One year ago today: September 10, 2020, building the workshed.
Five years ago today: September 10, 2016, oh boy, a dollop.
Nine years ago today: September 10, 2012, am I exaggerating?
Random years ago today: September 10, 2010, 96% undiscovered.
It shouldn’t be long now until I get the bedrooms livable. The snag is they will not be complete. Lots of finishing work, including baseboards, which involves moving furniture. It’s having two rooms instead of one where nothing is blocking my way, that makes me happy. Another benefit is that it shunts most work that’s left out to the shed, which I hope I never have to live without. And, I put in an eight hour day, this time consecutive hours with one short break. That was deemed impossible in 2006. Give me a pat on the back, if you were here, I’d let you buy me some beers.
The country is headed for trouble. Biden overstepped his authority with executive orders by requiring far-reaching vaccine mandates. It is already backfiring on him. The postal union demanded exemption and got it. Businesses with more than 100 employees are threatened if they don’t require the shot, so they are firing vaccinated people to get below that count. France banned non-vax travelers, but they will renege since Americans are their major source of tourist dollars and the cities are already in near-revolutionary status. And this just in, schoolteachers just gained exemption.
Let’s keep an eye on the morrow, when Biden is scheduled to show up at several pro-9/11 ceremonies. No, I do not support 9/11 symbolism. The incident was regrettable, but my question remains, “What did you people do that made them hate you so?”
My predictions? Biden will get booed off the stage or nobody will show up. CNN is no doubt already spinning stories for both outcomes. I expect to see stadium-size crowds, shoulder to shoulder, in MAGA caps, chanting the new American mantra, “F*ck Joe Biden!” And apparently India has charged a WHO “scientist” with mass murder, which carries the death penalty. India still has arrest warrants out for Bill Gates, whose “polio vaccines” paralyzed 496,000 children in that country. This just in. Biden will make no speeches tomorrow. He will lay a few wreaths and a prepared video of him making comments will be released in the morning. They know they’ve lost, but I think the chants they fear are all the more likely to commence anyway.
Beware the Democrat budget, it’s $3.5 trillion they don’t have. Guess where the money comes from? They’ve spent years passing small laws that allow them to do this without the 60% majority normally required, but it depends on their razor-thin margin where everybody votes along party lines. The usual outcome is a huge increase in withholding (income) tax and dozens of smaller hidden taxes, a Democrat favorite. It’s not a tax, why it is a surtax, dude. Biden has also proposed banks report all transactions above $600. And CNN aired a “doctor” who said traveling to another state is not a Constitutional right. Get the rope.
I found that contraption from the Reb posted on August 29. It is called a knee walker, which I kind of tried and it was more trouble than hobbling. I saw potential if it had a power source, and I just happen to have an old variable speed electric drill in the shed. What I don’t have is a lot of time. Today, I moved furniture for an hour and that was it. I’d planned an outing for coffee in Tampa, but then she started raining. All afternoon.
As ever the time was not idled away, I found more info on the Morse code “clacker”. There are still many for sale, but I’d wanted to hear the sound first. I discovered it is a solenoid that pulls a lever down with a “click” and upon release of the transmitting key, it sprang back with a “cluck”. It was the interval between the two that determined a dash or dot, so that would be advantageous in a situation where a powered speaker is impractical.
But such recordings are not only rare, we have another half-brain troop of millennials who don’t know the difference between a click and a beep. They advertise clickers but every last one was a beeper. This is not, believe you me, a generation that could storm the beaches at Normandy. The Germans would scatter them with a handy water hose. And I truly hate that millennial accent, it always sounds like they are reading a script they don’t believe in and get tongue-tied over anything with more than three syllables.
Shanghai parking lot.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
The Miss Ireland contest is probably a goner. They put the crown on some lady from Nigeria, whose first comments were about racism. This is why I quit watching these contests. They are no longer about beauty and do not represent an ideal to which local girls can aspire. The system is unfair, but other people’s beauty pageants are not the best places to go on about it. Like the women who complain men don’t understand menstrual cramps. Nonsense, men fully understand good and bad days, what they don’t get is how it becomes an excuse for bad performance.
And here’s a snap of the emerging Most Annoying Person on youTube, plugging fake car insurance in front of videos advertised as “free”. The only thing worse than a millennial is a lying millennial, but I digress.
I’ve been persuaded by the logic that the Democrats know they will lose in the midterms, so they are trying to pick a fight in order to bring in measures that will prevent or delay the elections. In this climate, they will need something far more believable than their fake insurrection. Except for the 400 people in jail without a trial, that went nowhere—and the Democrats will be held responsible. The party in power always loses during the mid-terms, it will take some real hokus pokus for them to try to upset that, but they cannot afford to lose a single seat at any level.
I had time to watch several videos of sentencing some pretty horrific criminals. They mostly deserved what they got, but I did not care for the presentation and lecturing. Something is wrong when a judge who just doesn’t like someone can impose a harsher sentence, and I don’t think a person who knows he’s been found guilty has to kowtow to the person imposing his sentence. There is no law that says you have to be nice or respectful to a judge and therefore, in my conclusion, judges should have to right to demand, expect, or react to it when it happens.
I mean, exactly what right does a judge imposing a 50 year sentence have to tell the prisoner he has to shut up or really to tell him anything at all. [I did not mean that the way it reads, but it stays.] You can argue it is a courtroom, but that would only prove you have not been in one lately to see how the entire procedure is rigged if they don’t like you. If you’ve not see it, don’t be talking about quiet, subdued surroundings. A condemned man has, in my books, every right to say what he wants. Trial endings are not the time for diplomacy and protocol. I saw some judges impose extra penalties designed to infuriate. I think there is room for reform there just as much as the entire legal system.
Don’t think I’m soft on crime. I think these trials taking four and five years need to be expedited where the defendant confesses, and I think lawyers that try flimsy stunts designed to get such a client off should also be reprimanded if what they are arguing is shown to be false. Careful of that wording. As it is, they can keep trying angle after angle hoping something sticks and nobody needs much of a lawyer for that.
ADDENDUM
I finally sat down and learned to read transistor graphs. Up to now, I just chose whatever worked and did not care for the graph-like specs. I knew that a transistor with a 100x gain was enough for anything I built and I don’t even pretend to be an engineer. It took forty minutes but I see now what is important for design work and I find the charts amusing in their simplicity.
Often called a “transistor characteristic graph”, I have this uncluttered example for you. What got me interested was that straight sloping line, I knew I’d seen it before. It is what happens to an unregulated power supply. Each time the load changes, so does the level of power, which is another theory. But just say the line represents the simplest case of what happens as you increase load, resistance, or anything that has a voltage drop into the circuit. This transistor is optimized at a base current of between 20 and 40μA, the vertical scale is missing. It’s usually 100x, see how it ties together?
