September 26, 2023

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 26, 2022, Italy’s fake fascist.
Five years ago today: September 26, 2018, on paying taxes.
Nine years ago today: September 26, 2014, only silver drops in price.
Random years ago today: September 26, 2015, Volkswagen: cheating is cheaper.

           A comprehensive review of the gig says we do need more Merle and the Prez is a fan. Can he sing the fast ones? He’s still not convinced about avoiding the droners on stage. I requested his list and listened to some pretty unfamiliar music. “Kern River” and “Born to Run” are not my cup of tea if only because I don’t identify with criminals on the run. (Yeah, they’re all doing it wrong.) Calendar says mention food, the calendar I have that reminds me I do not know why this blog is popular, so mention food. Here’s fresh muffins and baked chicken with biscuits. Whoops, you blinked and now it is half gone.

           Much of the debris from the tree fell in the neighbor’s back yard. He’s got a day job, so I climbed the fence and raked up 90% of it. This included two huge logs left near the carport. Using the electric chain saw, I got them to moveable lengths, then threw the blade. There is the matter of the broken fence. We repaired the chain link, but the gap remains and with the now gone, we can see into each other’s yards. So I got to work and sunk a fencepost, then ran the rails, and will salvage the pickets next day.

           At 1:30PM I threw the saw blade again, so got out of the heat and moved the big fan. It was originally installed toward the entrance, a nice cool place to walk in. But with the work space moved against the wall, there was no breeze as you worked. Bottom line is I need a second big fan. Hmmm, there is a $62 surplus this month. Also, the neighbor has a half-grown puppy she’s going to give to her sister, who she says is not the best keeper. It’s a small dog, part chihuahua with a quiet disposition. I’m thinking.
           The tree left quite a hole in the ground where the stump was, I filled it with bucketloads of wood chunks from the sawing operation. In the end, taking down that one tree required two men, two ladders, three chainsaws, and 6-1/2 man-hours. Add another two hours for cleanup and curbsiding the wood. I put six buckets of wood debris into that hole and capped it with a log plug almost two feet in diameter. Soon, I will have to go an a kudzu offensive to take down some pretty huge vines. These tend to destroy the tree bark and removing it eventually kills the tree—but that still doubles the life from being choked by the kudzu.
           Django, I’m at the part where he’s conning the slavers taking him to the mining company. I managed to read only 30 minutes of the GPS datasheet before falling asleep, so I intend to make special time to study this material. Who was it, Sparkfun? There’s a company that cells a receiver compatible with Arduino. What did I learn in a half-hour? The unit needs three satellites to find location, but six to find altitude. The satellites require a significant amount of their bandwidth in sending information to each other. That tells us they don’t stay in position all by themselves.

Picture of the day.
S. African bunny chow.
(Fiery spiced street vendor food.)
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Here’s the best picture I have of the yellow flowers from last day. They are nice but pretty small and grow only in the part of the yard I have to keep cleared. Nothing to report today except more yard work, though I did go our later for a couple beers and wrote three letters. The band sets. Yes, writes the Prez, he can sing the music. We’ve had time to review them and Merle is the winner. That makes his music the single largest portion of out song list. Some of it is challenging for duo work, but that’s part of their draw. Nobody expected us to play “The Breeze” on Sunday, the request was meant as a wisecrack.

           All this work, I’m tired. I grabbed the GPS printout and went over it. Hey, I think I got this backwards. If, as claimed, this printout is from the satellite, then the system does not work like they are telling us. This data is in plain English, comma delimited. This information I’m reading and the descriptions of the GPS data are compatible. Let me ask the question differently. You are driving down the road and the radio man says you are listening to 108.5 FM. How does he know? So either the satellite knows where your GPS receiver is, or your GPS receiver knows where the satellite is.
           I’m reading that the GPS receiver takes timed signals from the satellite and interprets them. If so, this data is not from the satellite, it is from the receiver—and that is the opposite of what they are saying. You can’t have it both ways. My goal was to find out what the satellite is actually transmitting. This is going to take more time than I thought. The best explanation so far is RedHat and it insists the date is comma-delimited text. (If so, then why do receivers cost so damn much?) Anyway, le’ts take a look.

           The satellites transmit something in the order of 60 pieces of information. Each “sentence” begins with $GPxxx, where the final three letters give the nature of the data. For example $GPGLL means the sentence contains the geographic latitude and longitude. I’ve often lamented that the GPS can’t tell you the next town down the road. Well, lookie here. $GPRMC. So, all the needed input is there. So explain to me why the GPS display is so screwed up. My guess is that figuring out where things are headed is just not a millennial thing.

Last Laugh