One year ago today: March 13, 2017, a lack of chrysanthemums.
Five years ago today: March 13, 2013, Roland should know better.
Nine years ago today: March 13, 2009, like a tech-savvy army.
Random years ago today: March 13, 2012, catching on to retirement.
Is it attic day? I can’t say I never thought I’d live long enough that such a question would get top billing. I just didn’t think it would happen so soon—that’s a joke, son. May everyone be fortunate enough to have a life as interesting as I suppose mine to be. But that’s all the nurturing philosophy you get for now. I’ve got an attic to tend to and a plan to go with that. The best approach is a central passage of plywood between the studs. So what is the big deal with that? Answer. The partition cross-braces, tarpaper, moisture barrier, and insulation have to go in first along the central channels, as the plywood gangway will be permanent.
It is old, here it is shown after being polished up a bit. And as soon as the lighting is done in the other rooms, I intend to take a day off to build a really nice buffing machine. From the motor out of the fan that bit the dirt, literally, the other day. It fell over onto a small pile of sweepings and shed a blade. It took forever to clean this tool by hand and the corners are still rusty. The blades are very keenly sharp and stay that way. That lever-looking piece jutting downward is part of the pliers, which are nicely spring loaded.
Thoughts again turn to my work shed. It regularly gets used but rarely merits mention any more, it has become commonplace to dash out there to make one or two small cuts and such. But the shed is already full of tools, and what’s more, the layout is more suited for, well, for building robots. How so? Good question, kiddo, keep ‘em coming. They are light duty tools designed to be used one at a time. Robot parts are unique in most ways, so the shop never needed to be set up for smooth assembly of multi-stage projects.
I was doubly reminded of this as the first thing I did when renovating the new bedroom was to clear a big space in the middle and set up sawhorses. I do not have a large (4x8) work area. The counter space in my shed is taken up totally by tools. Most of the bedroom new work got done on planks over those horses to make a handy station in the middle of the room. I need to rethink the requirements for my new work shed, a plan that’s been kicking around for some time now.
What about my Xmas present, the quality table saw? I never did get around to it, the old contraption from the trailer court days still works fine for the basics, but I can do much better work now. Same with a router table, but it doesn’t take much to figure out your really need two router tables. You know what, I’m going to take a daylight savings break and haul out my bass for that missing hour. That tune “Dark Horse and the Cherry Tree” really does need a bass line that does it justice. Return this afternoon, maybe I’ll have it by then.
Another delay is we’ve got another late-winter cold spell. It was down to 40°F last evening and it takes until afternoon for this old house to reach shirtsleeve working temp. Except for the back bedroom, I mean. That spot is fully insulated and cozy as it gets. I’m thinking of putting up a stick wall around the floor openings left for the plumbing and covering it with a tarp, making 2/3 of the room ready for occupation within the week. Yeah, we’ve heard that before.
The Ukraine. I think.
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I examined the multi-tool above under 4x magnification (a loupe) to locate any identifying markings, and found something that looked like the letter “E”. This was quickly examined by microscope but it turns out just some random scratches during the finishing process. Shown here is the surface scan at 10x, showing just burnishing scuff marks. I’ve also outgrown the microscope, but have no plans for a better model until the renovations are over. For those interested, this photo shows the surface of an apparently highly polished and shiny metal finish. I didn’t think to snap another picture with a filter so you could see the rainbow hues of the stainless steel that makes the texture so reflective.
However, I kept my old ones. I cannot be the only person to have noticed the 24 LEDs on the side plate form a convenient pattern indeed. Or maybe I am the only one who noticed, why am I so shy about my ideas. Gods sakes, it only takes one good idea to make it. The fact that I’ve been waiting fifty years for such an incident is only bad luck. Anyway, imagine if I took twenty of these things and wired them together.
As for controlling the lights, this is the first project that justifies using up a full-fledged $35 Arduino microcontroller. Like all but the super-rich, I’ve looked at the breadboard Arduinos that can be built for a few dollars, but if I can add a few pieces of strategic wire to the backboard of these LEDs, you will want to be constantly re-programming the display.
And yes, it would make a great kit. Forget those already time-worn dancing music cubes. All the do is make them bigger or use tri-color lites, cool to watch but basically useless for selling used cars. Don’t expect rapid progress however, because rewiring takes time and the money for anything like this has to come from playing out with the new band. I have money budgeted only for small Arduino learning and development. Tomorrow is rehearsal #14, but Lady Nik has long realized we are missing out on a goldmine if we don’t get on stage soon. She need only repeat what she’s already done once already (learn nine songs in a week) and we hit the clubs.
Remind me to ask her which club the people were complaining about. Pardon me, it was a restaurant. I don’t care if we initially bomb at a restaurant, that is not my bull’s-eye for this adventure. I could care less if we flop a time or two, it’s expected. If so, all we lose is a restaurant, if we win, I’m not above accepting meal tickets if the place is classy enough. In fact, let’s take a moment and see how many on the list would be suitable for a dining room crowd. Hang on while I count them.
Eighteen and a half. That’s over two hours of music. For the pork chop crowd, some of the tunes are already catalytic. See, I did my homework. Think of it, not a diner, but a semi-nice place, an okay joint, you know, like with tablecloths. Would you not want to hear “Country Sunshine” and “Midnight Special” instead of some dick guitarist playing all 29 verses of “Edmond Fitzgerald” to kill time? And ask her if the place has a dance floor. I told you my music was often chosen to be foxtrot tempo, so who knows? Maybe we could be ecstasy for a bored room, there’s no harm in giving it a whirl, and I still have all my wireless Karoke microphones. Leave out the raunchy stuff, “Cocaine Blues” and “Goin’ To Pot” and go for it. How could I have 18-1/2 tunes? It’s the search criteria, m’boy.
JZ gave me an English microwave cookbook. It has some decent diet recipes, but talk about weird directions. How does one “turn up” oatmeal or sprinkle eggs with “knoggerns”? Other parts are easy, like “energizing” meat for so many minutes per pound. But where does one get all this broth to boil things in? Chicken broth maybe, though that would not make sense in some of the recipes. I take “surface unit” to mean the burner of a conventional stove. “Twisters” are bread ties. Reheating is “refreshing” but what is “soggy bread” and beware of “Seattle salmon”, the Brit term for canned tuna. (Tuna has not been allowed around here for at least five years now.)
ADDENDUM
Last for today, here’s a bit of a treat, but with a difference. Everybody who works for a fixed rate has likely at some point pondered the hot dog cart. Yet I do not personally know of any person who tried it. I’ve heard only the same stories you probably have. The guy who made $100k his first year and the guy who never sold a thing and lost his shirt plus his next five years paying off the debts. He risked borrowed money because he listened to that old adage about don’t risk your own. Invented, I think, by the same gang who tell you to go into flipping real estate with other people’s cash. They’ll probably tell you war is good business, too. Guys, it stands to reason in the long run, the people lending money have to be smarter than the ones who borrow it.
Accounting school teaches the lessons in isolation. One day we’d study, say, economic order quantity and use a hot dog cart as the example. Next day we learn how to stock depending on the weather report. I really did pass all those exams, but never used those skills due to a plain fact of life. Most businesses won’t change suppliers or systems with which they have long-standing relationships. You can calculate your internal rate of return, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever find anybody that will pay you to do so. Now, I still have most of the best textbooks I studied, and I know where they are stored.
What if the opportunity came along that you could buy into such a business cheaply enough to incur no debt? You could turn around and sell the equipment for a profit next day, but that would leave unanswered the single burning question of how much money can somebody actually make with a hot dog stand? Come on, admit you are curious. The first thing I would do is make a list of the strengths of the proposition. These include, but are not limited to:
a) you live in an area with 3 - 5 street festivals every month.
b) there is an unlimited supply of cheap labor.
c) you already have the storage and parking facilities.
) a $2,400 brand new cart is for sale for $750.
e) once the cart is ready, you have an unlimited supply budget.
The idea begins to take form. Maybe I gots to know how much of that schooling applies in practice. A cash flow business is your best bet. Credit distorts everything, we want raw data. Now, this is not Miami, who tried to shut down or govern the stands and got into the health and safety mafia thing. You know, where all the vendors who didn’t cough up found roaches in their rig. I wonder sometimes, if I could use an actual hot dog stand to relearn some of the more advanced theories I once learned? Can I calculate to the third decimal point what a hot dog costs? Or at least calculate things out and sell the book.
The stand for sale locally is the basic starter kit. The kind with the umbrella, but in Florida that gives it year-round capability. Some guy over at the golf course bought it for his daughter a year ago and she decided she didn’t want it. (My god, what if my parents had given me such an opportunity.) Anyway, he’s got it in his garage and needs the space. He’s asking $1,000 but probably won’t get it out of me. I have to pay for the license, the insurance, the vehicle registration, and so on. Plus I’ll need a deep freeze and a ton of initial supplies. Also, a temporary tent to keep the whole assembly in the back yard for now. I’d be the owner, not the operator, but I suspect to really churn the money, it is a two-man operation.
Agt. R is the prime candidate. But he tends toward decisions based on less than fact. Remember, he’s the guy that was going to borrow $2,500 to buy a gold sluice. Then I came along and researched how this part of Florida has been thoroughly assayed and there are no gold fields. Plus, the gold buyers have a strict rule about buying raw gold, paying about half the daily quote. What price-fixing? It also came out that they pay only by check payable to the seller personally, never a business account. What good is gold if you can’t sell it anonymously at market? You tell me.
On the surface, it looks like a business that can be run on sunny weekends. Most of the consumables I’m already familiar with purchasing. Vending machines are no challenge to me and I did run a laundromat back when I was 20. But other than that, my experience is with selling a service (music) which carries no inventory and has no employees. Late this afternoon, over a refill, I did some what-ifs. Based on experience, I would say that it would be a very rare individual in these parts who could or would try to start this business without having to borrow money. And darn rights I calculated how long I could operate at a loss until he went under. Essentially, forever.
I would retain complete ownership. With the right statistics, I could even rent it out, but that’s iffy. Where I have an 80 foot driveway down the entire side of my building, Agt. R has only a narrow walkway into his back yard. I also have a modicum of privacy from the layout of my buildings. The guy also has, methinks, too many irons in the fire, but that could be because none of them are paying enough to give him more time off. If I decide to go ahead, I will document every penny with the usual robot club accuracy and post the relevant numbers here as an added feature.
[Author’s note: this little venture is not to be confused with a concession stand on wheels. That’s the ones that travel with the carnivals and have a big awning on one side. I’ve seen those for sale at around $10,000 but that is too much to risk without saying whether I have that much money or not. I’ll devote some resources to spreadsheeting the actual variable cost of creating a hot dog before I even look at any fixed expenses.
It’s just that I vaguely recall the last time I had a hot dog at the Maker Faire in Orlando, and it cost me $6 or something like that. I guesstimate the ingredients of the hot dog probably come in at less than 25¢. By this time tomorrow, we’ll know for sure, and that is buying the supplies retail until the ropes get learned.]:
Last Laugh
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