One year ago today: July 12, 2012, no license required.
Five years ago today: July 12, 2012, until it’s their turn . . .
Nine years ago today: July 12, 2008, first time grits?
Random years ago today: July 12, 2015, a colorful post.
Still no parts for my motorcycle, so another day to kill. I decided to hang out at the only half decent bookstore left in the area. That’s way up at Flamingo and Pines, the Barnes & Noble. I note that there are now quite a few robotics kits on the shelves. Most of them team up the Arduino, which is still too expensive for most hobbyists, with plastic assembly parts. I predict most of the hard work is done, since learning to program the Arduino would hardly pass as a leisure pursuit for most people. This picture shows that none of the projects contain a single new idea and all were mentioned in this blog years ago. I am amused by how these robotics and microcontrollers are finally reaching out to this market. It didn’t work for Radio Shack.
We made several random trips to different markets on different days for different items. But when I arranged the receipts this morning, three of them came to exactly $13.82. I’m not even going to try to explain that one. In a related item, I read the average family has $30 in change lying around the house. Ha, not the house I grew up in. Anyway, I took stock and I have close to three times that. I guess I’ll never forget how many times I was reduced to counting the pennies in that bucket.
If I had to do it over again, this time knowing I didn’t stand a chance, I would have planned my retirement differently. But the net effect would be the same. Find, create, or do whatever you have to that by age 40, if you have not made it big, some way of “retiring” at the income that will keep you alive until you get your pension. Too many people knock themselves out for a fat pension and by retirement age look back on empty, wasted lives. Not that they ever admit it. I would consider a life wasted if one had written less than 100 letters, or taken less than 100 trips just to see things different, or played less than 100 gigs on stage. Your standards may vary, but the concept remains the same—it doesn't count for much if everybody else around you is doing the same damn thing with their lives.
Trust me, there is very little redeeming value to working after age forty. If you have not, as I didn’t, climbed the corporate ladder by then, you are just putting in time and dreaming. I was lucky, I turned 40 without being up to my eyeballs in debt. They talk so much about demographics and how the birth rate is down, but have they touched on the reasons for it being so? Like the state moving into the household to prevent the parents from punishing the children, then the state meting out the punishment later when the crime rate soars. Think about it. If you don’t buy your kid $200 running shoes, you are a failure.
The state education system is an hopeless failure, look at these high school grads who can’t read or write. I have not seen the mayhem in a classroom but hearing about it is enough. In my day, you got the strap or the yardstick across the knuckles, then you got it double when you went home. As for misbehaving in class, it worked reasonably well on me.
Martial arts practice.
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Over to the library, I attended a so-called webinar concerning the developments in 3D printing. There is still a long way to go before these become household appliances, though I’m glad to see the momentum is still strong. The newest crop of printers are more rugged-looking and there are some clever refinements. For example, the enclosed chamber is heated, not just the baseplate, to ensure the extruded material cools more evenly. And a time lapse videocam, a good idea because these printers are far from instant. Really far.
I tried the freebie, called Blender. After an hour, the best I could do was draw a box and take some rectangular chunks out of it. And I have yet to see one of these applications where the controls are intuitive. I’ve used programs where the simplest and most common activities were so complicated I kicked the plug out. Software that you had to back of every menu to draw a line, and everybody’s favorite “electronics” software, Fritzing. Which has no symbol for the transistor or the resistor, something like that. Where do they even find?
There are an increasing number of these applications so I have hopes that somebody will actually come up with something user friendly.
“Nothing is so common-place as the wish to be remarkable.”
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
I had time to read another novel, “A Small Death In Lisbon”. It’s an interesting premise but difficult to follow over the interrelationships of the characters. During the Second World War, Germany had industrial interests in many supposedly neutral nations. This is presented as evil, of course, but not the fact that the English often imposed blockades on these countries, which hardly leaves them free to trade as they please. But this book is published by people who want you to hate Germany, so go with that for now. Portugal had wolfram mines. That is tungsten ore, used for anti-tank shells. These days it has been replaced by depleted uranium.
Here’s the plot, since I don’t recommend you bother with this, not even if it is condensed. The victim is the only daughter of a lawyer who’s wife says he was abusing her and that it wasn’t really his daughter because the wife, before she commits suicide, says she was raped by his brother, who in turn raped the maid, who married the German’s bank partner, who had been raping her before, and she always made “a hissing sound”.
The murdered gal was 15 and was involved in porno movies, prostitution, and once phoned her mother to come home just so the mother would catch her in bed with the mother’s 28 year old boyfriend. Then in come the Jews, saying the wolfram was paid for by stolen gold from eyeglasses and teeth at the concentration camps, but they would say that, wouldn’t they. The banker is set up for murder and handed 30 years and eventually the detective pieces this all together by torturing the girl’s boyfriend and then sleeping with the girl’s high school music teacher. It was the owner of the hotel where the girl and her friends ran a prostitution ring, and it turns out one of these guys wound up paying for his own daughter or half-daughter. I think.
So it does not matter what the girl was up to or what she was doing. This is America. It only matters that she was 15. The authorities must get to the bottom of this, is what I’m saying, even if they have to call in the special crimes unit. Again.
[Author's note: the authorities love to pry into the sex lives of everybody even remotely involved. This is why, if you ever get arrested for a sex crime, deny that any of your enemies were ever involved. Use real names.]
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