One year ago today: August 13, 2016, hillbilly sign lessons.
Five years ago today: August 13, 2012, Wichita Falls, TX
Nine years ago today: August 13, 2008, only $90,000!
Random years ago today: August 13, 2006, visiting boring Ft. Lauderdale.
I’m celebrating the day. JZ told me Burger King has pancakes for 89 cents and I vaguely recall the ad sign, meaning I’ll check it out. I played a gig and that is always the start of a new musical era for me. I am fully incentivized to get that guitar happening to the next level and couple that with my precocious stage material. I’ve been around here long enough to know who the dud acts are and alas, that’s most of them. The ones that even talk to the audience come across like they’ve rehearsed their lines. Return back and see me after breakfast. It is now 6:16AM.
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This photo is something new. It’s a muffin you make in a cup, from Duncan Hines. I bought one but mainly because it contains no listed modified ingredients or HFCS. I’ll still look it up tomorrow because other products from the same company are laced with poisons. Gotta make sure they aren’t using some new anti-consumer law to disguise the toxins. The product at least shows that somebody over at Duncan is thinking. Single servings, what an amazing concept now that marriage has been obsolete for over twenty years. Single serving? Not if I like it. I’m not too happy about the $3.19 price tag, mind you. Comes in around eight flavors, including my least favorite, lemon cake.
I’m taking the whole morning off, it is only 9:30AM now. I looked back to see the last time that Jimmy Buffet song got me some accolades. Can’t find it but it was before 2013, so that means I sang it at Karaoke. Hmmm, so it isn’t the guitar riff I spent two hours learning special for that song. For now I will presume it is just one of those songs that each singer finds best for his presentation. Ha, but why couldn’t it be a song that’s one of my favorites? I mean can’t life at least give me a few breaks? What? Buddy, those were not breaks. Nobody ever handed a goddam to me. I worked like a peasant for every last molecule of every last thing, tangible or intangible, that I have today.
Richer than you.
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Here’s your photo of the hired help. Tearing down drywall is as dusty and arduous as it ever was, there is no new technology at work here. Uncovering the 1945 or so work on the building is a mini history lesson by itself. For example, the original carpentry was so square, there was no need to bead the drywall corners, but as a cost-savings measure, the drywall in the closets is 1/4”. The drywall nails held for a full 60+ years. During the entire project there has been not one instance of a loose or worked out nail. And the builder used quite a variety of nails, I should add.
For company, we had NPR which is on and on about North Korea. A backward nation of 24 million with no electricity is suddenly our newest threat. You know, the same bullshit they fed us about Cuba, and Iran, and Afghanistan, and Libya. You have to be blind and deaf to not spot the connection. None of these countries have Rothschild banking systems. They will be crushed. In case anyone has forgotten, North Korea got the bomb because Bill Clinton gave them some nuclear reactors for free back in the 1990s. It’s the same story all over again. When you stop asking questions, the Clintons will stop lying.
Not that the radio had my full attention. I was, all this time, mulling over the latent solar hot water heater, or shall we say preheater, really. The club, defunct or not, has all the equipment necessary to build such a device, but if the average homeowner is like me, there is a disinclination to any system that needs monitoring because of the weather. The most carefree style still has to be kept from freezing. You can’t avoid this by moving the tank indoors, because the heating circulation tubing has to be outside in the direct sunlight.
That’s what I was pondering. If you examine any of these passive designs, you find a series of valves. The minimum number seems to be three. There is a master valve that switches the incoming water supply to the solar heater, or direct to the electric heater. If temperatures drop below freezing, you better move fast to switch to electric heat, but you must also drain the solar tubes. This involves two valves, one to let the water out at the bottom and another to let air in at the top.
What I got to thinking is how trivial a problem this is for a microcontroller like the Arduino. True, it is dependent on a supply of electricity, you know, in case the temperature freezes at the same time as it knocks out the power supply, but this could be handled by having valves that are normally closed or normally open should the main power fail. I’d get to that, what I was really planning in my head was the code to work the three valves in proper sequence. To a coder, this is unbelievably simple.
The catch? Well, I’ve never programmed such a thing before and while I can guarantee the code would work, I cannot say for certain the hardware would survive the elements. The solution isn’t so easy, but one thing I would do is, of course, build a prototype. If I have time, I’ll sketch out what is involved and you can look it over. If you are nice, I’ll supply both the schematic and a flowchart. It would involve installing temperature sensors and any time the Arduino detects a danger point, it rattles the alarm, then opens check and drain valves, and diverts the supply direct to the house plumbing.
The other catch? Taking on such a project will require nearly 40 hours of “think time”, and a good supply of direct materials and direct labor. Mind you, there is no place else in this area you can get a custom built system. There are only modular suppliers and I have not priced out what they charge. I did hear on the news that the fastest growing segment of energy is now solar power. And all I’ve done in six years is think about it. That’s a shame considering how close the operation is to a relay-based robotics construct.
“Money is always greener in the other guy’s wallet.”
~ Anon.
Well that pisses me off. I just finished buying the 30 amp breaker y’day and I can’t find it. I had the breaker panel open and I find there are three 30 amp breakers in there where I was expecting one. (The missing one I bought is for the dryer and is not installed yet.) So here is the breaker panel for you to check for yourself. I had planned to replace the two 20 amp units in the upper left with four slim-line types, but can’t figure what’s with three 30 amp. One is for the large air conditioner, that makes sense.
This is the opposite of what I found when wiring in the “ensuite” at Wally’s Folly. The baseboard heater was wired for 220, but there was only one such circuit at the breaker panel and it was for the water heater. I later figured out somebody had robbed that circuit to wire up the Florida room and had just left the old 220 wiring in place. It took me time to figure that out, so I asked Wallace and he acted like I must be retarded because I didn’t know what wiring was all about. So, he didn’t know either. The trick was figuring out why the other guy used that pair when there were lots of spare breaker spots. Ah, because the wiring went to the wall next to the Florida room.
For now, I mickey-moused the closet light. By that, I mean I didn’t bury the NM cable in the wall, but stapled it along the inside rim of the interior closet wall. Don’t panic, nothing is exposed, I ran a 1/2” lath along the path to form a channel for the wiring. This is because I have not yet decided if I’m going to leave that closet alone. If I do, then the closets in this old house will be the only spots with original solid oak flooring. You like that, do ya?
Agt. R and I never found any gold in the river and we haven’t sold any furniture or shark’s teeth yet. But you know as well as I do that doesn’t mean there is no progress. Tonight we spent an hour on his guitar strumming. He’s doing the homework. I can always tell by the questions the student asks and by the things they say they don’t like. Tonight was a major accomplishment for a guy who still does not know how to tune the guitar. He kept strict 4/4 timing through two complete songs. Let me delve into why this is important.
Most guitar lessons focus on teaching songs, where I zero in on technique. Many times, if you read this journal back far enough, you’ll find instances of me showing this to somebody new, and then suddenly, a few weeks later they can play practically any tune. The challenge is this does not work for the impatient type who want to play songs right away. Learning specific music involves custom learning the song, and we know from experience the average hack guitarist maxes out at twelve songs. That’s correct. Most of us know a guitar player, often in a band, who plays twelve tunes well. If he knows more, he sloughs them off, usually by comping.
For the last few weeks, I’ve kept Agt. R on a drill that purposely stayed away from songs. His timing was irregular and that is the barrier that was passed today. He played along with the metronome at 96 bpm. All he has to do is lock in his memory how he did it, and you watch, he’ll lose it and get it back over the next few weeks, but get it back a wee bit faster each time. And both songs were played with minimal fuss because he was able to directly apply the theory.
Have I described it well enough? For clarity, if I had taught Agt. R these songs, it would have taken the usual month to get each one down by repetition and rote memorization. This is what passes for music lessons these days, and the music teachers love it. On the other hand, with my method, Agt. R played both tunes for the first time right off the bat. He did not know when I knocked on the door a half hour earlier what tunes he’d be playing, if any. That’s correct. He did not listen to the recording or read any sheet music. He simply played the strum I taught him and changed chords according to the model I’d showed him. One of the songs he didn’t even know (“Tell Me Momma”) but he aced it.
There is a long ways to go, since a certain amount of memory work is always involved with stage music. You don’t get the luxury of a pristine studio environment where you can dub over every note until you get is perfect. I didn’t tell him by playing those two songs, he’d just learned around 2/3 of my song list. Recall that my music is chosen to have guitar parts so simple if a monkey was any smarter he could ply the. This is because I am completely familiar with the learning capacity of most guitar players.
ADDENDUM
Here’s a depiction of the cardinal finch birdfeeder as it exists today. I call it the armored feeder because of all the anti-bluejay, anti-crow, anti-pigeon, anti-squirrel devices. It’s almost hard to make out the initial bird feeder shape in the center. The screens allow only cardinal size or less birds to enter the feed tray area and only from the sides. In essence, they must hop both in and out of the sides rather than fly up like before. It is unknown if this is a permanent solution.
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