One year ago today: May 17, 2019, a short long day.
Five years ago today: May 17, 2015, an interesting day, I’d say.
Nine years ago today: May 17, 2011, early electronics.
Random years ago today: May 17, 2007, early Google trickery.
Another full day, so here’s the happenings, you fill in the opinions. The funds requests for materials went out this morning. Meanwhile, a simple glace tells us the parts for the thermal chimney are identical in most respects to a passive solar collector. I can bend pipes and I can bend rules, so am I cheating? Not in this case, since 100% of the money belongs to me, the request is a formality to keep things in check. We may sometimes be short some decorations around this old cabin, but I’m taking twenty minutes right now to scrounge for parts.
The drone. No pictures but we have access to a smart phone and a mission already planned. The Flight time is a ridiculous five to six minutes and it autoland directly under the spot where it dies. That’s another lie since the instructions indicated it would return to base. Nope, it comes down in a barely controlled drop—so the second crash last day may not have been my doing. This time, I had a co-pilot and she’s played a lot of video controllers before. The level of experience told instantly, we had the dogs chasing the drone in circles. If the club reactivated, that alone would make the drone worth every penny.
As is it, the thing is an expensive toy. We have a meeting scheduled for Wednesday. Five hours of charging for five minutes flight kind of leaves time for extras. And in this instance, I have a young lady with an interest in robotics, thought that could be influenced by circumstances. She was, and this may sound familiar, unskilled and unknowledgeable about the mechanical parts of robotics but was not aware of the critical role of the microcomputer. And she knows something about programming. Where is my spare box of microcontrollers? I’m saying if this was a recipe, you just read a very familiar list of ingredients.
Within the flight window, we had time for buzzing the dogs, but also put the machine through some controlled maneuvers. With a range of 1,000 feet, the first test was to get the thing high enough that we could see it, but not hear it or draw attention from the ground. Holding the “up” button causes the drone to rise around twenty feet and hover. After an estimated three hundred feet, it quit responding to the command. We got it to speed ahead in that characteristic nose-down helicopter fashion and to execute banking turns. The stability was remarkable in her control, the lack of it in mine. A close exam of the battery shows it may be a popular item available anywhere.
To execute anything but line of sight control, the viewing screen is necessary. My home WiFi has a telephone connection which may compatible with the tablet screen. I just don’t have time right how. Maybe by Wednesday, we’ll create the time. We have a private testing field, a skilled pilot, and a mission assignment if we get it happening within the week.
Auvoria trading. I’ve regressed the trading to a fixed weekly goal, allowing 1% for expenses. This allows the trading to continue without having to check it every other hour for trailing condition. I don’t feel the trail by feature is well-thought out and prefer to wait until they iron out more of the bugs. We arrived just as the feature was introduced and it is the rage with the old-timers. With the style of webinar now known to be standard, this makes it difficult to find anyone who wants to go over the old fixed trading template. I took extensive notes in the background so now have a trading pattern that involves careful buying but will sell easily in eight increments if the price rises. If you hear me refer to Week08, that is the template in focus.
Not only are the trades not automatic, neither is the notification screen. It’s another sign of weak coding, but powerful “whiz-kid-ism”. I’m certain any millennial worth his iodine-free salt knows how to code pop-ups. Yet for trade notifications, you have to open the screen and drop several menus. It is also becoming irksome how these coders are new school. That is, they program to spec over subjects they have never really studied themselves. They code what they are told, or to be more accurate, what they hear.
The problems arise when such systems collide with real life. The accounting modules are designed by people who know nothing—absolutely zero I say—about accounting. The reports created by people who know nothing of reports. And, as it is emerging, the trading routines by people who know very little about the stock market other than what they’ve been told to create the code. They don’t even know when they are reinventing the wheel. Thus my conclusion this week that I would not recommend Auvoria Forex trading to a friend. The two biggest objections are the apprenticeship-mentoring approach to teaching and an unstructured “wing-it” format to the lessons. That’s why I could take so many notes. I don’t write fast, they just present ideas slow enough that I can write them out long-hand. And when I can write faster than they can think, that’s hardly a compliment.
Cruise ship in canal.
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Now, this is Laylay, the hen, who I think likes to be a stealth chicken. Not always clucking like Tilda and doesn’t come running at the slightest footfall near the storage shed. But, see here the giveaway. Chicken footie-prints all around the work area. They’ve learned if they sit and watch me long enough, I’ll go grab a handful of seeds for them. It was so nice to do laundry “indoors” and I am going to mickey-mouse a set of shelves around the old tree stump. The lumber yard was out of red Ondura panels, proving my contention that if Superman moved to Florida, they’d slow him down. It’s been two years since I paneled the white shed roof and committed to the red color. Now that I finally need them, they manufacture a virus hoax, so people stay home and do yard repairs and buy up the exact item I need. Sounds farfetched, I know, but how often does it have to happen before you b-e-l-i-e-v-e?
The camera won’t work with Android, which surprises nobody. Part of my incentive to get shelving installed in the lean-to is to organize. I have disks and other non-perishables that have been stuffed into drawers and shelves for lack of any place else. The tarps around the yard are approaching two years in the sun, and modern technologists have failed to invent a tarp that can last. They are too busy coding pop-up ads, you know. The tarps get cut into shreds with pinking shears and used for various purposes. One of them is the shed roof for my precious motorcycles.
I’ve also mapped out the long awaited ramp. This is the dirt ramp that allows direct loading of gear onto the deck of a pickup. It’s a simple short pile of dirt bounded by 4x6” posts up to a height of 32”. So a pickup truck can let down the tailgate and back right up to it like a loading dock. I’d thought about digging it down instead of piling it up, but the sandy soil and frequent rains said no. It will be disguised by flower beds, now that we’ve learned to grow so many periwinkles.
ADDENDUM
My counter shows which blogs posted here are most popular, my spreadsheet tells me the categories. And I see I’m not the only person who thinks that dickweed with the electric meter needs a brain transplant. There are no surprises on the spreadsheet. Most popular blog is food, then music, then travel. Hold on, there is one oddity. You know how some of my older blogs have that clipped tone, go all over the place, and read like they were calendar notes. That’s because they are. I find them difficult to read and sometimes annoying because I can’t recall the context. But statistics indicate they are getting read.
It turns out those massive tents out east of town have another purpose. Green food production. It is known that crops grown in warm humidity with a high carbon dioxide atmosphere produce nearly five times as much. I may drive out there just to take pictures for you. They look like tents inflated from the inside. Carbon dioxide? It makes more sense than wasting money on those gigantic wind turbines which, for all the claims made about generating electricity, they have never generated a profit.
In grade school, we were taught the scientific method. If I recall, it was a seven-step process, which began with Purpose, then Hypothesis, and so on. I can’t remember the list, so it is one those things I just look up if I need it. The millies got to that one, too. All I get is the dumbed down version, “Ask a question”, because hypothesis is such a big, bib word. And you don’t want to get writer’s cramp spellchecking it.
Reading more on solar collectors gets a lot of info I’d like to keep in mind before I build anything. It has not been ignored that this yard produces a lot of biodegradable material. My utility bill is not a motive, I pay around $60 for water and electricity. The rest, like sewer and garbage pickup are fixed fees. That is, I only pay around $360 per year to keep this place nice and cool. Another reason is the bullshit fees and taxes tacked onto utility bills. Although my statement does not break down the totals, in Mami I was paying “delivery” charges for electricity and subsidizing the transit system which never worked right.
However, being independent of that power grid is a desired goal. The power company is increasingly getting into customer’s private affairs, gathering targeted user information, and selling profiles—and they are constantly attempting to make their policies into law. For instance, they want it made illegal to connect utilities in any name but your own, and you must prove you live in or own the house.
There is an “application” form with some scary fine print. If you rent, they demand a copy of the lease and pay particular attention to the expiry date. This makes them a dangerous adversary. I reviewed the economy behind the economy. Remember how the Kuwaiti stock market crashed when a barber demanded he be paid in cash? In the USA, there is not enough money in circulation in the country for everybody to pay off all their debt. The government does it by printing up more money, which is pretty stupid and dangerous. There was a dotcom bubble and a housing bubble that had the same lead up to what now looks like a money bubble.
