One year ago today: May 27, 2016, Linoleum roses.
Five years ago today: May 27, 2012, I deleted the files.
Nine years ago today: May 27, 2008, category: things people break.
Random years ago today: May 27, 2011, early electronics tinkering.
It’s been a week in the tumbler and while the rocks are smoother, they are not so pretty as the ones in the books. I think another week might soften them up a little. I put some of the recommended plastic beads into the mix as recommended and they disappeared. Ground right out of existence. One of the railroad rocks is beginning to look pretty. By and large, I’d say I’m still at the beginner’s phase. So, off we go again. I’ll start another rough grind, this time more to spec.
I was making more rails for the park bench Agt. R dropped off. He liked the job I did on my smaller chair so we’ll see how the bench turns out using the same technique. The stained pine rails for my chair have four coats of polyurethane and they do look pretty darn nice for a guy who’s training amounts to reading the can labels.
You bet the shed is getting crowded. It’s still an infinite improvement over anything I had before. I installed a power bar. That’s correct, 24 outlets was not enough. I learned from the robot club the value of not just a set of drill bits, but a set of drills. I have four drills, one each with each popular bit and one with a 3/32” universal pilot hole. I no longer waste a lot of time changing drill bits.
Meanwhile, I was listening to Tampa Bay radio. Do you have any idea how tricky it is to find a Tampa station that actually plays music? They take the phrase “talk radio” very seriously in that town. I suspect a few of those stations have a smaller audience than this blog. It’s not like they have serious speakers and interviews, it is more the DJs blithering away on topics way over their heads. And as for Florida DJs, talking about the dogcatcher is a little deep for them.
Taking a break, I fiddled around with my MP3 and got decent volume out of it by finding the equalizer and maxing out all the gains. I see my Fishman does not have any RCA jacks, funny I never noticed that before. I wanted to test the MP3 player through those speakers. Of course, I can’t remember which box has all my adapter cables. There was only one thing to do. Make my favorite cold salad. Collard greens with fresh chopped onions, then chilled in the fridge. That’s the seasoned greens, in the big can. Don’t try using regular and salting it yourself. It never comes out quite right.
The real Ritz.
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Today I installed my first terabyte drive. Sure, they have been around a while, but most people’s personal home files are not as compact or efficient my own. I don’t have a lot of large files. Pssst, guys, that means I don’t have any porno on my computer. Nope, these are real files, including thousands of spreadsheets, some dating back to 1981 Visicalc files. For some reason, I kept every spreadsheet I’ve ever created. There are thousands of blog files, record files, and tens of thousands of downloaded articles, of which around 12% concern robots and electronics. Robots was the first time in my life I studied a new topic primarily from downloaded files. So, in 37 years I’ve accumulated a terabyte of data. I could trim the fat by erasing duplicates from the annual backup of my entire working drive, but that would be tedious.
And the lathe is missing pieces, I’ll ask Agt. R to go through the pile again and dig out the rest. I see why they knew it was a lathe. There’s a big sign on the side of the box says, “Lathe”. Setting that aside, I got my auxiliary input on the Fishman working right. It’s a simple direct in jack with no effects and it is not connected to the mute switch. Hmmm, most acoustics have built in tone controls and we have to go with that in a pinch. But how is this guy going to sing without a PA. He’s sung through his amp but that is not really the way to go. Next week I’ll check out the aux for the bass, leaving the front jack for vocals. I rarely change bass tones, preferring to get specials sounds totally by playing technique.
I have not played a full four hour gig standing up since 2013. Most jams and stand-ins have been less than an hour. I should run myself through a full four sets. As far as that goes, I can easily play them sitting down, but I used to joke about the day when I could no longer play a gig on my feet. Like everyone else who’s getting up there, I like to think of that day as always being ten years into the future. And the Willie song, “It’s All Goin’ To Pot” is now on the list. Whether we like it or not.
Being an old Jules Verne fan, I watched the latest release of “Journey To the Center of the Earth”. That’s the version with Brendan Fraser, who’s funny good looks prevent him from ever being a serious actor. Good special effects, but it is only vaguely based on the book, which I read many decades ago. It’s not Jule’s best effort. Neither was the choice of actress, it says Anita Briem. Just not babe and I like my actresses to be babes. She looks on the verge of getting frumpy and doesn’t quite have the look, even when caught in a t-shirt in a timely rainstorm or whatever it was. The radio says the blockbuster movie of this (2017) summer is “Wonder Woman”.
Ah, but we know from experience they will water it down. Is she going to be a divorcee with a mop-headed son who is “gifted” or is she going to be the lezbo with the overweight pubescent daughter who, instead of dieting, is learning to like herself? I’ll bet the old theme is gone, the one where she becomes wonder woman by gaining three bra sizes. Personally, I think these remakes are a reminder of how the last few insipid generations have failed utterly to produce any replacements for the leaders we used to have everywhere. The best these hipsters and millennials can do is copy cat and even then only in highly predictable manners. They have not really invented a single new monster or variety of music, and as far as inventions and innovations, well, America didn’t lose the lead. They did.
While I was at Best Buy, I took my closest look yet at Win 10. It’s a piece of junk. MicroSoft has not added one new useful feature or application since Win 95, and by the way, if you still have your old XP computer, I’d hold on to it. It’s berated as not secure, but sooner or later somebody is going to figure out what those tens of thousands of lines of extra code is doing sitting idle in every MicroSoft product since Vista. And there’s no way Hewlitt-Packard embedded that keylogger at the factory level without some collusion with Redmond, even if it was just turning a blind eye.
I suspect it is there to be activated at a future date when the cloud reaches a critical mass. Then all you Google MicroSoft users will really find out who your friends are. At least in my day, the code was readable and MicroSoft never did like that. They switched everything over to C+ which is inherently difficult to follow, even if the creators had known what punctuation was intended for. Again, not one new useful feature all the way to Win 10, all they do is scramble the locations of your familiar buttons and make the overall system less capable. My main objection with Win 10 is that it does what it wants to do, which is some idiot coders whacked out idea of reality. Remember, these are the same people who gave you Calibri 11.
"But what ... is it good for?"
IBM engineer viewing the first microchip, 1968.
Most people in my age group have never been in a programming environment. I’ll tell you a secret. Since I graduated with my latest degree, that was around 1994, I haven’t been around the environment either. Why? Because I learned something my classmates didn’t—that good programming is rarely the result of a group effort. Once I got out of school, there was just no reason to work with other programmers, they are like a stone around your neck. Who remembers the expression for more than three programmers working on one project. It’s called a cluster-fuck.
There is a reason for the lack of team effectiveness. The correct way to program a large project is to divide it into modules. Each programmer is given a basic set of what to accomplish and a list of variables. I always turned in top-notch code, but that is where I also noticed the most severe defect of other programmers. They could not accomplish their task without knowing what everybody else was doing. Myself, I didn’t know and didn’t care. My code was always the shortest and best, so I [usually] had my choice of lab partners. So I always chose the only girl in the room.
There were times the instructor teamed me up with coders. I view coders as the source of the “nerd” label that became attached to programming. It follows, since these people normally don’t have a real life. They are the last people I’d tell my home address. Don’t want them even driving down my street, no I don’t. They are quick to call you paranoid, but they are the ones who panic if they don’t have something on you. And like the phone company, a lot of them found out the hard way that complaining someone is not a “team player” only works when the other guy (me) doesn’t have the highest marks in the entire faculty.
Here is a sample of my C+ coding. Allow me to point out just a few characteristics that others omit. First sign of good programming—all lines of equal importance begin in the leftmost column, and are grouped together in a logical fashion, as opposed to scattered all over the body of the code. The constants are listed first, then the variables, with each variable name predicated with a case letter “v”. The constant and variable names are self-descriptive, indicating both what it is and what it does—gee MicroSoft, what an amazing concept. Every line is commented, and the comments line up, too (they may not be aligned in this blog's display font). Note the camelhump place-names—because only an inconsiderate moron would use the underscore character as a separator. The “int” means integer and I’d get around that, too, if C+ would allow it. There are a dozen other positive attributes to my programming, but for now, this is only a quick peekaboo.
int cBasePin = 9; //The transistor base lead
int vOnTime = 2500; //Motor on time in milliseconds
int vOffTime = 2000; //Motor off time in milliseconds
int vOnSpeed = 220; //Motor speed (0 - 255)
int vOffSpeed = 55; //Motor speed (0 - 255)
[Author’s note: I’m the “opposite” type of programmer. I can make my modules work perfectly—and I guarantee my work--knowing nothing more that what parameters are passed to me and knowing what variables you want back. By comparison to C+ jargon, my material is readable by even non-programmers, where a true C+ programmer would attempt to make the code as difficult to read as possible.]
That’s also the point where I began to note the connotative difference between programmers and coders. The coders would sit down and start entering code immediately. I don’t even touch the computer until the code is written out long-hand and proofread. I was well-known for having code that ran right the first time. We even had a class nerd who didn’t like me, Marcus, or Mick, something like that. Whenever I aced a program, he’d suggest that I was somehow cheating. Although he never explained how cheating was even possible. He’s the guy who dropped out of accounting when they brought in the public speaking requirement. Imagine, some clown afraid of his own shadow criticizing me.
That rift between real programming and its poor cousin, coding, is what I see today. No longer are there any real programmers producing real programs. Instead you have banks of coders churning out applications. The difference is a massive gap in quality and maintainability. Thousands of coders cranking out millions of lines of code that nobody can read without getting a headache. It even explains why it is cheaper for outfits like MicroSoft to create a whole new operating system than even try to fix the old one. They don’t have the people to do it, and of course, starting from scratch with new hirees, you get countless repeats of stupid mistakes that were already solved by real programmers, something the last two generations have never seen.
Last, this terabyte computer is an internal brand plugged into a USB adapter. I still do not trust the standalone externals. That, and my heavy duty ($150) fan from the shed has finally went kaput. So that means another extraordinary expense this month. At least this now goes into a form of equity One item I will adopt is the 2.5” hard drives. I still find the internal drives are more rugged, which is the opposite of what you’d expect. Ah, what the hell, it’s almost end of the month and I’m only $28 over. Back in Miami it was always at least $600 over and twice that wasn’t rare, either. For the record, today is the third this year that I spent no money. The other dates were February 20 and April 2. This never happened in south Florida. And it was probably impossible without barricading yourself in.
Seriously, you should see these people code, typing away frantically, cutting and pasting modules and taking more time to make them work than coding from scratch. Watching me code is entirely different. It looks like I’m sitting in the cafeteria sipping coffee. If I do much, it is with a pencil and paper, something of an abomination to the greatest generation. Computer programming was one field I never thought would fall victim to a majority rule state of affairs. But it was inevitable, for at age 18 I was already joking about how few people that started the courses ever got past 101.
My least favorite classes were the ones where the instructor assigned partners. Then as now, I have a low tolerance for the truly stupid in society. Because I find it’s not that they can’t learn, it’s that they won’t. It always made more work for me. I’d often have to step in at the 11th hour and do the code myself anyway or miss the assignment deadline. Not only does the team get the credit but they learned to just no do anything and watch me go at it. And some people wonder why I value my privacy.
The one enduring trait of the pathetic majority was same as today—they could not code unless they knew what other people were doing. Not just coding, they needed to know names, home addresses, birthdates, religion, and gossip. It’s a sure sign of weak and ineffectual individuals. And you can imagine them trying to get that kind of information out of me. Hey, I’m proud of the fact that in 15 years at the company, not one person ever found out where I lived. And I never ran into them at the market, since none of them could afford to live in my part of town. You get that when you support too much majority rule.
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