One year ago today: October 27, 2016, $1,500 & a free cell phone.
Five years ago today: October 27, 2012, it boils down to age.
Nine years ago today: October 27, 2008,bass player’s elbow.
Random years ago today: October 26, 2011, fakes, motorcycles, and greener pastures.
See this picture? That’s to incentivize you to find a nice place to live and stay away from this place. The fact it is in Wilmington perked my interest. A renovated mansion on a private road asking just $350,000. It’s been what, ten years since I’ve been there and I’m still fond of that town. One of the side purposes of my trip this time is to set some finances in order. Then, ha-ha, we can go over yet another time again the plan that always falls flat on its face—The Smithsonian.
To me, it’s another of those laws designed just to keep checking you are who you say you are, etc. Note to myself that I have finally succeeded in getting all my pills double strength, making undocumented travel possible again. You can fill in the blanks.
On the cross-town trip for the renewals, I stopped to see the motorcycle pro shop. Mercifully, he let me cancel all the custom chrome pieces and accessories I had ordered for the Rebel. Also lost in that incident were my driving glasses. The fine print from my new provider became instantly readable. Unless I want horrid bifocal horn-rims, the co-pay is $215. Ouch-ee-wah-wah. You don’t do that to people on pensions at the end of the month. I paid up, leaving me down to my last [budgeted] $40.
I also called the Hippie at 3:00PM to cancel rehearsal. Woke the guy up, but who am I to judge those who have never held a job nor had to? Stopping to visit Agt. M, turns out he moved last month, but chances are the robotics club will be revived in some form. However, the rule stands that married men cannot participate in money decisions. So that leaves everything up to me, the only remaining single club officer. Again. It doesn’t help that I spent the last decade in the Miami area, doctor’s orders.
JZ and I were reviewing that ten years. He also wants out of south Florida but provisions of the family trust make that difficult. Woman-wise, I find Miami to be hopeless, but because he cannot really pack up and leave, he continues to waste a lot of money and energy looking for what is not there. I got five hundred dollars that says of the next 100 Miami women you meet, 99 of them will be one or some combination of :
Single mother
Druggie
Shacked up
Slut
On welfare
Ex-convict
Tattooed
Stripper
Mentally disabled
Grossly fat
Arch-feminazi
Hooking
Super-weird
Diseased
I didn’t have to mention fugly, untalented, or bitchy. Oh, and the 100th one was taken before she hit sixteen. It will be up to four more years before she attains the list.
Finnish summer cottage.
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By now, I’m famished. The nearest place I like is Five Guys, where I quickly find out the cheapest order on the menu, small fried, is now $4.59. Later in the day this resulted in another major discussion with JZ about the need to invest in something income producing that can be tweaked against the upcoming inflation. I’ll say it again, prices on the things you actually buy have doubled in the past five years. This cut your paycheck and my fixed income in half. It’s called stealing, but it isn’t illegal when the government does it.
The reason is that the 7489 actually does something the beginner can comprehend. By connected the right wires and lights, it can perform a single task by itself. You don’t have to understand gate or logic theory, but a grasp on digital numbering makes things easier. I found a source of the chips at Alfa on Pembroke. They are $9 per chip, making them too expensive, but that is true of most of Florida. I sort of know the staff there, or at least they remember the my motorcycles. The bloggable point is that one of the guys expressed an interest in learning electronics.
No, this is not usual. In Florida most people who work at a store just work there. Appreciate that 90% of the no-techies that walk into that store are not hobbyists with a direct interest in how the parts work. Since this was the very basis of the original robotics club, we have a rule to always encourage anyone who could potentially become enthralled by the design of electronic logic. I was running late but carved out the time to advice the chap to focus on the 7489, the gates, and the Arduino.
The two guys there quickly glommed onto what I described about how every known book or course on the topic of electronics falls short in some major way. This has probably caused more people to give up electronics than anything. I know that I’m a no-techie, but I also know that has enabled me to get past lots of the hurdles. The now-defunct club was a great atmosphere to prompt different viewpoints on existing problems and that has made me appear as a sometimes expert. I said sometimes.
That situation provides yet another inducement to reactivate the club in some form. We never built a robot or a computer, but the club provided a society where like-minded persons could openly talk well away from critics and lordy knows how impossible it is for beginners to find good articles or conversation that don’t sink too deep. For that matter, read today’s addendum for more on this aspect of learning. Meanwhile to give you an idea of the kind of time that independent research takes, peek at these dates when the 7489 was mentioned in this blog.
December 19, 2013.
December 21, 2013.
December 28, 2013.
December 29, 2013.
September 14, 2015.
I will find and photograph the prototype. Broward Robotics Club does not destroy its failures.
“The answer is simple:
‘It’s not easy’.”
~Carl William Brown.
I got on the road back to Miami at 5:38PM thinking to meet up with the family at the Fall Festival. Wrong. The freeway was bumper-to-bumper and several times came to a stop. I did not get to the church until 8:40PM and the parking was twenty blocks deep. I drove around but I never stood a chance. I hope nobody waited for me (I found out later they did, but just an hour) because the place closes at 9:00PM. And I was so looking forward to seeing how Miss Miami is faring this year. Like Taylor Swift, she is finding out the hard way how few males have anything to offer her emotionally. If you think my list above is harsh, ask a few women what they’ve been through.
Tell you what, ladies, I’ll dispense on piece of advice for you. There are men that want everything you can imagine, but the one thing they all want in common is a woman they do not have to worry about. I’ve only met one of those in my life. Normal. Normal men are the ones I’m talking about here. I pulled into the Dunkin on South Dixie, the slowest Dunkin in town, and 22 minutes later got myself a coffee and worked the crossword. Unless you want to spend your money on what I’ve listed above, that coffee constitutes an exciting night on the town in Miami after you are 30-ish. Mind you, it takes most people quite a while longer to admit it. Look at me. Frinstance.
Stand by some more. I got the dates mixed up and it is tomorrow we're playing the Halloween party in Coconut Grove. The Tamarac show was an open mic and I don't do open mics as a rule. That event was invented by some house trying to get free entertainment. In Florida, it's a scam. Get all your musician friends to show up expecting to play. Then make them sit around for two hours waiting their turn and [each]running up a $15 bar tab.
You'll have to wait for photos and coverage of today, as I spend half of it at the eyeglass place. Even with my insurance, the co-pay is $200 so I'm not happy with that. And I don't get the glasses for another month. However, I got a lot of information and the first negative review of laser eye surgery. Pay attention, because I don't know where else you'd get this side of the story.
Laser eye surgery works on the 'lens' and thus is a compromise. The retina still has to focus though that lens. The more common problem is the retina failing to focus, I did not know that. So no matter what the lens is doing, if the retina doesn't work, you are out of luck. This is something I must look into, I've just never heard of this before. The good news is I have only the simplest type of myopia and I can still go to movies without my glasses. Did I mention the full price? Nope. It is $315 of which $200 is my portion.
ADDENDUM
Read the following carefully or it could trigger the wrong conclusions. This is not, repeat not, what the spark of reviving the club was about and we did not discuss the following. This is merely to put a few unpopular public concepts back into perspective. The over-riding notion here is that being educated and being intellectual are not the same thing. The world is full of educated people who don’t have a clue. Hey, did I just describe Liberals? Anyway, the short following article is to clarify, not to convince anybody of anything.
When the Roman Empire fell, religion plunged Europe into the Dark Ages. You could be burned alive for suggesting the Earth moved. But a few people always felt that feudalism and primogeniture were not the ideal condition of mankind. They wanted to bring the world out of darkness and hence were called the ‘Illuminati’. They knew they could not change much themselves, so they recruited a lot of the upper echelons of the Freemasons. This blurs the groups but in fact, they are not the same outfit.
The concept that radical ideas require a private setting to nurture is thus a given in most people’s eyes. Those who condemn private societies usually have a mutual beef—they are excluded from membership. There are good reasons why Orville and Wilbur, or Wozniak and Jobs, or any team that invented anything new kept it private until it was a success. So let’s have no finger-wagging about Agt. M’s concept of the self-charging battery. Or my loony concepts that to discover anything new in electronics, you have to necessarily re-invent the wheel.
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