One year ago today: March 13, 2022, the kill switch.
Five years ago today: March 13, 2018, an attic day.
Nine years ago today: March 13, 2014, another “research facility”.
Random years ago today: March 13, 2007, impressive perfection.
Let’s see, a Lufthansa flight told passengers to delete all videos of a scary incident. I remind people that if you computer works fine, you don’t need upgrades—as users who found their HP printers blocking refilled cartridges discovered. It didn’t take long for lawyers to sue DoNotPay for practicing law without a license. Just you watch, the government will bail out Silicon with taxpayer money sometime today. And it took less than a day for the government to bail out the bank.
Still donating to the Red Cross, with 97% of you money going to administration costs? Well, they’ve just been caught supplying illegal immigrants with maps and tips on how to jump the border. And this just in, the trading of bank stocks was halted on the market moments ago. Myself, I’m going to cut some trim for the shed to tightly seal even the tiniest gaps around the roof line. Then trap the second squirrel, and see how the morning goes from there. Are you with me? Good, we have important work today and it’s going to rain.
Here are some closeups of the citrus scale. These are all the same magnification, but no way to tell with my cheap equiment. Probably 300x, not enough for detail, but the presence of that yellow spot always on one end tells me this is animal life. Probably the same critter at different larval stages. I will first try a mechanical attack, with a brush. The literature says sprays are not always effective as the bug will layer itself so the chemicals can’t reach all the way through. These are hi-res photos you can enlarge, and feel free to let me know. Yeah, it’s only noon and I hear the sky grumbling.
I have the basic conduits ready, and a spot of luck. I can hang it from the floor joists. Ii picked up a bag of the hangers, which are more expensive than the pipes, at a yard sale for something like 10¢ each. I fitted a couple this morning and they are the exact size. Might be a matching set. And almost exactly the same color. Please let this part go smoothly. I then brushed down the peach tree with liquid detergent. This scale is a tough customer. Now way could this be done on a commercial scale without machinery.
Next, I got out the hand pump and completely hosed down the entire tree with more detergent, which clogs their spiracles. Plus some Seven and a dash of natural oils like peppermint and cloves. The box says they are excellent repellents. I used another half-gallon of solution to hit all the ornamentals including the Mexican heather plant. The one that is so hardy but will not propogate. The laundry deck was piles with leaves but I’ve learned to keep the leaf blower on the shelf nearby. It also turns out to be a pleasant enough spot to work, all in the shade.
While I should be renovating, I’m building the desk camera stand. The one that will show my hands working. It’s boring enough, this should at least give a camera angle that keeps a good focus. See addendum for any results. It’s been a half-gallon peach tea day so far. The cable seems easier to put in the pipe first, than to pull it through like with fish tape. Almost the entire run is one straight feed but there is no getting around lifting up the floor in two spots. Good thing I left hatches in the right places.
The Mineshaft Tavern
(Madrid, NM)
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Here is a later model breadboard, with wiring channels cut on the underside. These are easier to work with adult-size fingertips, and building a working model is not the place to be concerned with keeping things tiny. Later, I got the cable completely through the conduit (fun), leaving the joints loose. Once it is part way under the building, I can pull it, so the joints can wait. By dusk I had it partway under when the mosquitoes got me good. I kept working another half-hour but by then they were swarming in squadrons. It’s enough under the structure to reach from the kitchen cutout, so slate that for tomorrow. The weather robot says perfect conditions and once that is done, I’m considering a change in schedule. All I need is an excuse and I’m on the road to Nashville.
Stringing cable gives me time to think and I’ve noticed a change over the past decade. How do we just know some future historian will finger-wag and say it is reminiscing. The reality is I tend to recall incidents that had a long-term effect on my behavior today as opposed to just old-time’s-sake. An example is a model ship; and it plants me in a space where it is impossible to recall if I wrote it in this blog, or by hand years before. I strive to keep repetition down but it’s hopeless. So, it’s an acceptable condition, here is the model ship story to demo the difference between reminiscing and recollecting the impact.
When I was in university, I met rich kids and one couple (man & woman of course) had permanently rented a place in the north end. RofR knew them so he often dragged me over there. They had two living rooms, and in one was a model ship. A real model, around five feet long with thousands of pieces. They told how the kit coast $600 back then and it was a realistic scale model. They had a special tool to drive in the thousands of nails. In two years, they had maybe two thirds of the hull done. It was so labor-intensive, they quit using the tool and pushed the tiny brads in by hand. That’s reminiscing.
The part that I now recall is how it affected my life today. RofR and I were so dirt poor it was flabbergasting to see somebody with a model ship in it’s own room. But it went much further. Since they were renters, they would eventually move and no way could that boat be left behind. It meant these people had the resources to not only make the ship, but had confidence they could store and move the structure intact. It meant their situation today was secure enough to take on a useless project that required thousands of hours of work. You bet this was like a wallop in the head for the two of us. Other people had security and money to waste. Yet, these were not really rich kids, just well-to-do. Ordinary rich, you might say.
Now, two generations later, I still hesitate to take on long term projects. With the cabin, I have no choice, but I mean the way I plan always has a termination point that ends the same day. Despite the skeeter onslaught, I could not quit working until the condition was met that the cable was reachable tomorrow in case it rains or doesn’t rain or is too hot or too cold and I can work inside or outside. People who build toy ships never seem to bother with such thinking, it is what it is. Like RoR said, they regularly shrug off mistakes that would wipe either of us out for life.
Which got me thinking about a wife and kids. The media is all about the declining White birth rate. Yeah? They don’t mention what I say are the leading causes. Massive imposed expense and interference from the government and the deliberate destruction of the core family unit. Foreigners think America is 90% queer colored folks. I think I’ve seen two blacks this week and that’s because I stopped at Wal*Mart. The State meddles with the family under the guise of “child protection” but it is all about control. Try to educate your own kids and they have the power to tell you how. Disobey and they will surround your compound and burn you and the kids alive.
But the worst barrier is money. They just plain make it too expensive to raise children, but if you don’t follow their guidelines you could be crippling your kid’s chances. Trust me, you don’t want to be raised in poverty or anything near to it. You wind up with the wrong exposure, the wrong environment, and the wrong social skills. If you ignore the warning signs you condemn the next generation to the same horrors you experienced. I chose not to ignore them. There are many variations on this decision so I should point out a juncture. Stay with me here, this is kind of important.
While getting married and settling down and having children is a choice, it is not a given. There is a juncture which produces two types of unmarried people. Those who miss the boat and, after a certain point or age or circumstance will never become a family unit. Go to an over 40s club, read some on-line dating profiles, listen to old women talk and you know exactly what I mean. Often it is baggage, but you can work with that. These people will “never win for losing’. What about the other side of that coin?
Those who meet opposite sex marriageable partners by the bazillions. You can’t just write them off as being too fussy. You’ll find they normally have reasonable standards and expectations, but also an excellent “schmoozing” alarm system. They know trouble in the making be it today, tomorrow, or ten years down the line. It should not be expected such people would put themselves in harm’s way or go out looking for trouble. You may suspect I place myself squarely in this group. I could get married any time I please, and I feel it may come to that if I live another five or so years. Why not?
At my age, I’d just be taking on somebody else’s problems, but I’d do it for the company. This explains my frequent joshing about Taylor Swift. I actually find her a bit mousy-looking, but love listening to her opinions. We would be highly compatible as companions, but what about marriage? Both of us have the resources to simply ignore any squabbles that arise. The longest-term relationships of my life include this as a necessary and over-riding factor. The other extreme is Theresa or Sharon, for whom tension and conflict were part of the game.
The Reb and I are the best example. Thirty-five years of getting along despite certain core differences that blast other relationships out of the water. If she ever moves on, which is within the realm here, I would just go out any marry the first rich lady I think looks okay. Harsh? So is life, Sunshine, and anybody tells you different is selling something.
ADDENDUM
Searching on latest Arduino projects, I got the same list first viewed when I started more than ten years ago. Water sensor, robot bartender, flood alarm, door lock, weather station, nothing new in a decade. Worse, none of these were any advancement and many were kits. What, they get good at following directions? I thought that was supposed to be the computer’s job.
I’m receiving what most consider the most difficult type of transmission. Random characters, random length. By comparison, receiving messages seems child’s-play and that is my point. I’m learning to receive cipher-like snippets, where the shape or spelling of a word don’t give any assistance. You've got to know your stuff. And break habits you were not aware of like leaving space after a period, or thinking there won’t be two punctuation marks or three alphabet letters in a row. Ah, bet you never thought of those as being habits.
Cipher is often sent in groups of five characters. The last while, I’ve disappointed myself by missing letter spacings. I generated huge files of random length words to force myself paying attention to those breaks. That's part of what you see here. It is easy with words, there is only one way to spell, once you get to the ‘m’, you know the word is “oatmeal”. I’m training to avoid what would be a pitfall in any potential non-Internet scenarios. If the food supply truly gets blocked, I’m the one who gets invited to dinner, know what I mean?
The misformed letters are my solution to a problem from years back, where it took longer to write some characters than others. Some letters take long enough you miss the subsequent character. Good example is the letter ‘f’. Try it, even if you get it fast, your nib is in the wrong position for any of the vowels if they come next. These are empirical solutions because I [purposely] chose not to type the letters, but hand-write them. That’s another gizmo that could be in short supply right when you least need the hassle. I write the letter like a stylized P, and yes, shorthand has crossed my mind.
Another quirk, I’m not good at sending code. You can think through that one on your own, but I can transmit just well enough as could ever likely be useful in a real life emergency. No sense telling Joe where to send his F-15s. Which brings up my satellite again. Remember my design of the cheapest satellite ever that does something useful. The plan was to send this blog in Morse, but such ideas come and go around here.
I’ve known for years there is no good place to go on-line and receive code. Teaching websites have standard blocks of practice code that is as boring as most telegraph messages. They are normally less than 30 words and use mostly the same 200 words. While I don’t have a satellite, I do have huge files of blog material. I need a web page that starts sending and steps through the entire blog, what 15 million words or whatever it works out to. The user can set the speed. At the slowest of 5 wpm, you’d need 3 million minutes or 5 years of 24 hour days before it starts over. Great code practice with the additional luxury of experiencing this wonderful, one-of-a-kind blog. Such a deal.
