One year ago today: July 19, 2017, full time job?
Five years ago today: July 19, 2013, new scooter motor.
Nine years ago today: July 19, 2009, Millie in the Gulf.
Random years ago today: July 19, 2006, the music box.
Rehearsal #6, a complete success. I said that y’day but I meant musically. There’s more to this, which I’ll run over quickly. When things are not going well, I’ll count tunes. How many can we play so far, that kind of old-school thinking. My advertisement for a guitarist states you must take a few weeks off your busy schedule and learn a simple but new approach. Twood has done that. Like I don’t literally mean take two weeks of, I mean part-time practicing. And it’s working. When it comes to audience appeal, sit down for five minutes and think about how you would expect the song to be listened to. Do this, and that is all it takes to best the fancy pants guitar players from downtown.
Everybody likes a good tale from the trailer court. Last day, I mentioned I’d given my lady friend a couple of these screen door catches as a temp measure to keep her doors closed and save on A/C. I think I told how she was a city gal and had no idea what this thing was. So, I told her to hold on to them, saying it would dawn on her. Banana for scale. In the end, a patron came in who knew how to adjust the plungers and I forgot about these catches. She didn’t. When I came in last afternoon after practice, she came rushing up, all smiles saying I’d be so proud because she’d figured it out on her own. Impressive.
I finished watching the Frank Sinatra war movie. Isn’t it nice of those Germans to line all their tanks and trucks in one big tempting target, despite by that point in the war, the Allies had complete air superiority? It is still a better than average movie for the era, and in the end you are never sure if he gets the girl. Overall, it’s a reminder of how movies of the period were careful to include scenes of good moral character even if not essential to the plot. Like how to tip the cab driver and how to drive the speed limit.
The plot was how Frank falls for a lady who he parades around town until they meet Tony, the playboy, and she fancies him. The message, however, is clear. Never trust a woman. What? Oops, the ghost of Ann Landers informs me that is supposed to be, “Love conquers all.”
Abandoned Rhodesian farmland.
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My records aren’t perfect, but all the really important documents are scanned. Good, because a missing paper really caused some embarrassment a few hours ago. Sorry, no details, but for years the only reason I have never scanned everything is my dinosaur of a scanner. I need something high speed even if I use it twice a month. I mean, the trade off is wasted time. At my age, there’s a premium on that. Everything is fine again but I have to get back west again this fall. It’s been five years, alright, but the memory of that classic trip is so clear in my mind it doesn’t seem more than a couple. Sidecar, via Yakima, John Day, Denver, Bakersfield, across the Mojave, through Sonora, to the Alamo, then parking in Hammond to ride the Orange Blossom Special, where I sang on Beale Street on my birthday.
For break time, I threw on “Pelican Brief” since I know I’d already seen that movie at Sunset Place years ago. Strange, it was like I’d never seen the movie before. Didn’t recognize any scenes, but I clearly recalled the plot. My suspicion is that Hollywood has the scenes that sell down to a formula and they’ve been used so many times none of it stuck. Julia was hot stuff back then. Here’s a watercolor of a young Julia, except it’s not. This painting was done in 1814. I found it while reading an article on inkwells. I’d remembered when I started grade school, the wooden desks still had inkwells. Right next to the carved initials. It was not unusual in my time for every boy to have a jackknife in his pocket.
Fancy inkwells are collector’s items, most people have never seen the real thing. They were often brass or silver, with pots for sand to dry the ink and little bells to summon the servant to mail the letter. Ballpoint pens were already common when I reached school age. Yet I always wondered about those silver inkwells. Because during the time they were made, it was considered gauche for the rich to write their own letters.
Or how about the critics of ballpoint pens? The know-it-alls said that children would lose the skill to make their own ink from chimney soot, linseed oil, and gum Arabic. Then they’d be stuck if the supply of store-bought ink ever runs out. That’s sheer nonsense. Think about it, if one of today’s finest can’t find a ballpoint pen, how in tarnation is he gonna find gum Arabic?
I’ve read the chapter on prime numbers but it did not give the information I wanted on encryption. However, it gave new ways to look at prime number, or modulus arithmetic. I’ll need time to figure that through.
ADDENDUM
It’s nice to have a small work area back again, with renovations requiring every square inch the way they do. This is Agt. R’s turntable, and it is Bluetooth™ capable. The turn table would not turn. Taking his word for it, I opened the case. I was expecting to see a broken belt, but everything was intact. Next, I traced each of the leads and those were also okay. Yet, the unit apparently turns on, as shown in the bottom panel.
I’ve speculated the next advancement in robotics is making the microprocessors themselves into more than a systems management device. It just seems more practical than fine-tuning the other pieces, which is a rough description of what they’ve been doing for forty years. The guts of this gadget are likely the cheapest components available from each source, then made compatible with the microcontroller. This is an unsung advantage of the current crop of microcontrollers. But I believe this could be brought forward on a different scale. Somebody programmed the microcontroller to make the pieces work together. I say it would be more efficient to design a generic type of controller that has the capability to self-adjust to a spectrum of situations.
Ah, but now we’re talking artificial intelligence. It’s just that it would not take that much intelligence. They already match the voltages to a few standards and the value of modularization is known. Give me a microcontroller that is preprogrammed to detect a matching set of spare parts, and sure, I’ll have a go at inventing something. In a sense, that is already being done, but the hard way.
My conclusion is that the turntable is working fine. Take a look at the lights. There are three of them and only two are lit. The red led is a pilot light. The blue led is some kind of standard for Bluetooth™, and the third led is green. It doesn’t come on. Hence, we might just be looking at a bad design. The lights come on from an internal battery for that purpose. But the actual unit will not work unless a separate power cable is attached, which charges a different internal battery, which would turn the green led on and away you go. Or, possibly, the other two lights will illuminate when the battery is otherwise too low.
The bad news is it seems to be a special “USB cable” that was not in the package. Agt. R said somebody gave him the turntable because it didn’t work. Aha, the battery was factory charged, so they promptly lost the cable or used it for something else. Since the other two lights come on, they presumed a malfunction. What I need to do is find a replacement cable. If not, I think I could rewire a regular plug to do the job.
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