December 28, 2022

Yesteryear
One year ago today: December 28, 2021, shovel-tired.
Five years ago today: December 28, 2017, younger & prettier.
Nine years ago today: December 28, 2013, so there.
Random years ago today: December 28, 2015, a generic day.

           I’m learning a Marley song, “Three Little Birds”. I thought it was called something different. This brand of music is too specialized for me to consider but it was on the new guy’s list. Give it a listen with a focus on the bass line and you can see where and why I play a lot of those piano notes. I’ve not met up with the guy yet but his e-mails tell he’s already had some Polk time-wasters pounding on his door. Good, makes my task easier. I’ve opened a Mastodon account to test the water. My Caltier fund is slowest I’ve ever seen on-line. I finally caught that bad-ass raccoon on video last night.

           A minor amount of yard work got done and Howie has been mowing a little closer to the house each week until now I have a front yard again. It’s still icy at night but the Florida sun burns through in the day and we had a balmy 70°F all afternoon. At least up to the time I fell asleep after dragging a pile of limbs over to the street pile. Here’s the best clip of the raccoon, the Sony is not great for low-light. It has a setting for it, but it wrecks photos that you do want in the dark, so leaving it off gives this result.

           This is a cranky adult male who is not as afraid of humans as he should be. Here, he is hauling up the birdfeeders by the chains and snacking on the suet. It’s an older one who should know better but then again, I can be away for weeks at a time. Plenty of time to hone his skills. Or, could be he’s super-pissed the way I cut down three-quarters his house last week.

           Whenever you see an array of capacitors like this, it’s likely a spark gap generator. Since these are generally frowned upon I was surprised to see so many examples of home made units on-line. This is the original “Marconi” radio but the most powerful unit drowns out others. It makes them ideal AM radio jamming devices. Did you know AM radios will not, in their present form, work in EVs? The jammer shown here can be tuned to certain frequencies, similar to what the Soviets used in the Cold War. It requires an operator to follow along as the enemy changes frequencies
           Nowadays, the radio waves are digital and employ a technique called frequency hopping. It’s what it sounds like, the transmitter and receiver both change frequency in a pattern that is difficult to jam and intercept. I never read up on it, but my guess is the frequencies are generated on the fly inside the messages. Be aware that any code can be broken. The goal is not to wear yourself out, but to make it so time-consuming to break the code by the time the enemy has it, the information is stale. And yes, all on-line activity and phone calls are recorded and filed away.

Picture of the day.
Cancelled Honda two-seater.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           By late afternoon, I had stepped through most of the tunes the new guy sent. He’s typical in the sense that what he plays does not address anything about what the rest of the band must do. Peaceful Easy Feeling is one complicated piece of music and a lot of Green Day has no definable bass lines. As a duo on stage, the challenge is to present as full a show as possible. Such tunes always let you down, just as certainly as a guitarist will insist on playing them. Welcome to the real world of music.

       Marley tunes, it would help if they were not all the same speed. I see that I’m going to have to just memorize the bass bits, which strains my entire practice routine. There is no logical repeat point where the music begins to repeat itself, indicating his bass player was once a guitarist. They believe they can improve anything, nomsayn? To balance this, I found what must be a rare version of “Homeward Bound” that has a real pro bass player. If you listen to most versions of this tune, you get simplistic root notes. I’d beefed them up and now hearing this says add some arpeggios. I believe I can’t improve everything, but this song gets the treatment.

           Soon as the sun set, the air plunged twenty degrees, from the beautiful 60s to the chilly 40s. I’d wanted to dig out the lock miter bits and give them a test run. Instead, I threw in a load of laundry for excitement and got my arse back inside. Fortunately, I had both heaters still in the back office (bedroom) and a topic I wanted to investigate further. The noon, or latitude sight. Historically, I will memorize such complications, then go back to learn it. Such is the case here, sort of. I had to unlearn a few things so four hours later found me still doing practice examples. This is the easiest sighting taken noon each day, kind of a discipline that keeps the mind sharp.
           It further kick-starts productivity which can often be measured in numbers of cups of coffee. This photo shows the end of three frozen days. Hey, the trash is on the other side of the kitchen and I’m not walking around in my skivvies in those temperatures. Besides, from this perspective, you can see the fresh cup of brewed Chai Latte to the left. Will it be trash time or tea time?

ADDENDUM
           Collector’s item. Over the years, and I mean a lot of them, my habit remains of entering a date in the margin when I re-read something, or sometimes to correct an error. That was back when they experts wrote books and proofread them, not today where errors are determined by majority rule. If fifty million millennials say their is they’re, there going to get away with it can come back crying later. This is a scan of my favorite but hardly great chapter on sight reduction. The noon sight and a regular shooting have much in common. This is more of a hindrance and you should keep them apart in the old noggin. It shows I first read this chapter seven years ago and at least twelve times since. Not every instance is marked so it could be twice that.

           I still maintain that begging should be outlawed in America, except possibly in defined areas and times. This would include shutting down all telemarketing and the cash register people and their “would you like to round up” pitch. It is collusion to ask people for money in front of strangers and that is that. Going over the budget for 2022, it was fine until Bidenflation came along. I used to feed the dogs a dozen eggs back when they were 95¢ a dozen. Now, organic range-free non-GMO eggs are five times that if you can find them. In a sense, America had it comin’, thinking prosperity would guide itself along forever. Or that the Constitution was some kind of shield that sprang up to protect them all by itself.
           Put it this way, if you can’t find a job or something to make money at in America, you really are useless. That should clear up any confusion. Nighty-night.

Last Laugh