One year ago today: September 24, 2015, 1,070 calories.
Five years ago today: September 24, 2011, wood carvings & circuit boards.
Nine years ago today: September 24, 2007, the elephant barmaid.
Random years ago today: September 24, 2010, Windows CE = Crappy Edition.
MORNING
I had to ask myself, does this look like $35 in groceries? Time to plant that garden, or actually, I have room for a decent greenhouse, but not the time to tend to either one. Food is the headliner today. After reading enough labels at the PW I decided there is no such thing as gravy, soup, or sauce mixes that do not contain modified food starch. So I got up early and learned to make sort of gravy on my own. My real goal is sausage biscuit gravy but I started cheap.
Here’s my guess. I chopped up an onion, and mixed in some celery pieces, green peppers, and a lot of diced up cubes of those buns I made a couple days ago. They don’t keep, so now they are inside a chicken. It said baste with oil, so I used 5-30W. Or was is Mazola? And spices. Well, you know all those older bottles I’ve got that I’ve been meaning to use up for so long? Dill, curry, basil, paprika, and all that stuff. It got into one big bottle and it sure smelled nice even before I put in on the chicken.
A bit later, I basted the chicken and yep, it went just like I’ve seen videos of it along the way. I think I got that part right.
Ukrainian First Grade class.
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NOON
I pored over the new song list on the presumption the other guy will do his homework. We know 15 songs in common on paper. The rest I got to the library to listen only. That’s because their computers are blocked from downloading music. I could work around it, but I need that library on my side. Permanently. Here’s a road side I passed on the way to audition. Tampa 44.
The tunes he’s chosen include “Long Black Train”, “You & Tequila”, and an old Merle tune I never cared for because a dozen songs on the same theme came out at the same time, “Swinging Doors”. Of course, on these tunes, I cheat to the limit. It’s not busy, so I’ll tell you how I cheat and reveal my ulterior motive. Off the top, you cannot tell these guys their music isn’t right. I work to bring the crowd up to their own speed, while a guitarist will try to drag them down to his. So the overriding principle is to let the guitarist think you are totally behind his choice, then make him mildly regret it. Here’s how I accomplish that.
Point of order: this has nothing to do with Steve, this mechanism was in place long before I we met. My initial move is to find the sheet music. Failing that, I try to find the guitar tab, a typically bad move for accuracy. If that doesn’t work, go to youTube and see if you can find a tutorial for guitar. If that fails, see if there is some guy playing the riffs with the camera on his left hand.
Oh, and let me depart a moment to tell the left-handed asshole with the tutorials off. You damn jerk, we get it, you think you are special. But your backwards videos keep crowding out what most people are searching for and you know it. Stick your upside down guitar lessons where they feel good.
Where was I? Oh yes, now that I’ve found the guitar parts, adapt as much as possible to the bass. This works well because I can usually play the notes of most chord variations. The philosophy here is twofold. If the guy wants to play his own songs, learn the bass so well that he is forced to play it like the original or lose face. I mean, he chose the song. The second strategy is to play the bass so well that unless he really hustles, he is in constant danger of being upstaged by the lowly bassman.
That leaves him the choice of either sloughing off the song and not being the star of his own set, or to just quit with the slow songs. Take the easy way out and just play accompaniment to what I’m doing. It sounds harsh, but always understand the game was invented by guitar players. My way is simple. If the audience wants slow music, let them play the jukebox when I’m on break.
AFTERNOON
You want to know about the chicken. So that’s how it’s done. Why did I ever think there was so much work involved? I started small, but I could easily have watched two soap operas and peeled ten pounds of potatoes. The stuffing bakes itself inside the cavity and stays moist. I’d say this was a successful experiment. On the stuffing, I’ll go for a subtler mix, but otherwise, this was a treat. Next time, a bigger bird.
Another change is he doesn’t peck once and scan any more. He’ll dip at the seeds numerous times. I take that to be a sign of growing confidence. I spread the cloves around the ground for a radius of ten feet and refilled the hopper with gourmet seed. Ten bucks a bag.
Scouting the yard, I see I need to cull the oak seedlings and prune a lot of branches. I actually saw one limb fall next to my scooter. That was incentive for me to examine the trees. A lot of the smaller under branches have to go. Like a truckbed full. And all the ferns from the front. If they want to grow in the shade of the house, okay, but not the shade of my beautiful oaks. Note when the porch is in, the birdfeeder will be in perfect position.
Kerpow! Yep, there’s a storm. Get me a good book.
NIGHT
My plan was to study matrix theory tonight. When I returned from the library, I realized I had a ton of downloaded PDF files. I won’t install dirtware like Adobe on my private computers, so cancel that. Unless I want to go out to the shed and bring in a throwaway Windows 8 computer. Folks, if you don’t know by now Adobe is installing tracking software on your computer under the guise of updates, don’t let me be the one to break it to you.
Instead, I read some advanced work concerning Arduino PWM, that’s pulse width modulation, and on the Arduino, that is advanced. Because most people don’t understand it, they just copy and paste the code. PWM is the way a microcontroller controls the speed of a DC motor. You can’t do it by varying the voltage. It works by sending a digital on/off signal that varies the duty cycle. If the signal is on 50% and off 50%, the DC motor runs at half speed.
I though the Arduino had one special PWM timer, I discover it has three. They operate only a certain number of output pins and I’ve heard rumors that using some of them will knock others out of operation. I won’t go into specs, but you can’t use the chip timer to run PWM, you need that timer to continue running the program. So you hand off the timing to a PWM pin.
After studying a nine-page essay, I now know more about the PWM process, but I still don’t understand it. So it joins differential calculus and impedence as one of those topics that nobody will explain properly. True, they are inherently complicated matters, but that is not, repeat not the problem. I can understand complicated things. In these cases, the problem is the lack of anybody with sufficient talent to describe these things in a fashion I can grasp. Take impedence. You got high impedence and low impedence—see, I just explained it as well as 100% of the authors I’ve ever read on the topic.
For that matter, I’ve heard “experts” who tried to respond to my questions say things that were directly contradictory. I know that calculus is the measure of a rate of change, so tell me how it is used. No, don’t hand me yet another useless graph showing time going to zero, I got that and I passed the test. I want an explanation of how it works so I can use it. That hasn’t happened in over 50 years.
PWM apparently works in two differing ways. I finally learned how the frequency stays the same while the cycle varies, I now grasp that part of the puzzle. I discovered it uses a register, which is the word used to describe electronic chips that (basically) count. I knew the Arduino operates at 16 MHz, or 16,000,000 timing pulses per second. Most “chips” work on either the rising or falling cycle of this timing clock. You can’t use this clock for PWM.
So there are other clocks in the chip, and they divide the 16MHz by 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 64. Don’t quote me on this, but the idea is to bring the speed down to where humans can comprehend what is going on. Then a register counts from 0 to 255. You preset a point, say 128. As the counter passes that figure, it toggles a switch. So in this case the PWM duty cycle would be 50%, that is, 255/128.
For reasons I don’t understand, there is another clock that counts up to 255 and back down to 0, triggering the toggle both on ascending and descending. Apparently this is more accurate. And that is what I read tonight.
Last Laugh
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