One year ago today: August 16, 2015, not nearly foreign enough.
Five years ago today: August 16, 2011, romantically desirable?
Nine years ago today: August 16, 2007, reads like a Dragon script.
Random years ago today: August 16, 2012, Colorado water pipe.
MORNING
You get lots of reading today. I was home waiting for buyers. Nothing yet, but I had time on my hands. It's no secret this blog was at first meant to be read in sections. It's the mark of good work that it can be read a bit at a time, and a mark of distinction of all good non-fiction that it can be read without having to be some blasted expert. And yes, the photo below of a "shed" gets top billing. This is the outcome of five years of robot club collaboration and I'll compare it to any other unfunded organization of amateurs. In all these years, even the touted Nova "AI & Robotics" has yet to progress to somebody's basement.
I canceled a plan to drive to Miami this morning, reasoning that if JZ wanted to tell me anything, he could use the Quizno’s phone. He already knows I’m one of the few who isn’t going to tell him he should have done this or that. Instead, we had a final meeting of the robot club, Broward chapter. We held it at the usual Dunkin Donuts and it was decided to take the Lexus to Lakeland in a couple of days. Agt. M has never seen the new property and it is not the easiest to find even with Google maps. The street is too short.
The shed doors swing outward weightlessly to form an extension so oversize work can continue indoors as well as provide windbreaks. The clubhouse will be replaced up north by a modern workshed. Still, this is where 90% of the mechanical or industrial work took place and we have enough spare parts to, I believe, seriously build and launch a rocket if we had to. I read close to 40 extensive books on robots, microcontrollers, guidance systems, and programming over the years.
The meeting mostly concerned plans for the future. The distance makes it impossible to collaborate on most projects, but then, I am hardly the only guy who thinks south Florida has become a third-world stinkhole. Crime on the news every day. People who are not white claiming to be white—and yes, I have a problem with that. Not the white part, but the claim. Would not the world get suspicious if I suddenly began insisting I was Chinese? The same thing happened in Louisiana and California. Once the good people leave, you get Detroit. And don’t hand us any of that Liberal American-style equality crap. We’ve seen so much equality in our lifetimes that frankly we are sick and tired of it.
Nobody over here is forgetting the premise (although not the original premise) of the new property was to establish a base in the interior to go looking for the bargains. It was plain costing too much to go there for one or two days, although that happened something like twelve times, I dunno, I’m not going back to count. But I know it cost nearly 14% as much as the house was bought for to conduct business the old way. As you imagine, we are superbly geared up to search for other properties now.
I should show you, but I won’t, the concentric rings on maps of the area establishing boundaries and areas of exclusion for these searches. If there is a proper bargain or fire sale within two hours driving time between Tampa and Orlando, we will be right on top of it. Mind you, there would have to be another recession for us to move on it, but don’t rule that out. Once Trump gets in, there may well be a slump as supply and demand return to normalcy. Housing with $200,000 price tags have never been natural to Florida and few other than the sucker class would mourn their extinction.
And nobody forgets one of the most costly errors was driving all the way to inspect and finding the house was in the wrong part of town. What do I mean by “wrong”. Come on, I’ll show you, if you are not too damn prejudice to see for yourself. Yes, denying truth is prejudice. I understand there are Federal laws that prevent the overt stating of certain facts, but come on, there are dozens of other methods, such as a revealing picture of the neighborhood, that advertisers could utilize to not waste your time. I’m referring to advertisers who specifically go out of their way to mislead.
The mystery of my missing pills just got solved. Of all the crazy events, the pills were cut into an edible medium that the super rat must have liked. When I swept behind the dresser, I found the channel he was living in, and two gnawed through pill bottles. He liked the pills so much he went right through the bottles. Y’know, I never did kill the super rat, he just disappeared. I wonder if he OD’d on heart medicine? Anyway, there’s a new one on me.
Fake wooden (Quaker) guns.
NOON
Here is the original web cam. According to Wiki, it was established so programmers could see if there was coffee in the pot before making a trip down the hallway at Cambridge. At least until Bill Gates shut it down in 2001. Mind you, to Gate’s credit, he did so by donating a completely new computer lab to the university. Still, it makes you wonder why the students chose to immortalize the pot while it was empty.
This is a most underestimated factor, but one I suspect was due to the less than world-class universities I was able to afford on my own. Remember, back in my day, loans were given on the baseless presumption you were getting at least some help from home. I passed most of my courses in an aimless fog. The Internet was never mentioned, nobody told us video games was a massive market, not a word was said about cellular technology or drones—yet these topics were very well known at the time I was in school. I can ask with better cause than others, where would I be today if somebody had simply told me the basics. Instead, it takes ten youthful years wasted to learn them on your own--and add another five if you have lot's of damage that needs unlearning.
Having the time, I went through the whole place here and removed all nails and screws that were not here when I arrived. I live having lots of places to hang things. Now I have to patch the holes. This all gave me time to think. One thing I’d like to do is create a database containing every one of my “Yesteryear” addresses. This is handily the most popular special feature of this blog, but it is also very time-consuming, especially the random year.
A database would raise all kinds of possibilities, such as making the entire blog random access. I’d have to look at it, but for sure it would spiff up the links and it hints of having a wee bit of an index. Blogs don’t have indexes. And technically, they are upside down.
This is something I would have to ponder deeply. The average link looks something like this: [http://talesfromthetrailercourt.blogspot.com/2013/08/august-16-2013.html] and a database would today contain nearly 4,200 of these. Honestly, I’ve not really read most of my own posts when writing it is the intense effort. I’m also assuming there is some consistency with the addressing scheme and I’m usually not that trusting where Google is involved.
NPR is no longer or hardly worth listening to since Keillor left. That’s okay, NPR is anti-everything that’s good for the country anyway. Who else advocates consumers they can boost the economy by paying interest to banks who just print up for free the “money” they lend out.
Yet another thought was on Darwin. I see now that it was not so much the extraordinary number of specimens he regularly sent back to England that got him going. It was the unexpected fame and the sudden need to preserve it by not letting somebody else scoop the story. His initial discovery was not evolution, but the extinction of species. If God created the world as stated, species don’t change, and nor would they go extinct. What Darwin spotted was that species that were extinct seem to have been replaced by similar species. And that’s what got me thinking.
Is this always so? I understand that Nature evolves something to recycle everything. I’ve consider it keen how marsupials in Australia often fill the same roles as mammals on other continents. But what intrigues me most is the rules that confine species extinction. Is there a set of factors that determine why an extinct species is so often superseded by a similar type? I looked at cases where introduced species crowded out the native pool.
Like starlings. But it seems they merely pushed the locals aside. (Insert Cuban joke here.) So I looked at the islands in the Pacific that were invaded by snakes or rats. Why do they remain invaded? If the snakes and rats ate all the bird’s eggs, then why didn’t the snakes and rats then starve. These are questions I cannot answer, but I’m the old pattern-matcher and my spider sense tells me there is some guiding principle involved.
AFTERNOON
Already I get flak for not changing my own throttle cable, see robot club meeting above. Listen, I was content to sit back and read while the mechanic type took to it. There’s a little half-Chinese babe that’s taken to hanging out there and she’s easy on the eyes. Y’day was so expensive, I don’t mind staying home a bit until things smooth out. I had to spend my household float, the change bucket, and the laundry money. Not to worry, the fridge is full and I’ve got an infinite supply of tea and coffee.
It is mentionable that of the nine people who have looked at the place so far, six have been single women. My mentioning that it was safe that way in the original advertising may have been a smooth move indeed. I’m expecting a fairly firm offer since the last lady knows the area, the owners, and is familiar with the system and territory. I named a cash price if she takes it as is—the place has not yet been scrubbed down or even dusted. It is just swept clean and vacuumed. The cash price is the exact amount slated to put in the new bathroom in Lakeland. What a coincidence.
If I take the offer, the amount this trailer cost me out-of-pocket works out to $1.49 per month. Not a bad lead up to retirement, I’d say.
Next topic is the book on Darwin, but this is not part of the reports. Rather this has to do with the strange (and nearly freaky) descriptions of Victorian society. With maybe a few exceptions in the military, one is correct to view most English lore of some poor kid rising up through society as hogwash. Talent and ambition have as little to do with it as they do today. Behind most Englishman’s success you are more likely to find a tale of an idea or invention ripped off somebody in the lower classes. It took that clockmaker guy 43 years to collect the prize for his invention, and even then only when the King intervened.
Here’s a picture of the dining hall at Cambridge—you Harry Potter types can shed a tear. My alma mater had fewer stained glass windows. You can’t see it well, but floor under the tables for the rich kids, er, I mean, fellows, is one step higher than the rest. You are not allowed even breakfast at Cambridge without being reminded of your status, you low-life. I’m also learning more about the “unmarried English daughter” I experienced firsthand in my teens, where the Englishman will become irrational if that’s what it takes to marry off his daughters.
Because by 1850-ish, there was a huge surplus of daughters. Darwin, from what I gather, had a 37 year old sister on the market when he returned from the south seas. That would be scary even today. And back then, the daughters could not undertake a meaningful career—which actually wasn’t true, but it made for much at the time. There were simply not enough educated husbands to support these women and I think we just learned how that came about.
And few concepts could be more English than apprenticeships. How better to exclude the working class, no matter how gifted, than to make the only available entry-level positions into unpaid prerequisites? That way your Farnsworths and Wedgewoods could just wait until the upstart died of malnutrition. No need for laws that invite accusations of elitism. And if any commoner actually ran the gauntlet, trust us, he’d be totally gentrified by the time he got anywhere that counted.
Such it was at Charles Darwin’s time. It was not the Welsh coal miners, who worked with fossils every day, that were invited to his readings. And yes, as a matter of fact, I know exactly what it is like to be the only educated kid in a room full of older rich bastards who think and act alike. The English did not invent kissing ass, but they did carry to an extreme of perfection. Look at the Australian civil service.
NIGHT
I wiped down all the cupboards and shined the chrome. There was only one inquiry today, some bottom-feeder who wanted to rent-to-own. I advised him if he could not come up with $5,000 these days, a place of his own was “probably not in his stars.” He’s a feisty type, so I’ll let you know if he lips off. I stayed in, eating Russian apricot cookies and eating boiled chicken. It’s not my fault women anywhere near my age have turned having good old fun into a major operation. It’s insane the hoops they have to go through to drop everything and just have a party.
My favorite is the lady who has a running ad for a nice man who will prove he is nice by picking her and her kid up at daycare this afternoon. Folks, I allow for certain embellishments. There probably isn’t a prostitute alive that doesn’t genuinely think the attraction is her great personality. I’m not against flaws, we all have them. I’m talking about people who deliberately cover up factors that preclude a normal relationship. If you have some terminal disease, been gang-banging Bradenton, or just got out of prison, no, you are not ever going to have a normal relationship.
I glanced through the ads that have pictures, guys tend to do that. Not one looker in the lot. It seems to me if you want to meet a winner when you are over 40, you’d best have something more to offer than “good company”. I’ve dated lots of women who say they are good company to know they are homebodies who don’t blend in well.
What struck me was the proportion of women who wanted what JZ calls “normal dates”. This means, in my own words, that they want the courtship behavior in return for sexless flirting. I have been on many of these dates in my life, but always with women who paid their half, that is, going dutch. Try that in Florida. The ads to which I refer go so far as to list some of the activities the lady expects. All are expensive enough that you know the average gal can’t afford them. And that’s a heads up.
Or how about the ones who want a man who can make them laugh? Ladies, George Carlin is dead. Everybody loves music—but if you can’t play any, it’s all talk. Most of you don’t mention how you get around. Bus or car, unless you are 18, it makes a difference. If you are tired of the bar scene, what is it exactly you were doing at bars that it got that way? The ones who have to stipulate “friends first” kind of makes one wonder why they have to specify. Like, what were the alternatives?
As always, one of the first signals I look for in a woman over 30 who says she is single is how light she travels. How willing and able is she to pack up and leave it all behind. That’s where you find out she has 14 cats. Or 2.5 children. Or expects you to commute to Gainesville. Women who are serious about boyfriends don’t tie their asses to a piano. And one more you gotta love is the women who say put a keyword in your subject line. What, so they’ll know you are a new prospect instead of a regular customer?
Moving along, I took a look at what has been happening to the Arduino microcontroller. I had hoped somebody would have the imagination to use it for a breakthrough. Not dice. It is still the top seller, but I’m hearing encouraging tales that new, easier to program models are appearing. The Arduino seems to have flattened out to a beginner’s toy. It taught me a lot, so much that I don’t really use it any more. The websites are little more than instructions on how to use a growing number of those “shields” that take the fun out of building anything.
My conclusions at this time, Arduino-wise, is that any innovation will revert back to clever programming rather than the current trend of adapting ordinary processes to the microcontroller. Like the water level sensor, the battery level detector, and the LED readout (shown here), these are ho-hum caliber functions that are already performed better by off-the-shelf products from Wal*Mart.
ADDENDUM
Book Six is where things get interesting for Darwin. They are on the homeward stretch, sailing west from Australia across the Indian Ocean. That’s one of the few places I’ve never seen except looking west from the Thai west coast. Darwin is piecing together the news from home and he knows he cannot return to the old status guo.
Like many, I had the impression Darwin got home, sat down, and wrote a controversial book, but I also knew the impression was wrong. Now I see that his fame actually began while he was away. Here’s something we like to see. He took the job on the ship without having been trained at university about what not to write. He did what he felt was a good job and turns out that was enough to place him ahead of the pack.
He visits with a number of authors and local officials who realize more than he does that he is onto something. It would also seem to my untrained eye that only rich people wrote many letters in those days, and Darwin’s mail chased him around the globe. One of the packet ships was apparently as much as six months behind the “Beagle”. This could hardly be a workable system if each individual who received mail was not someone who knew someone.
What’s happened is many of the letters he send home have been circulated at lectures and academies, and he is concerned because he never wrote those thinking they’d be shared or published. I indentify, I would not want anyone publishing my private correspondence. It is written differently, and as Darwin put it, more carelessly. He nearly freaked on receiving news that his letter home had been published or circulated. I got family like that, too.
Last Laugh
Return Home
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