One year ago today: August 5, 2016, the Suzuki I didn’t buy.
Five years ago today: August 5, 2012, no $13 burgers, thanks.
Nine years ago today: August 5, 2008, my new sign.
Random years ago today: August 5, 2009x, there are no fixed signals.
What interesting events could possibly happen in central Florida on a nothing Saturday? Ah, that’s my thinking, so I had to make up my own. Here’s the facts, see if you can sketch something along with me. Where my hallway, not that big a hallway, meets the living room area, it forms a T-shape. The way the partitions are built, the soon-to-be dining area is the focal point at the intersection. Whether you walk in the side door, front door, or exit the hallway from either the bedroom or bathroom, you are at that junction. Still with me?
So you’ll know it’s not all work and no play, here are the chocolate chip cookies from last day. Still warm when the picture was taken. For some five years now, it has been tea at home, since going out for coffee has returned to my life as a ritual from my college days. America used to be full of cafes and restaurants with a counter where you could sit all day and have free refills. Why would one do that in an affluent country?
I can tell you, because I lived it. In my opinion it is callous people who tell their children you can become anything you want to be. That may be true for a tiny percentage through luck or favored circumstance. For most of us, the time when you are young and inexperienced is the lowest-earning potential of your life. You will miss out on being young if you spend all of that time, or even a majority of it, working your ass off. If you weren’t born with much, you ain’t gonna get it busting your chops from the day you leave home.
I saw young men do this. Go out to the oil rigs, or the lumber mills, and come back six weeks later rich on payday. But by then, the women were all seeing somebody, the good ones were married, and the remainder were a growing proportion of leftover skritches. These tough guys could not save a penny, most of them, because the circumstances were they already missed the boat. They could only compete by spending more on cars and gimmicks. Buy a TransAm and you’ll get the girl! Whoops, while you were out earning the payments, she ran off with the filing clerk. Maybe it’s no different today, but I can sure vouch for the part of it that I saw with my own eyes.
Where I had no money, at least I was not living in some bush camp. I did put short times in with Haliburton and Weyerhauser, but just long enough to learn that as a career, your best move is to get the hell out of there as fast as you can. There is lots of talk of the kid who worked in the bush to finance his way through university, but I’ve only seen it twice. And neither of those guys ever came close to the scale of what I was accomplishing with the ladies. Hell, I used to like the times when the greasers would clear out of town for a shift on the rigs and pipelines. More for me.
Be aware the way I reckoned it back then is still valid today. If I was broke, why was I wasting my precious time sitting in Denny’s? Doctor Gordon had that attitude, why wasn’t I out working? At what? I had no experience and no training, there was no conceivable job that didn’t leave me worse off than simply having no money. One didn’t have to be a therapist to spot that working in the bush was not the answer. Most men who did that came back a little bit crazy.
I may have not been building an infrastructure, but I was sure planning one and history has borne me out. I didn’t waste a lifetime obeying idiotic rules and paying interest on worthless paper money. No, I was the guy back in town doing all the women. Just being available got me more than all the big money ever did for those guys. You see, I was a lowly dance instructor, another thing that old doctor just could not understand--not when there was money to be made 200 miles up in the mountains or 200 feet below the ground.
Besides, I ask, where are all these guys that got rich working in the wilderness? Where are their accomplishments? My brothers went for it and today they don’t have one thing to show except a boring life of meaningless toil. Gotta pay the bills, living one paycheck ahead of the banker, just like the pack they run with. They reside at boredom central. Mind you, the way I live is intensely humdrum to them. Reading books? Playing with electrical wires? Why, I’m so out of touch, I don’t even own a TV. Can’t get much more dreary than that.
Here, have a cookie.
Morocco.
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I cleared a space in the vegetation to my work shed, the jungle had completely taken over while my back was turned. There were electrical boxes stored in there and I’ve decided to add an extra four outlets to the living room, which is to become the second bedroom soon. I’m going to continue with the wiring to the closets and a couple bulbs up in the attic. For the extra twenty bucks in materials, I want some decent working conditions up there when I go for the attic fan and maybe something fancier. You know, if I could find a model that was sideways, I’d put the water heater up there where it is already too hot.
He did a nice number on his index finger, right across the knuckle. But he has been practicing, once again I can tell by the complaints and by the questions. This picture shows a metronome and a pair of self-powered drumsticks, both donated to the cause of getting his rhythm playing off the ground. Since there are not that many retired accountants playing bass, here’s an odd statistic. Compare this following data with other retirement plans.
After you are 50 years old, every minute you spent learning a song seems to translate into one dollar—if you perform for a paying crowd. It doesn’t seem to correlate to how often you play it, just the learning time. Yes, that seems backward because the more often you play something, the more you should make. But any guitar player who kills stage time playing Neil Young can tell you mere repetition doesn’t fill the tip jar. The way it seems to work is the more time you put into learning a song well, the better you play it. I’ll spend nearly 90 minutes on songs I’m proudest of, but maybe 10 minutes learning some hack Eagles tune.
The operative word is learning time. I can spend hours playing the tune thereafter, but the focused learning part isn’t in the textbook. Examples would be any Johnny Cash. When I play it, well, buddy, you’ve been entertained. There is another stat that comes out of these reviews that likes to remind me of reality. It is the number of songs, projects, etc. that get mentioned to the number that actually get completed. It still runs 1,000:1. (And in every case, the real work involved company officers.) Conclusion? The average person never completes much in his life.
My backyard is this high. To keep the pathway open, I sprayed a herbicide that claims to work once, and not thereafter linger or pollute the soil. In return, Agt. R has donated me one of those metal burning pits with a spark guard. I don’t have a lot that needs burning but nor is it any fun bagging it and hauling it up to the garbage—which arrives really early and I’ve missed it more than once. By the way, I found my missing bass tuner, the missing eyeglasses, and now I can’t find my three-hole punch. I need to get that extra room finished over the next few weeks or I’ll really be miffed at myself.
In my massive DVD collection, I found a Disney movie, unusual in itself. I find all their products since 1980 to be nothing but repetitious remakes. The spark was gone when old Walt kicked the bucket himself. This movie was okay, I probably mistook it for one of the Martian Chronicles by the title, “Narnya”. Excellent animation, pretty much flawless. But as usual, Disney seems to have a policy of choosing only the plainest-looking of actors and even more so with actresses. I knew their rules are to target a younger audience, but there’s no sense pretending that even children don’t know what’s attractive and what isn’t.
“Some days I don’t have enough
middle fingers to go around.”
~ Everybody, sometimes.
I’ve come into possession of a “new math” book, which I thought to read as math has always been my worst subject. That’s my worst academic subject, there Ken. Anybody can climb a mountain but it takes brains to figure out how tall it is. I’m reading the parts that make sense to me to see how far I get. And I’ve picked up some trivia. A Rubik’s cube has 2,048 solutions. But to find one by trial and error, working rapidly, would take some 640 billion years. I’m taking a closer look at modular arithmetic, also called “clock arithmetic”.
Plus, I read a chapter on half-stepping, a technique for finer control of stepper motors. See what happens when I get a comfortable room to study in? For you microcontroller fans out there, this is a control method for smoothing out the rotation of stepper motors. This is an experiment that failed last year because the batch of stepper motors from Hacktronics had some weird winding arrangement I could not decipher. To non-robotics fans, a stepper motor is what controls the precise movement and positioning of the paper and ink nozzles of your computer printer. Thanks to Hewlett-Packard, your printer is the most expensive peripheral you are likely to ever own.
How it works is the rotor is surrounded by a series of coils, and energizing these in sequence causes the motor to “step” to various positions and hold itself there while power is on until a different coil is activated. Most motors have 200 increments of 1.8°, for a total of 360° rotation. Do not confuse these with servo motors, those whiney motors used in remote control models. There is a way to increase the resolution to 400 increments by carefully programming the Arduino controller (in this case) to energize two adjacent coils, see diagram below.
What you are looking for is the way every second phase shows two coils magnetized (red) instead of the orthodox one, causing the rotor (green) to position itself between the two. The result is a much smoother rotation of 400 increments, and since this is accomplished entirely by programming, I thought I would look into the method. When I heard it worked on bipolar steppers, I immediately took it upon myself to get familiar with the code (not shown here). And no electrical wiring got done today in the living room. See what I mean?
Well, tell you what, I’ll show you a snippet of the code, but understand this was written by some millennial too stupid to document his work. I warned you about this aspect of object-oriented (C+) programming. Any idiot can make it work, but that doesn’t mean it works optimally. Anyway, here’s a sample, again, I am not responsible for this mess.
digitalWrite(out1,HIGH);digitalWrite(out2,LOW);digitalWrite(out3,LOW);digitalWrite(out4,LOW);delay(60); } else if(i==1){digitalWrite(out1,HIGH);digitalWrite(out2,HIGH);digitalWrite(out3,LOW);digitalWrite(out4,LOW);delay(60); }else if(i==2) { digitalWrite(out1,LOW);digitalWrite(out2,HIGH);digitalWrite(out3,LOW);digitalWrite(out4,LOW);delay(60); }else if(i==3)
My version of the same code looks like this:
if i==0 {
// Step 1 First phase of cycle: (1/0/0/0)
digitalWrite(PhaseA,HIGH); digitalWrite(PhaseB,LOW); // Coil A HIGH, coil B LOW
digitalWrite(Phase-A,LOW); digitalWrite(Phase-B,LOW); // Coil –A LOW, coil -B LOW
else if i==1 {
// Step 2 Second phase of cycle: (1/1/0/0)
digitalWrite(PhaseA,HIGH); digitalWrite(PhaseB,HIGH); // Coil A HIGH, coil B HIGH
digitalWrite(Phase-A,LOW); digitalWrite(Phase-B,LOW); // Coil –A LOW, coil -B LOW
else if i==2 {
// Step 3 Third phase of cycle: (0/1/0/0)
digitalWrite(PhaseA,LOW); digitalWrite(PhaseB,HIGH); // Coil A LOW, coil B HIGH
digitalWrite(Phase-A,LOW); digitalWrite(Phase-B,LOW); // Coil –A LOW, coil -B LOW
Note you can follow my code if you can read the logic chart in the diagram.
ADDENDUM
The book, “Bones”. I was awake reading until late and it is quite the tale. I suspect based on some true circumstances. The way it follows a disjointed plot, it is not like newer writers and their hunches that always work out. I’m half way though and the author is meticulous about saying anything he does not know for sure. In that sense, he’s predicted everything in the book right since 1985. The retirement communities, the shopping malls, the subsidized big farming taking over the smaller holdings.
It concerns a son who becomes fascinated by his father’s suicide some 35 years earlier and sends a detective to have a look. Multiple divorce was big at the time so everybody has a series of ex-wives and children who don’t know each other. The old ladies are all ditzy and the old men are all “tetched”. Like a good detective, he’s followed up every name and when looking at the foundations of an old burned down cabin, an earthquake fissure has uncovered some bones.
Later, the book is great in that I’m nearly to the end and can’t figure out the killer. I think it could be ex-wife number 2, only pretending she is gaga. Or her niece, who really knew about the affair. Or ex-wife number 1, who needed money. Maybe the husband of the other woman, adding the grisly thought that he is a taxidermist—but somebody killed him. Maybe the lawyer, who was after wife number 2, or the disaffected former business partner. I really can’t say and that is what makes a good mystery.
More as it happens.
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