One year ago today: January 10, 2016, the “this size?” scam.
Five years ago today: January 10, 2012, the brick tent.
Nine years ago today: January 10, 2008, say “took-took”.
Random years ago today: January 10, 1980, concerned with work, old women.
MORNING
A generic day. That means you get what happened, exposing this blog’s origination as a journal back in 1979. I still have a lot of those records around if I ever get to entering them. They won’t be all that relevant, but they would certainly show the ages I’ve gone through. That’s the year I moved back to Washington (state). This morning, after a hearty breakfast, I met Agt. R up and the library and we had the bottle jack ordered in four minutes. The jack that the store people said did not exist. The delivery is 5 to 10 working days, so that’s my window to get the work she happening.
Four minutes, you heard me. That’s all it took while Tractor Supply Co. has been farting around since December 18 and feeding us bull crap. Wrong SKU number, my eye. So I got some free time on-line and surfed my usual news feeds. That over-rated actress whose past her prime deserves the flak she is getting. She should have kept her wrinkly mouth shut about politics. Step down, Streep, and let some aspiring gal with looks get in front of a camera. But oh, is the establishment laying an egg that the president can bypass their beloved mainstream media and tweeted directly to people without political correctness. Good work, Donald.
The library, for all it’s immensity, has no books on wildflowers that grow well in this area, so there is a $4 bag of mix up at the garden center that sounds as good to me as anything else. It says “partial shade” and that would be my front yard. I’ll find something that grows there. The day was immensely nice so I didn’t get around to a lick of work on the place. But I did throw a 6-lb. ham in the oven. That’ll be a late supper. I’m gumption-less today.
Listen to me Kovaleski, you piece of crap. You want to be a newsman, you take the lumps like everybody else. You think you can make enemies and remain immune by playing the gimp card, you got another guess coming. I got news for you. That was your five seconds of fame. If you can’t take the heat, don’t draw fire, you stupid little shit. Go sell women’s shoes or something. Go have your spaz attacks at Payless, where over-sensitive wimps belong. Imagine, becoming a newsman and thinking nobody has a right to make fun of you. I used to think it was impossible to be that stupid.
“I have no idea who this reporter, Serge Kovalski [sic], is, what he looks like or his level of intelligence,” Mr. Trump said. Don’t worry Don, the guy is a nerd, so his intelligence is that of a liberal news reporter, so everyone outranks him. Including the dogcatcher. As far as my vote goes, you can call anybody a gimp any time you please—First Amendment. As far as I’m concerned, calling a gimp a gimp is not an insult, it is a description the gimp necessarily brought upon himself by doing something he thought he could get away with. Do an image search on Kovaleski, he makes certain he’s got his crooked wrist prominent in every damn picture. What a looser.
[Author’s note: “looser” is the correct Internet spelling for “loser”. I’m reminded of the line from Clint Eastwood when somebody complained he shot an unarmed man, “Maybe he shoulda armed hisself.” Got that Kovaleski? Some people don’t bow to the insidious pressure your type have learned to manipulate.]
Atacama motorcycle route.
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NOON
That’s my plan, I’ll stay home, drink coffee and watch old westerns. The cornier the better, like old John Wayne, that kind of sappy plot. Why, Miss Penelope, you’re prettier than a rose in the church parade. I did measure out what I’ll need to get the first shelf into the shed, I’m opting for really durable counter tops, but rough lumber, not like kitchen counters. Think 3/4” particle board. I also measured the north area of the house for a small retaining wall to cause the runoff to flow away from the foundation. That’s one part of the house that gets raised when the jack arrives. Hopefully.
Next, I got to the county maps, the kind printed up from aerial surveys. I’m longing for a hundred mile dash somewhere on the Rebel, even with the gearshift sticking like it does. I’ve pretty well decided to get that fixed because otherwise, I like the bike a lot. No, I have not forgotten the seller lied, he’s about to get his. Shall we say he can forget about any more job promotions. Shouldn’t have lied to me, fella. And you are actually lucky. During the checkup, I really got something on you that I think your wife doesn’t know. You started it.
But I can’t stay angry with the house full of the aroma of baking ham. I’ll have to freeze half of it, boy, did I get a deal. I’m just dry roasting it, but maybe tomorrow I’ll find a recipe for that mustard glaze. Then it’s ham sandwiches for a week. Ham omelets, Always slice meat against the grain. Ham and perogies for breakfast, don’t knock it.
“We Feed Our Babies Onions So We Can Find 'Em In The Dark.”
NIGHT
Okay, here’s the ham. Is there such a thing as ham pie? They got chicken pie. I’ll find out and get back to you. Yea, ham pie with pineapple. I can’t stand the kind of people who can’t stand ham and pineapple. It’s a great combination.
Then I’m leaving the library and this new person walks in. Thank goodness I’d already put on my sunglasses. My god, it was a gal with the exact body of my ex-wife. Unbelievable perfection, sincerely one in a million. You only see things like that in the movies any more. Around once every ten years when I think I’ve forgetting how it was, I see something like that and every other woman slides five notches back down the scale. It’s my own fault, but there’s no way out.
I looked at properties in the area again. Yep, the land under my house is now worth twice what I paid for the whole place. With the house and recent improvements, the estimates say my equity has quadrupled. You may catch wind of claims that the real estate market is coming back, but it’s another lie. The south American and Chinese drug lords are as welcome in Miami as they ever were, but the only segment that is moving in Florida are the affordable houses. Be careful with that definition.
It doesn’t meat a house you can afford, it means a house where there is a job nearby that pays enough to get a mortgage on the place. Such jobs are rare to non-existent in Florida. Let’s look at this from the other angle. The average job in Florida, and we are always talking about educated and skilled workers, a college degree or equivalent, pays only enough to buy a house in the $190,000 range—and that’s if you are prepared to spend 30 years paying for it. I’d say thanks to the radical left, thinking such a job is still going to be here in 2047 is borderline something.
Myself, I’m content with living out here, you may not get the same if you are used to city life. Like a lot I know, they don’t go to all these events, but they like having the selection. Myself, I think I’ll go to a live theater in Lake Wales upcoming later this month, but there are zero activities after dark in this area. You’d better have some excellent hobbies or diversions on your side. That’s how one survives without becoming crazy Dave, the hermit.
By coincidence, not that many days ago, I showed a few people up at the local Radio Shack the Arduino in operation. They must have really figured that was something because, well, several strangers have talked to me, like I was the resident genius. My ruling on that one is easy. For all the Arduinos sold, it would not at all be surprising that the sellers and such have never seen one come back and set up. Tell you what, hang on and I’ll snap a picture of the basic configuration needed to do anything. It is different than the way the Arduino comes out of its cardboard shipping box. You’ve seen this before if you follow this blog. Time permitting, I’ll write and addendum.
ADDENDUM
Here’s the Arduino Mega, it’s the same as an Uno but has more inputs and outputs. The Uno, the model I use, has only around 12 outputs. That seems like a lot to beginners but you quickly run out, particularly if you are unlucky enough to be a regular C+ coder. The rule is one job per output, and that job can be, robotically, very simple, like making a light blink. A single digit LED numeric display requires seven outputs. Myself, I get around this by sheer programming wizardry and I’ll soon be hauling out that breadboard where I got the Arduino to count without using any integrated circuits or transistors. I have it wired directly, which while not impossible, has never been done before according to the Internet.
This lack of a programming solution is not hard to understand. It is far easier to take shortcuts to hard wire the display. As an academic exercise and demonstration of programming superiority, I instead opted for only “dumb” components and programmed them to display. If you read back far enough, you can find redacted transcripts of my work in this field. I finally chose to create matrices of each digit and call the binary images from stored memory a few thousand times per second in batches of eight. I was more than once reminded of the quote by Teilhard in 1964:
"I have the sense of circling a huge problem, without really getting to the heart of it. The more this problem seems to grow before my eyes, the more I see that its solution is not to be found anywhere else but in faith, far removed from any experience.”
The answer was not faith, it was in the matrices. I had to shelve that project when house-hunting began in earnest, since the way I code is not quite in the realm of ordinary thinking. I’m heavily influenced by proper programming languages and my C+ shows it. A C+ program is a series of loops and the education of the average coder these days seems to fail at ordinary subroutines, much less the complication of nesting loops more than two or three layers deep. Hence, each C+ program tends to do one incredibly easy task. I’ve coded seven layers deep, but that’s approaching the IQ barrier of incomprehensibility and my purpose is to teach what I can to the team.
I once coded eight layers (a very simple program mind you) and found the microcomputer CPU could not deal with it directly, over which I was astonished. As usual, time makes the same problems seem smaller, so I’ll dig out the boards and show you how I did it. It works, but there is a glitch in the complicated wiring that stopped me from submitting it. When was that? Xmas 2014? Like Newton and his calculus, or Darwin and his evolution, I’d better publish soon before somebody else scoops the tale from the trailer court. (I’m not comparing myself to Isaac or Charles, that’s impossible since they were rich kids who had few concerns over distractions such as house-hunting.)
Okay, back to the photo. What you are seeing here is the Arduino attached to a wooden block with a small “Hacktronics” breadboard to the right. You may notice the mounting screws at my fingertips. This arrangement was common over here years before others began (finally) to manufacture complete kits with the same idea. Most instructions told people to wire the Arduino directly to what it was controlling. This left a mass of wires dangling whenever you had to move the setup.
Vivitar takes a lousy photo, but the white breadboard is used as a bus. All my Arduino jumpers go to this fixed breadboard, and from there they are jumpered to the sensors or whatever. It acts as a strain release, and if you are adept, you can program different functions to several jumper wires, which is impossible with a direct Arduino connect, unless you splice the wires. Do that once and you’ll never do it again.
Given time, I’ll fish out the counter with two numbers, I think I chose two just to demo the project before going for the miracle million. There are off-the-shelf integrated circuits called BDC for binary to decimal converters, but my challenge was to eliminate all that hardware by creating a driver that worked on code only. A very cunning set of code, I might add. Had I published at the end of 2015, I might have got some publicity. But the house became more important.
Last Laugh
[Author’s note: take a closer look at this “cake”, that is baloney. The icing is made from mayonnaise and mustard. My arteries got harder just looking at this. I eat mayonnaise maybe once a month and I do not allow baloney on my property. But surely some people will find this funny. I don’t.]
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