One year ago today: July 7, 2020, everybody has a dragon.
Five years ago today: July 7, 2016, defenestration.
Nine years ago today: July 7, 2012, remember Larry Gustafson?
Random years ago today: July 7, 2007, the Show Off, great tips.
Day five of rain, and this is no blog about the weather so take this seriously. The tropical storm is still south of Miami, meaning we got something unusual. This will cause major problems if it keeps up even another day. The streets are already flooded, I’ll try to get you some video. Strangely, no power outages, maybe because there has not been much wind. At least this causes me to spend more time on my lessons. I see it is not that easy to distance oneself from publishing what sells over what notions you formally held about this business. Turns out everybody has some idea of what sort of book they would put their name on. Hence, these publications use pseudonyms. A lot.
It is now 8:00AM, so take a break. I will later look for a kit or development board, as usual picking what is available rather than optimum. Microcontrollers taught me even with these boards optimized for beginner’s projects, the real trick to superlative performance is coding done to a very fine standard. Just before I bought this place and threw a wrench in my robotics coding hobby, I was easily writing code that outpaced the Arduino boards and what could be wired on a standard breadboard. No, not filling up the memory, that’s the way fools do it. I still have the project that got an Atmega to count to a million totally by code and display it in decimal, never once using any counting chips. I believe I got this to work with less than 100 lines of code. It’s in a box around here somewhere.
This will require learning Hardware Development Language to proceed. I glanced through the code and some graphics of the output, which is undoubtedly parallel. Most coders can’t do one string right and I just witnessed fourteen? It’s when you take the same coders and methods and try to apply them like this that you get outfits who can crash electric cars into stationary objects. Notice I am admiring the system only, at this time I cannot even imagine a simple project that would use this arrangement. Above is a picture of the circuit board I examined (on-line). Usually I steer clear of Intel products because of intense jargon, but I downloaded the manual.
Ah, here’s a model for only $33.75. Catch you later.
Snake River Sporting Club.
(Private.)
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I still use spreadsheets to store the majority of my contacts. I prefer to use a small database. The fact is, it has been more than 30years since a good free one came along. You heard me, the focal words being “good” and “free”. The software is not a challenge, but too many sources turn it into one. My original information, including a ton of sensitive internal phone numbers from my old job s still stored on File Express. People over there never heard of databases until long after I had been populating my own for years. That’s the bunch that became “experts” whose snotty issue became “whiz kids” overnight.
The database company still exists but is no longer free, it’s $19.95 and cannot really be used without the manual, which cannot be purchased separately. I used my new publishing software to see this program from the 1980s still sells around 30 copies per month. Here is a screen shot of the main table display screen, my older readers may recognize this. The major annoyances with usage is to enter a record, you must press F10. You cannot set it to enter any other way, such as scroll past the last field. Also, in Windows, the display can lock up, forcing you to exit and reboot the software. (The problem is Windows, not FE.)
Maybe I’d still use FE if, over the years, they had used that time to correct some features that made the software hard to use. It is DOS based, so cannot use a mouse, but the concept is sound. It has an excellent report generator (80 columns) and calculated fields. Who knows, as I move long term storage boxes up onto the new shelves, I may run across the old user manual. It is almost impossible for non-DOS people (millies) to hack and if you really need more capability, it can export what you need to other programs. Usually you do just that, as otherwise you’ll need DOS printer drivers.
Times have changed and DOS features are becoming a bit prized over here. Maybe I’ll spring for the manual, but would quickly revert from the current FE PRO to the original FILE EXPRESS, once again due to bloat. The new versions operate identical to the old versions, but contain thousand of lines of mystery code. Plus, I’m curious just how much information I have stored in the old files from the 80s and 90s. Could be a goldmine, you know, since I was in many cases the only guy in town keeping such files at the time. I think I have the database of five thousand phone numbers from Cuidad Bolivar in Venezuela, but that project fell through.
That phone database represents an odd circumstance created by our economy. It’s a situation of people like myself who want to work hard, but there is nothing they let you do that makes any money. Does that make sense? It should, I’ll work as hard as you want, but only if I get paid for it or, (and this is the big one) there is a payoff in the reasonable future. I already worked around 10% of my day for long-term returns all through the 80s and 90s, and that is what I live on today. Or largely so, I mean. Back then, I would have done more, but there was nothing that paid enough to make the game worth the candle.
This is why you saw me having a stab at dozens of different businesses, ones that required more than long hours and dumb luck. I won’t list them except to say I always returned to music. Everything else had some downside that nixed it as a viable part-time or passive income. How many times I tried mail order before the Internet, only to find it was a highly regulated industry and importing anything was a headache, or they made it so. Alas, that experience severely curbed my enthusiasm for it just when the Internet came along. I regret that. But I did learn the importance of keeping the production quite separate from the sales. These days, I’ll build it, but let somebody else put up with the customers. And let that somebody be the Internet, the best invention ever to let one duck and hide like a millennial, as in let me transfer your call.
I got distracted from the point above. It was that you could find long stretches in my life where I was apparently doing nothing in my spare time. This should not be confused with laziness. Indeed, I often found myself surrounded by the lazy, but that was never my circumstance. Fact is, I was constantly on the lookout but the infrastructure here ensures that every business era creates millionaires up to its saturation point, and then plateaus until the next era starts. Nobody could have known for sure the Internet would expand so fast, at the time it was just one more thing everybody said was the next winner. What finally got most people was that it was never, as they had told us, free. Sure, initially the information was free but you had to pay 15 cents a minute to get it.
There, I missed the point again. I’m saying that in the midst of plenty, many people like myself found there was nothing you could work hard enough at to get ahead without external factors like dumb luck. There was not a single business you could get into that didn’t require you to sacrifice your youth and vitality before you showed a return. That option was there, but don’t blame most people for not taking it. Besides, there was not one single guarantee they’d let you keep it. I speak from experience every time I got a little ahead, something came along and threw me back to the start line. Worse, to get ahead, you always had to skimp on something else and that always tripped you up later. Why am I writing all this obvious stuff? When I should go downtown for a quiet beer. Hey, catch you later.
