One year ago today: February 4, 2016, that Yoda-eared Gowdy.
Five years ago today: February 4, 2012, classical piano & theory.
Nine years ago today: February 4, 2008, car model IQ tests!
Random years ago today: February 4, 2010, brilliant Arduino Etch-a-Sketch.
MORNING
Yippie, at 6:30AM the air was bone dry, there was no dew. So it was up the ladder to paint the kitchen awning. Except I ran out of the nice grey paint, the bottom of the can was dried just deep enough I could not finish the porch step. That’s okay, by noon today I’ll have a nice wagon to haul all the paint I want. Sorry, no before pic of the awning, it was too dark when I started. But while I was up there painting, I saw this interesting decorative pattern on the rim. How fast can you say “scrollsaw”?
If you look, the trim is actually off-center and cut unevenly. This tips me off that maybe trim doesn’t need to be that exact, but it’s not a sermon you preach to a robot club. I’ve got one of those shape copying plastic thing-a-ma-bobs, the kind that won’t lock onto a pattern. It’s a certified piece of junk and I used it to copy this pattern profile. Agt. R says you can buy templates and just trace them but then again, he says I have too much time on my hands.
Some of that “too much” time, I used to go back over my notes on celestial navigation. That small error I was making was insignificant yet I’m still not happy. Navigation is a discipline where the more you understand the less error you make. Tiny errors are cumulative and this one affected every reading I took. As opposed to the error itself, would you like to hear about the effect of the error? Sure, why not? It’s the old analogy of the flagpole.
The closer you stand to a flagpole, the more you have to strain your neck upward to see the top. At any given place to stand, you can calculate the angle you should have to look upward. If the angle you observe is different than the angle you calculate, then you are standing closer to or further away from the flagpole than you thought. Actually, that is basis of celestial navigation. You are looking at the sun rather than at a flagpole.
And there is a handy book that does all the hard calculations for you; it’s called a Nautical Almanac. It tells you how high up in the sky you should see the sun on every minute of every day. You then read your sextant and you’ll find, except by coincidence, you get a different reading. The difference between these figures is an easy calculation and gives you an idea of your position. From a grammar error in the directions, I concluded, wrongly, that the “flagpole” and the sextant had to be in a straight line to where I was standing, causing a tiny declination error. QED.
A7 Warthog Gatling gun.
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NOON
By noon the very next day, the wagon is beginning to pay its keep. Shown here, I salvaged a complete set of cabinets. The trailer looks overloaded in this picture, but it is rated for nearly twice the weight shown. Two ladies in the yard thought I’d never do it. Take another look, what I’m really after is those beautiful 1”x12” planks, one of which you can see sandwiched in the middle. There are eight such pieces in perfect condition. My next screen door is not going to warp. And how I ever got by without a screen door is a conundrum.
Oh, and the counters, the white object (2) inside the box of the trailer, are destined to be the small work desk for the storage shed. Hey, am I not confusing storage and work sheds? Nope, the answer is that the work shed is full of wood tools, but I also have other tools that need occasional attention. Like leaf blowers and hedge trimmers. I’m going to bend that 60°F rule and see if I can coax a few flowers to grow now. Cleaning out the shed, I found 30 feet of that garden edging. I want something to grow in that shade so much, I even bought a watering can. Plastic. Three dollars.
It this still eludes you, pick the board up and look at it from one end. Thin at the top, thick at the base, now cut it in two away from your line of sight. Here, I found a sample. Imagine this cut in two away from your line of sight and hopefully past my fingers.
“The closest he ever came to perfection
was filling out a job application.”
NIGHT
Unlearning is regularly the more difficult but I took a couple hours off to force myself away from that navigation error. I wonder why that is? If you learn something wrong, why should it be hard to unlearn? But we know it is true, just look at the idiots around us who do things ass backwards because they refuse to stop doing it wrong. Ken, sit down and shut up. Yes, my results are more accurate. I found the sun near the Galapagos, nearly beeline south of Deming, New Mexico. Just you watch the mess these Millennials make of things with this “unlearning”, especially if you think it is bad already.
Why? Because they are a generation of public school grads who think truth can be voted on. When 50 million of them say an error is correct, it becomes institutionalized. Look at the fiasco of Microsoft. Who else can get away with putting the Delete and Rename command buttons next to each other—and have the true personal ugliness to defend the practice? Android is so bad that every typo sends you to la-la land with no way back. I’m not predicting doom, because experience always teaches most people the old lesson that free people aren’t equal and equal people aren’t free.
Consider the related lesson that really socks some groups more cruelly than others. That's the lesson where doing things the right way and the hard way are the same thing. Ha, this strikes sheer terror into New Agers. You know, I often thought that whole “take the easy way out” was imparted by the education system. There’s just no other suitable explanation that explains why so many can be so wrong in identical ways. Like that crowd that insist Trump called Mexicans rapists. He never said that. But they apparently voted that he did. Truth by majority rule, but that’s a misnomer, because they are no longer a majority. They got their asses handed to them last election.
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