One year ago today: September 30, 2016, Haines City!
Five years ago today: September 30, 2012, a generic Sunday.
Nine years ago today: September 30, 2008, always answer, “No.”
Random years ago today: September 30, 2011, robot talk.
Who recalls that thrift to the west where I met the gal with the same eye color as myself? That’s where I bought my little bench vise y’day, which is seized up but I’ll soak it in oil. Turns out the thrift is kind of a family business and you know how well people get along in such settings. The lady who runs it is rather nice but she has very little experience on how to sell the merchandise. And no experience on what is good or bad. I chatted for nearly an hour y’day about what knowledge I’d gained at Dicken’s shop in Dania. Remember those days, around twelve years ago now?
I showed her how to retail new saw blades for the tools that worked. Get a line on items that people want to buy new, like work socks and gloves. Set the furniture in realistic patterns, with a fan blowing where people can sit a bit. Get a coffee vending machine in there and connect up some of those computer speakers and CDs. But, at 15 miles from here, it is too far to commute for me to help out.
This vise is soaking in a vat of rust remover along with some sets of bicycle wrenches I found. Remember those, a set of 4 small thin wrenches that were useless for anything else. You were supposed to carry them in a little pouch behind your bicycle seat but that was before they invented integration. In a related vein, have you seen the blast of “discoveries” coming out of Africa immediately after those remains of civilization were found in the Ukraine that predate anything from Oldavi? Suddenly we have all manner of artifacts from the African continent being dated before the Ukraine. My, what an amazing coincidence.
This is the same lady who I advised to save all the non-working video cameras of suitable shape and mount them around the interior for security. This may be the boondocks, but these days the ratio of weirdos remains the same everywhere you go. I think it might be due to the Internet spreading the word among these psychos about what they can get away with.
At this juncture, I direct you back to my age-old idea of a used book store. There are tons of vacant old buildings in the downtown core but I’ve never checked the prices. That is because my instinct tells me no bookstore will make a true profit unless the store is owned, not leased. My accounting apprenticeship showed me how evil landlords can be once they sniff you are running a successful business on their property. And how a simple move across the street to a lower rent district can kill a successful business in no time.
This is a Schmitt trigger. It makes more sense if you learn that digital signals do not usually, I said usually, work on the 0 and 1 model we are taught, but on the rising and falling edge of that signal. Notice the input signal does not have a nice crisp edge.
It takes a wobbly input signal and makes it digital off/on. Isn't it odd, in some ways, that a traditional analog device (similar to an op amp) is used to make the signal digital?
A real tea garden.
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This would not be any used book store. Maybe I’ll take a peek at the prices of these shops. I know they tend to be quite stable even in bad times but there are bargains. A book store would, for me, be a simple premise. You bring in two books for every one for only $1.00. Otherwise, it is $3.00. Bring in two paperbacks and you get one back for a buck. I would not usually buy any books, unless in batches or estate sales, or raiding the local thrifts for what they can’t move. Please, guys, this is all speculation. I don’t want to wind up like the Book-a-neer in Paris, Texas. Twenty tons of inventory with no index.
Yes, I would do the Internet café thing again, but only with vended coffee. My computer operation was, in the long run, the only department of our old store on the boulevard that made any money. It pulled in around $200 per week, but I never had to be there except when I got a call that something wasn’t working. I met dozens of people who simply appreciated a place to go that was not boisterous or a drinking atmosphere. And I know precisely how to set up, operate, and maintain such a computer business. The only thing I shied away from was giving lessons, but the reasons for that hesitancy will be gone by December 31 of this year. No, I’m not saying what they are, but I’m a practical fellow when it comes to keeping a low business profile.
Nor is it lost to me that the way I naturally set up a computer desk is a complete self-contained mini-office that is ideal for everything from paying bills to running a remailing service. And I also tend to stock the shelves with impulse items ranging from pepper spray to fix-a-flat cans. And I have eight years of successful experience at this. When I peer into the next five years, should I last that long, the time to prepare might be now. What I would truly like to do is open my “RealBank”, a bank that operates the way people think a bank operates. Where you deposit money and lend it to new couples buying a house.
Don’t pooh-pooh $200 per week, that’s $10,000 per year and that’s comparable to what most musicians actually make. As for staff, one pretty gal with an hour’s training can run the place. It’s an idea I’ve toyed with often enough, but probably not as often as I’ve toyed with the pretty gals. Now might be the time to look closer, since I’m again hearing uncomfortable rumblings about social security and the system in general. A second real estate collapse would bite deep and hard this time around. If 2006 – 2008 brought us to the brink, a repeat would push us over the edge.
The picture? It’s one of a huge box we found at the Thrift, but nobody knows what they are. It’s nylon cord around four feet long with a plastic clip on one end and a small loop on the other. Rather well made and clean, they are not a lanyard or any type of binding strap—unless there are other pieces that are missing. If you know what it is, leave a comment. It won’t get published, but it will be read. Same for anybody who wants to contact me. Leave a comment. I’ve never answered one yet, but you know, things can get pretty mercurial around here.
Today my plan is watch Bruce Willis movies. I don’t believe a word of Mel Gibson’s contrived retraction about the Jews, and still wonder how Uma Therman let herself go that badly. And the only famous quote of Robin Williams was in Patch Adams. When the Bible said on the 7th day, God rested, said Adams, “Maybe he should have used that day to attend a seminar on compassion.”
“Never turn your back on a charging turtle.”
~ unknown.
Did anybody else find the big news story going around about dementia just so much hoopla? Some doctor at some institute reports finding dementia can be predicted by a diminished sense of smell. What kind of crap is that? Oh, I get it. You simply overlook the patient’s diminished sense of time, place, language, memory, family members, balance, and what have you got left? Smell. Get that bastard a Nobel Prize. Be quick about it. Millennials need heroes worse than you can imagine.
It rained so that kept me inside pondering the living room floor. The room is large enough that I could finish 2/3 of it and leave space open to get at that bathroom plumbing. I just know I’ll be doing most of that work by myself. My wounds prevent me from working, but I can still plan things out and one thing I’ve got done is how to put in a complete parallel set of PVC plumbing for the entire new system, leaving only the very final cutover to be done when I get some help.
As for the bookstore, there is an abandoned pharmacy for sale off a main road in Mulberry. It probably failed because of the poor traffic location, but that is a plus for a book store. Downtown parking is always a hassle. It would, in the end, depend on the asking price. And we know how stubborn these commercial properties can be about that. Who recalls my observation that many buildings will go vacant for decades but the owner will not lower the price to make it competitive. It also has a lot to do with the way the American accounting system works, but don’t go into that.
I’d guess the property is worth around $63,000 (because of its bad location for that type of business), but priced three times that. And the building, well it has a great store front and in the back, a huge two storey warehouse that is built like a bunker. There are seven off-street parking spots and a drive-thru, plus all the street parking you want. It is across the street from a very busy thrift that, well, I think I’m the only person who has ever bought any books from that thrift. They don’t know what sells. Please remember, dudes, I’m only looking. I’d rent out my spare room if I got hungry long before I’d risk that kind of money on a business.
Just don’t rule anything out. The market is not collapsing, but it is shaky as hell. I wish I could better recall that case study we did in final year economics (an accounting degree requirement). It showed that it was not money, but the movement of money that creates wealth. And my guess is, real-estate-wise, money around here has ground to a halt. Why thank you, yes, that really is a nice picture of the building I’m thinking about. It’s stitched, you know, from three pictures.
ADDENDUM
How goes the book on calligraphy? Interesting, that’s for sure. Like many, I guess I thought the shape of our alphabet letters developed slowly through common usage. No, it was the spirited work of four or five individuals throughout history. They designed and created the characters and usually published a book whose font proved popular and was widely copied. The shape of the letters is not determined by some average or random survey of how people actually write, but rather some fairly dedicated study. The modern calligraphic alphabet was largely influenced by a museum employee who passed away in 1944.
We knew from other reading that the mix of capital and small letters in English was a result of efforts to make the words easier to read. No other major language has this feature. The Cyrillic (Russian) language consists of only capital letters. Another example would be the printing on old Roman and Greek statues. The capital letters are all evenly spaced. I should have realized better the influence that the thousands, maybe millions of man-hours of that transcript copying by monks would have had on the eventual appearance of manuscripts. I find the old or Gothic “black letter” pages very hard to read.
Once the small letters made their appearance, the greatest innovation was ascenders and descenders. This is the way some small letters, like “f” or “y” have parts that stick up or down from the general height of the rest of the letters. The capital letters all remain the same height. I gather this to be the single most consequential advance in making English the language of commerce and technical literature. While other features were based on appearance and novelty, the concept of small letters jutting up and down from the row of writing was a true actual ground-breaking improvement that has never been practically copied by any other language ever.
Yet, it would appear, nobody knows who actually invented it. What? Well of course I have a theory on that. If you look closely at Arabic writing, it is also all consonant capital letters, though you may not recognize them. There is a default vowel sound that is changed by adding small dots or other symbols above or below the row of writing. Imagine some medieval scribe after long hours at this script. He would have to write each word, then lift his pen off the page to add the vowel signs, similar to how you go back to dot your i’s and cross your t’s. Are you with me so far?
It isn’t hard to imagine how sometimes he would fail to lift his quill pen enough, or maybe the papyrus rippled in the desert wind, and the vowel mark got connected by an unintended stripe of ink. What? Well, hey, it is only a theory that I came up with off the top of my head, and that’s how ascenders and descenders were invented.
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