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Yesteryear

Monday, August 8, 2022

August 8, 2022

Yesteryear
One year ago today: August 8, 2021, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.
Five years ago today: August 8, 2017, Bushnell adultery radio.
Nine years ago today: August 8, 2013, yep, shot twice.
Random years ago today: August 8, 2010, Sony, Dnepr, bingo.

           That’s interesting, I did not know there was an app that tracked airplane flights, though I’ve seen the charts. I quit using airplanes in general twenty years ago. I see all the elite want the app banned. That’s the private jet and they have the full support of celebrities, billionaires, and every shady government operative. Rules for thee is always a surprise to those who should have known better. I even avoid riding buses and trains when they started demanding ID. I would ride if it came to that, but it is just dumb to tell strangers too much and that’s been true for 3,000 years. Good morning. Coffee, buckwheat, grilled cheese, hoping you had it as good. (If not, did you work as hard as I did for it?)
           By mid-morning it is too hot even under the house. We’ll play the odds, an early heat like this can bring cooling rain in the early afternoon. We’ll find other chores and get busy with the other plumbing. That’s the ticket, always having something to do. And coffee, lots of coffee. It did cool, but curiosity took over. This can be a powerful instinct around here and I got to dismantling the old electric chain saw for any salvageable parts. I knew I’d wreck any chance of repair, but since the parts are not available and I know labor is $75 per hour, what the heck?

           Here is the offending piece, called a planetary gear. For non-mechanics like me, that just means a gear with the teeth on the inside. A smaller gears spins against these teeth. The top photo shows the gear before I save any parts like that bearing. The lower photo give a good view of the worn teeth. They are smooth and flat, but at the far back you can just see a stub of the shape of the original teeth. If it was advanced enough, this would be an ideal project for a 3D printer.
Instead, I got some interesting parts like the tiny oil pump but other than learning, I have no skills to use these for anything. And I broke the carbon brushes on the motor by pulling too hard on the wrong stem.            This is an easy repair for a robot type person. The motor is too large and powerful for anything I can think of around here. Hold on, remember the Reb’s big iron fan? This led me to investigate how a three-speed fan switch works. Good luck. This is not a ceiling fan and just you try to find a video on the switch. People showing how to replace it, not what you want. How does it work?
           In other words, what controls the speed? Is it something in the switch or something in the motor? I notice there is an extra brown wire, so my guess is the motor. Searching for this information is where you find out just how many mouth-breathers make videos about anything mechanical.

           On-line I see this highly-touted video of a 13-year-old playing bass with some big name band. This has me watching for something special, and talent-wise, there was nothing. That’s exactly how I played bass when I was13. What was lacking is a big concern hall full of rock professionals to let me join in for one song that I had memorized. As ever, I’m leery of this brand of spectacularism. No matter how many times this happens, most of these so-called prodigies wind up nowhere. As this blog pointed out so long ago, the average recording artist grosses $700 income during his life. That’s before expenses.

           For noon break, I read several articles on heat-seeking missiles that claim they work from any direction. Heat-seeking is a misnomer in that they would all head for the Sun or the neighbors barbeque. I say these missiles must have tunnel vision and be launched from behind a hot target. Anyway, I was looking for explanations and there were none. This is not infra-red imaging and heat-seeking missiles do not snake & weave after a target. They don’t really need to as the target often cannot detect these passive devices and have a “cone” within which they cannot outmaneuver the seeker.
           In my mind, I have an Arduino sketch that I’d like to develop, a very simple homing device. Same as my primitive idea for a Sun tracker, a series of seekers that steer themselves to the mode where all have the same signal strength. This uses infrared head sensors, not to be confused with cheaper temperature chips. But with a house to keep up with, will I ever have such an interesting hobby again?

Picture of the day.
Fatties on extra drill.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Olivia is gone. I was never a fan of her personality, but those blockbuster songs were a staple of my early years. Nor was I impressed by her acting, just her vocals. She’s been ill for 30 years so you often quit thinking about it. What I recall most about her is her boyfriend disappearing off a boat and then found years later in Mexico under an assumed name. I have nothing against ONJ personally, but I have always envied people surrounded by so much opportunity that even minor effort on their part results in fame and fortune. Don’t confuse envy with jealousy, because envy can entail nothing personal, as is the case here.
           To my teenage eyes, she was like Tommy James. With her parents and location, she had it made. Both these examples did the same things I did, start a band at age 13, but that’s where the similarities end. No way those people had to train their own musicians like I did, plus where was my Ed Sullivan and my Johnny O’Keefe? For that, they had help on a scale I could not imagine and that is what forms the envy. If I’d become famous, there would be hordes of historians who could twist that into any design they want. Yet, to me envy is not necessarily evil. I strongly respect many of the performers I envy because little of it was their fault, or as is often the case, their doing.
           Here is a picture of the Olivia Newton-John that I prefer too remember. I do wish people would quit referring to her as a blonde. She was at best a light brown. I dated blondes almost exclusively for all my teens and early twenties and you can’t fool me with a dye job.

           I examined the wiring and plumbing and I’m going to need a day with a super-early start. Mind, if all goes as planned, I be finished before noon, but don’t bet your money. Instead, it was surprisingly cool so I went after that pile big brush pile from last day. Two-thirds of it fell into the church lot next door and I don’t want to incur their anger. I broke most of the major branches up into two-foot pieces and piled them at the curb. That’s more than good exercise. What’s mostly left are pieces I cannot break over my knee, so that explains what I was doing at the other end of the yard looking at the chain saw. Did I want to string it out before I get all the pieces ready. Naw, wait until I can finish the whole job, it is easy for anyone to see I’ve put the majority of the work in already.
           Back inside the back room with a coffee, I’m going over the measurements from the last few days. I tend to scheduling cutting one whole batch at a time with each saw. For example the deck from y’day was all precut and moved to the deck site after. I’m needing another set of sawhorses and the silo floor has one piece that isn’t plywood. All told, around an hour of cutting just with the chop saw. I think I do more sawing than all my neighbors together. And I’d love to have an outdoor spot for a table saw. That saw I’ve been planning on getting for five years now. I have one, but it sucks badly.
           Where would I put it? Well, we now know that far back yard where the chicken coop should have been cannot be seen from anywhere except the fence line. All that would really have to be covered against the weather is the saw itself. It would be so nice to cut pieces longer than six or so feet without scrounging around for something to hold up the other end. And remind me to get into that area with the grass whip before it turns into a rain forest.

ADDENDUM
           In a gradual process, I’m re-reading “Darwin’s Radio”, about a virus that affects only pregnant women. Not so much for the plot, but for the descriptions of how viruses operate at the molecular. I read this book back in 2016 but cannot find anything here on it. The premise is mass graves found in Russia were not war crimes, rather local populations curbing the spread of the disease. As it happened this was the book that destroyed my faith in the CDC long before the pandemic hoax.
           For those keeping up with this blog, an article int The Register confirms my report that there is no real A.I. over at Google. It appears to be artificial intelligence, but it is really just clever presentation. The structure of the code and the language used means it can never lay claim to being true “intelligence”.
           There is no easy way to say it, but object-oriented languages cannot be linked in a way that could emulate intelligence as a core set of rules that interprets input. My calendar was marked last Friday as the tenth anniversary of Mars Curiosity. The date lapsed for lack of interest which over here is normally caused by “nothing new”. India’s rocket program chalked up another failure, which is again a coding problem. It’s not strictly the code, for just like in America, each monkey in the zoo can prove he did his job right. It’s trying to make it work as a unit where the utter lack of quality control rears up.

Last Laugh