One year ago today: March 20, 2018, on centralized power.
Five years ago today: March 20, 2014, gout.
Nine years ago today: March 20, 2010, no time is wasted.
Random years ago today: March 20, 2011, my 1981 A.I. computer.
First day of spring, which is today and not the March 21 we were always taught in grade school. Like the logic of people who study too much psychology, it must be due to some wobble in the Earth’s transit. Other than a trip to the J. Percy Priest dam, a no-drone-zone, it was a day in the back yard watching the pets romp and my transplanted daffodils wilt to nothing. That’s okay, I’m only after the bulbs. The dam area is scenic but not the best dog walk. Too much human trash lying around, each piece of it needs sniffing at the far end of the leash. So back home it was and they spend four hours in the back yard.
MicroSoft has gone through lengths to make assembler look like C+, with it’s lack of structure and confusing use of punctuation. I’ll not pursue that version, it isn’t worth it as a hobby. I was looking more to see how and why it had influenced Arduino programming. One of the worst possible mistakes in the history of programming is to make anything dependent on what the other guy may or may not do. This is why all compilers, translators, or interpreters should have their own input-output code in the package. C+ takes a wrong turn by having an “include” command. This is like a link to code that you can’t see, by someone you don’t know, and no guaranty that the workings won’t be changed without notice.
During the study session, I viewed one of the few people I would trust to write proper C+ code, and you can view his work yourself at How To Mechatronics. I have no trouble at all with his accent. His work has had 16 million views, kind of making him the unofficial authority on the gadget. Without his diagrams and explanations, I would never have really known why brushless motors only have three wires, or seen a DIY wire-bending machine. If you are the least bit electronically-minded, I recommend a good long look at this guy’s site.
Adding to what I just said, I had hoped in forming the original robot club to meet up with someone like this guy. Instead, the club stayed tiny. We had a hard time finding people who didn’t pronounce the “l” in solder. This guy, who speaks Russian with a German accent, focuses on the parts I want to learn and in turn, I know the parts that are missing from his explanations. We’d have made an incredible team, but that window is long closed. It’s years later and who has time for much Arduino when the back yard needs raking?
Monte Casino these days.
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A quiet day. Gives me time to putter and one test I thought was fitting was to test the tap water here in Nashville. The pets get drops of conditioner in their drinking water and although I don’t know what that costs, its major claim is to make the water “natural”. There’s my incentive to check it out. The only test I care about is how neutral the water is. Other than that smidgen of chlorine, which I don’t test for, everything that’s concentrated in the water that should not be there will alter the PH balance. So that’s my test. Here are the results. The top reading is the tap water, the bottom is the same water after adding the treatment.
[Author’s note: on-line facts about tests like the above are incredibly inaccurate. Often, they are exactly wrong about base or acidic color changes, and there seems no way to verify which sources are true. For that reason, I counsel against relying on anything concerning this subject from web pages. The few sites I found that were accurate were so poorly written many do not even show color charts.
I’ve allowed for the fact that the charts can themselves be misleading, since litmus paper is not a precise test. However, most people using a Google search are most likely amateurs who have no clue about the results, so a chart would be less misleading than the even worse accompanying literature.]
Did anything much happen today? Nope, not by blog standards. What does occur ion a quiet day is something of less blogability rises to the surface. This has the effect that not only does something-at-least happen every day, but you get to compare it to how your day went. I do read all comments and I know that this daily report does invite an amount of comparison. I don’t embellish the events but yeah, I know that just writing things down can make them seem a tad momentous when they are not. So today[‘s good question would be how many others tested their drinking water? Like, ever?
ADDENDUM
The neighbor who used to walk the dogs came over and asked if they needed an evening hike. Sure. That accomplishes several things. To name a few, I get a break, he doesn’t know the dogs were already outside for five hours, I need to run to the market for flu medication, it makes the guy feel needed, and lets me know how closely he is keeping any eye on the place. I wonder if he’d take the cats for a day? I can’t get used to the noise they make re-arranging all the carpets in the house. Continually.
Good, it gave me time to go shopping. And grab a coffee at the Panera. They have good coffee and the atmosphere is less old-folkish than you get in Florida. In fact, many locations attract a better clientele than Starbucks. Note that although none of these places is really a good choice to strike up with a stranger, it seems to me the ones who go looking at the local Paneras are the ones who shun the Starbucks crowd for the same reason I do. Starbucks is too full of men who are so obviously just looking, nor do I care for the sort of females who dress to go there for that reason. And to day, there were better looking women in the supermarket.
Nasal spray top of my list, to combat drip, my major symptom. The price tag on the high end brands is now $36 per container. Welcome to America, can you believe nose spray could ever cost that much? It’s the deficit that causes this, although most economists could never be forced to admit such a thing. When you keep printing up money to pay the bills, sooner or later the elements of the economy that do the most buck-passing start skyrocketing in price. Medicine and health are primed for that. Each segment of that industry relies for its profits on ever-escalating cost behavior. There are no savings to be found in the supply chain, so every cost is magnified and it is the end consumer that winds up paying the cost.
The problem is caused by government and insurance. They keep the industry lop-sided in favor of the big players. I doubt there has been a new medical company begun in this country in my lifetime, though don’t quote me on that. The industry is nearly total in its artificiality. No startups, but then, no failures of the establishment. But every startup, particularly digital devices and any new strategy to improve healthcare has been a flop. The big players do not want anything to change. Unlike other products, you can’t sell what people want or need. You have to sell the insurers and doctors and hospitals. Should you actually invent a product that cuts costs, the last person to see any savings is the patient.
