One year ago today: September 12, 2015, she deserves a medal.
Five years ago today: September 12, 2011, it’s called an H-bridge.
Nine years ago today: September 12, 2007, a generic day.
Random years ago today: September 12, 2012, the smallest passable roadways.
MORNING
Let’s chat a little household budget philosophy. At a primordial level, you could just stop spending once you run out of money, but face it, the future is easier to deal with when you plan ahead enough to know when you are out. The biggest asset for such plans is experience. Plans alone are flimsy things. To actually operate at a surplus, you must control and adapt, which is where people break down. “I can stick to a budget but my expenses won’t cooperate.”
I shall describe a phenomenon. As banks know, unexpected costs wreck every credit plan. Well, the figurative opposite can happen in an all-cash system. Instead of bumping into unexpected debt, you regularly find pockets of extra cash. A good example is the red scooter, which gets routine maintenance, a budget item. So for all the bitching I do about spot repairs, it is still on the road five years later with four times the projected mileage. Henceforth, the full replacement cost had been set aside should I ever need it. And that’s my point.
To buy this house, I did need it. I dipped into the till. It may seem inefficient to some that it was a month after I paid cash that I realized how close to broke I was. (That was June 23rd.) Hey, isn’t that kind of broke the identical problem as people spending credit cards, and if so, why bother budgeting? I don’t think there is an answer, but that’s why I called it a philosophy. I may already, without being cognizant of same, be better off than I thought. You see, budget items from my rental situation are still in place but no longer get spent.
So I as it stands, despite the move and the renovations so far, I have not taken any expense money “out of the bank” in 64 days. Sooner or later, something like that has absolutely got to translate into pretty damn good news. I’m reminded of my early days at the phone company, a similar thing happened. Even though I got paid the same amount as everybody else, my paychecks would often stack up ahead in my drawer two or three months before I’d bother to drive downtown and deposit them. To the crowd that lives behind their paychecks that is pure magic. Back then, there were no check-cashing places.
The fun part of that was all the married men who wrote this off to my being single. Why, if they didn’t have families to support, they could do the same blah-blah. Funny attitude, since there were no rich single men at the company. And down the line when these same characters became divorced, they had to develop a new set of excuses. Lying to themselves was apparently more bearable that admitting budgets work. And sure enough, their collective dreams got turned into a ball of hub caps.
The band from hell.
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NOON
Getting the kitchen into Texas shape. Look here, it is the grab station for my 1 tbsp measuring spoon. Ah, remarks the sharp-eyed cadet, there are two tablespoons on that hook. To which I respond, say, Ensign, you are right. There is your measuring spoon, and then there is your backup measuring spoon. Say, you don’t make a lot of pancakes, do you, Sparky? Now stand aside, you’re crowding me.
The best I’ve ever managed is a respectively unburnt stack. Kitchen smoke alarms and I do not get along. Or let me rephrase that. We get along like I do with cranky women. That is, I can get along any time I want to, but I don’t want to.
I reviewed my music list and I’m still too weak to front a solo. I did it for years, but there’s a point where putting up with another musician is less hassle than the dry lifestyle of the solo performer. That is why you’ll hear me joke that I wish Taylor Swift was free this weekend. The most successful duo of my life was with my ex—it is quite the colorful existence compared to the “quiet desperation” of most people’s lives.
The standards are higher in this town. But there has to be some form of coffee house or open mic I can hit up. It’s best in show biz to have many eggs and many baskets. I got another contact from Ft. Meade, but that is beyond my 25 mile travel limit. Still, always audition if you can. You never know how badly they need you.
NIGHT
You know how the strangest things can become bloggable on an otherwise quiet day, and all I did was put in some hours on the subfloor. I finally got JZ on the line and explained how the south end of the building was indeed an inch low. An exact inch, I measured it with calipers. That being the case, I’m going to shore up the south end of the joists and await his next arrival. Raising a wall is a two-man undertaking. I’ll also use the time to set up the bandsaw, which is the best technology for making the precision cuts that will be required to shim it to level. Once again, the dull becomes top story.
This picture is the entranceway to the trading post I thought was an outdoor bar. I walked around the place, found the prices too steep to go by oneself, and drove away. I’m saying it is one of those meaningful places you’d take a gal to meet your quality time quota. But I can make my own $7 smoothie at home.
See? Where during quiet times, most blogs resort to gossip, here you get information. I’m going to talk more about NAND gates in a moment. One of the things I threw out as not worth moving was my easy rocker. If JZ shows this weekend, I’m going to get a new rocker and that pub set dining furniture. Plus, I’ll need to fashion a squirrel guard. That rodent has figured out how to get the bird seed. And every time I plan how I’ll get back to my hobbies, I conclude I need that workshed. Now I grasp why Edison needed such a large and separate lab. So you can work on the whole project rather than one step at a time.
So I did further reading on electronic gates. I had to sit down a spell after supper, so I studied, and that is the only level I’ve touched on integrated circuits in at least a year. I have a small container of the more popular ICs somewhere, and that is kind of my point. The majority of devices out there are just combinations of a few basic gates and logic circuits, nothing new has been invented since the war. And this is what is behind my lofty-sounding claim of last year that I could build a computer if I had to.
So, I will tell you what those basic components are. Bear in mind, it is very difficult to find this kind of information in the textbooks, which are designed as much to prove a point as impart knowledge. It would be a noisy and clacking computer that could only add, but I need to back up that I really meant I could build a computer.
The four gates needed are the AND gate and OR gate, the INVERTER (that turns the AND into the NAND), and the EXCLUSIVE OR. (You can look these up on your own time.) The four logic circuits are the ADDER, a counter, a comparator, and storage. Every and any logical electronic device out there is made up of these eight components. The only one I don’t understand, but is the comparator, or op-amp. And I’ve moaned about that before.
I can set up the op-amps and use them, I just can’t find a good explanation of how they work, which is part of my learning goal. This isn’t some trade school where you can hammer the pieces into shape and not have a clue otherwise.
The comparator tells you if two numbers are bigger or smaller or equal concerning each other. That, and all other arithmetic (subtraction, multiplication, and division) can be accomplished by extremely rapid adding. I estimate it would take me around a month to build a computer that could add numbers up to 16. I have nothing but admiration for the original people that conceived of all this back in the 40s. It demands much more than the ability to solder and wire, you have to have a thorough background in numbering systems, for starters.
ADDENDUM
In my move, I included four boxes of tax materials I’m still required to keep another year. Inside one box was some outdated material, I browsed it before throwing it out. One item was that resume I had to fight the tank lady to get back. Who remembers that? I’m sure I would have recorded it, but if not, here is the synopsis. I don’t do hiring agencies, and I cannot be expected to like it when such an agency pretends not to be. The tip-off is usually when you show up for a job interview with your resume, a carefully calculated document with your personal life history, but they want you to fill out an “application” anyway.
I had taken a day off work in 2004 to drive to Ft. Lauderdale for an accounting interview, the lady had assured me it was for a firm hiring twenty people (if I recall). When I got there, it was some obscure office with no accounting firm names on the directory. The secretary asked for my resume, then handed me an application form. What’s that for? The tank lady suddenly appeared, Mrs. No-Neck, who I quickly nicknamed T-34.
I had arrived to talk about the job, while she was avoiding the topic by wanting to talk about me. Where was the office? Who were their major clients? But she was all not did I go to accounting school, but what was my exact street address at that time? It turns out the firm was not opening for another two years but the fat lady liked to “keep 200 resumes on hand just in case”. Damn, lady, I lost money getting here. I immediately reached over the counter and grabbed my resume and she tried to grab it back. Tug-of-war. She called security to block my exit. A quick argument ensued in which it came out she had lied about not being an agency. Ah, the bitch was being paid by the resume collected, not by the job placement.
When I insisted the resume belonged to me and they should call the police, the security stood aside. Yet today, because of the Internet, millions of people blindly and timidly give their private information out to these unregulated agencies, which have become the known barrier between them and the jobs. It’s not a resume, it is a credit application form that gives them the right to track you for life. What a bunch of suckers. I wonder how many have been blacklisted because the agency didn’t like them. As if anybody at some agency knows more about what a company needs than the people who work there.
Afterthought: under the “New Age” definition of Freedom of Speech, people should be able to lie under oath and advertise in the paper and send you the bill. Think about it.
Right now, only people like Hillary Clinton can do that. And why am I paying for a Secret Service van to haul her ugly old ass around? Ben Franklin and friends
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