February 15, 2023

Yesteryear
One year ago today: February 15, 2022, Cumberland Furnace.
Five years ago today: February 15, 2018, what’s the rush.
Nine years ago today: February 15, 2014, an empty room.
Random years ago today: February 15, 2001, the Sun also sets.

           During a lull last day, I’ve come up with a set of spreadsheet formulas. Details in the addendum. Google is mucking around with the blogs again. The pictures in posts over 12 years old are not displaying, or at least not on this computer. And we have a deposit gone missing. It was a mail-in, so there was a paper trail. Funny, this bank never makes mistakes, but first step is to check if the instrument has been processed. That puts me downtown today. That’s out near Bradford’s place, but we can’t rehearse if he doesn’t answer his phone. I sent the Reb pictures of her new tractor, a Valentine’s gift. Seriously, it’s for sale soon as I get it running.

           United, a diversity hire airline, had a plane out of Hawaii plunge to shouting distance above the Pacific Ocean. Seems the “pilots” forgot to turn on the computer. In case there’s any doubt, the battle lines are fixed in America. Nobody is changing sides any more. There is certain to be an incident. And the ordinary people who the media dub “the far right” have been too quiet for such a long time. Of course, none of this is going to unite America, we need that strongman. One who will completely defund the political operation called the World Health Organization. They’ve announced another outbreak and another vaccine. It’s in Africa, called the Marburg virus, similar to ebola, and like much else in Africa, it does not normally attack healthy people.

           CNN finally admits deaths among young adults is 30% higher than two years ago. The cause is the unvaxed and unmasked they say—and they are indeed well-paid to say it. Disney’s fully vaxxed chief of distribution (whatever that is) died of a heart attack last week. Real cause of death: the stroke poke. And sheeple with the omicron vaccine are developing diabetes at ten times the normal rate. There is a video of immigrants in Belgium being removed from taxpayer funded housing, but no word on where they are going. I say bus them to the politician’s neighborhoods. South Africa admits they cannot fix the system they stole. You see, a smart thief leaves the White man in business, so there is something to steal in the future.
           Instead of work, I spent time taking down every approach to the birdfeeders. The nervy squirrels were working in pairs. They were climbing the old hummingbird feeder bracket. There should be some footage for you of how they were getting on the birdfeeder, I will now modify the perches to make them too small for rodents. That sapped my energy so I wisely spend the rest of the day inside well within my limits. I took twenty minutes to soak the plants and the peach tree. The papayas are still just there, I would lack patience trying to grow those for a living. This is month five since they sprouted and they are still dark green.

Picture of the day.
Eastern Montana.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Sleep mostly. JZ was on the phone for 40 minutes, the saga over there is on-going. He picks up things from me that often churn up unexpected results. A couple months ago he had never heard of REITs. I explained the details and next thing I know he’s asking if his portofolio has any. The answer is yes, but I get the impression he was told his portfolio contains “real estate” and that is not the same thing. But, since I don’t know who told him what, I don’t ask. One thing certain, he is completely informed of everything going on around here, my records show I’ve sent (by mail) not less than 96 reports, with documentation and pictures.

           The original plan was we fix up and flip, but as you know by now, I was on my own the entire time. I asked about that brass hose fitting. JZ says it seems backwards because it is designed to regulate pressure. A high pressure hose down to a lower pressure similar to how an electrical transformer. Makes sense to me. Here is the direction arrow stamped on the outer casing, if it indicates flow direction, I’d take it to be backwards.

           Who remembers the squirrel catapult? I liked the big slingshot version better but here’s something I could build. For those who don’t link, it is a contraption that triggers when the squirrel reaches the bait, flinging the animal quite a large distance back the way he came. Here are some comments from people who saw the video.

1. Call Trump, I have an idea for the border wall.
2. You watch, they’ll start lining up for rides.
3. This video needs to be 8 hours longer
4. Rig up a basketball hoop in the trees.
5. The 303 people who did not like this were squirrels.
6. You need to turn this into a live cam.
7. Instant evolution into flying squirrels.
8. Do you have one for salesmen?
9. Don’t cast your squirrels before pines.
10. There’s a Miami lawyer already talking to the squirrels.

           It is nothing to me hearing Eric Clapton got screwed up by the vaccines. Says his immune system is shot and he can’t sleep. Screw off, because despite that, he is still not warning every one he can not to get the jab. He’s on record describing the pain, but always leaves that doubt that it might be something else. Goes to show you, once a jerk, always a jerk. Rachel Welch died at 82. I vaguely remember her from James Bond movies, I think, but she was never one of my favorites. Too Marilyn Monroe-ish, you know, who jiggled a bit too much for my liking. But as I’ve said before, I can see what every beer-guzzling butt-crack Joe sees in her. Big boobs, big arse, as RofR used to say, good child-bearing qualities.
           To put Welch into perspective, her daughter, Tahnee is now 61. Shown here. I’d have to think twice about hitting on her.

ADDENDUM
           Everyone has had a turn at the activity of going on line and no matter how specific your search, you keep getting jerkoffs who say things like “Hi guyz” and think you want to know their lame experiences. Nobody seems to have told that makes it a blog. Anyway, same with practicing navigation. Yet, this is one field I would highly recommend intense repetition until you get it. The problem is finding a site that gives you those examples and the answers. Try it. Don’t come back and tell me there are lots of sites for this unless you go in there and try to work any of those examples. But, if you can actually do that, please contact this robot club immediately. In fact, here is an excellent place to start, NavSoft.
           The plan is to have a spreadsheet print out random but realistic examples of the input, only for the north and west hemisphere, where 90% of sport sailing takes place. There are reasons to keep it simple. It’s not a difficult task for anyone who understands modular arithmetic. The idea came to me after I’d mentioned I did not like the repetition you get on most Morse code sites. Well, I listened to some of the code and they give locations by name. I want to hear the location by latitude and longitude. I can already pick up on numbers because of the sound. I would like to “hear” the coordinates until I recognize them automatically.
           I would have the spreadsheet generate random DR (dead reckoning) positions and other data and then print out practice forms. I’ve worked all the samples I have so many times I know the results and I’m not learning anything.

           Much later, I have the spreadsheets to generate examples. Land or water make no difference to the calculation, so I left both in. But have you ever tried to get Excel to print the month name instead of the number? It’s conceptually simple, where the month says 12, you want it to diplay “Dec”. But after all these years there is no easy way to get Excel to do this. Or if there is a way, it is not easy to find the directions. What I’ve created is two forms to spew out random positions and readings. This is to drill into my head the process of getting the AP and GP lookups right. There are a series of mistakes I keep repeating, like measuring the wrong direction between locations, mistakes that only practice is going to fix.
           It was enough to get the tables to just display the correct formats. It was not anything related to my field (accounting) so I had to re-learn custom formats. And example is a reading of 15º is normally written 015º to avoid that opportunity for errors. Developing the tables also gave me perspective on issues I was unaware could happen, like what if my random formulas generate a reading that could not be taken at night or below the horizon. Again, I left them in since in celestial navigation, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Last Laugh