One year ago today: January 14, 2023, a better stopwatch.
Five years ago today: January 14, 2019, the sour cream mystery.
Nine years ago today: January 14, 2015, remember the Honda 400?
Random years ago today: January 14, 2007, old business, etc.
The exact date is obscure but tomorrow is the token 25th year since I began restricting beef in my diet, aren’t you proud of me? However it’s only been some 15 years since I really quit. Today I hear they are marketing ostrich burgers. I’m game (ha-ha) but I need to look at the process first. Are they grain-fed? It would not be the first time the regime tried to slip in something under the guise of a new product. Read today’s addendum for all you need about ostrich for now.
a) businesses can rent their underused toilets. An app called “Flush”, it’s $5 for five minutes.My favorite has to be a product called “Rabbit” that, ahem, automates dialing a smart phone. Yes, folks, idiocy has gone full circle, the millennials now have an app to unscrew the mess they screwed themselves into. Imagine, an app now needed to dial a "smart" phone. My latest cell phone takes four varying trial-and-error moves to download the pictures you see here. NASA has finally drilled open the capsule with the asteroid samples, it jammed shut crash-landing in the desert last month. The Astobotics Moon-lander is somewhat behaving now, but a soft touchdown on the lunar surface is aborted.
b) A.I binoculars that can identify 9,000 species of birds and animals. Around $5,000.
c) a mask that blocks your voice so it can only be heard by other people with a mask.
d) a stroller that uses A.I. to rock your baby to sleep.
I’m going back to sleep till noon, so should you. There is talk of a large area off the Australian northwest coast, the Timor Sea, was once dry land and inhabited. Viewing the satellite map, I can see it. The radio says 51°F out there, so cancel rehearsal. A Fox News panel asked Trump how much of his term he would spend on retribution. Um, are they admitting something?
Now I’m back and it is still sub arctic. What’s a good movie, or do they still make them? Ah, here is something, the old 1950 “Jason & the Argonauts”. I saw that as a lad but did not grasp all that Mt. Olympus god angle. Let’s try again. I see right off the movie-makers back then were better at time-wasting scenes. Loading the boat, why if they had a prairie they’d ride horses across it. The movie could not keep me interested, so I did some extra reading on Arduino programming. I knew the output was streaming data, but nothing about how to format it. I’ve seen it scroll across my computer screen one line of text at a time.
Knowing somebody else has been over this before, I went on-line to find a device that could scroll text on demand. Nothing. I must hold some manner of record for the guy who comes up with searches that find nothing. I’ve seen people scroll lyrics on a smart phone on stage and it is beneath my standards. I may give myself a present this month, if there is such a thing. A metronome that counts in say, five or six measures, to get you started on stage at the right tempo. After that, let instinct take over. Preferably with an earplug, and a clicking sound instead of an electronic beep. Just you watch, if I find something it will have a feature rendering it unusable.
Hard Rock hotel, Hollywood, FL.
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I roasted the other half of the ribs and that’s good chow. Skip the sauce for me, it covers up the taste too much. Herb and garlic seasoning, from the dollar store. I have discovered I can make ribs, though pork is not a big part of my menu. The postal scale reveals that, from what you actuually get, pork ribs cost over three times as much as chicken. They are good, but not three times as good. It says here Fuddrucker’s serves ostrich burgers. Isn’t there one near JZ’s place?
The Prez e-mailed, concuring we do nothing until the weather improves. He does not have the same manner about dealing with musicians, which is understandable. For example, I have long since notice the jam session guy never makes a decision on the spot, no matter how simple. Ask him for a song list and 8 weeks later, you’ll still be asking. He also thinks anybody who doesn’t look and act like a lumberjack is queer. This makes him a bad band member and it does not matter if you get along with him, he will let you down. But we’ve agreed to see if he wants to practice at his place, which is conveniently half-way between our houses.
I’ve never seen the Johnny English movies, so I’ll throw the first one I can find on in the background, while I’m working this evening. Here is is,.”Johnny English Strikes Again”, a spy spoof. I like it already as he defeats high-tech gadgets with old-tech know-how. Rowan Atkinson is truly old-tech. And over in Germany, the nationalist AfD party continues to surge as the government calls for a ban. Sure, arrest their leader and put him in prison for nine months. See if it works better than the last time you tried that.
Meanwhile, I read two hours on how the Arduino writes text to memory card. And I don’t get it. If I try this, I will just modify the examples given. It involves functions from a “library” which you cannot open, you “feed” a line to a file and use an “overloaded” function to call an unsigned 8-bit integer “version” of another non-standard function called f.write. You then use anothr function that “accepts” a reference to that file and an unsigned 32-bit integer number. Then you create an array of length 10 unsigned 8-bit integers which you fill with zeroes, then covert these to a string, one digit at a time. This then adds some ASCII code values and uses a loop to write these to said file with a “pointer to the location of the data being written”. You then use another loop to write these strng characters to an array unless an error occurs, in which case you throw the whole mess into an infinite loop to stop the Arduino from doing anything else.
No, I don’t get it. For starters, infinite loops are something you avoid, not use as a tool. The Arduino is also bad for “drop-through” code, where if conditions don’t match, the instructions “fall” to the next instruction in the code. This works until somebody adds or moves the line during maintenance. Time and again, Arduino code uses false data to act as a command.This is also risky, as in the universe, there is always a chance of the false data actually happening. I remember my first program as a teenager, we had to enter -9999 tas an EOF marker. It was a bank ledger, and years later, when the government required reporting on all transfers above $10,000 it became common for people to withdraw, you guessed it, $-9999 dollars, meaning the program had to be scrapped and rewritten.
The only way to deal with this is take the code one step at a time. Separate the standard Arduino commands and keywords and what’s left is part of these librairies. There must be some documentation somewhere to find out what these are. The .cpp files can be viewed with Notepad, but once there, instructions are not included. Speaking of idiots, the FAA has announced they will be hiring those with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities”, so there is hope for Iowa. I mean, why should the burden fall entirely on the DMV and the ATF?
ADDENDUM
There are no large commercial ostrich farms in the US. The bird is cranky and hard to raise and they must be fed almost ten percent of their body weight each day. They can’t be readily herded and if you move them forcefully, they refuse to breed. If they do, one ostrich egg equals two dozen chicken eggs. They tend, however, to taste “rubbery” in an omelet, the only practical way to cook them. Currently less than 20,000 small farms raise the birds, so an ostrich burger is a specialty item. I could not find a restaurant that serves them in this area, I’m willing to pay twenty bucks.
There are some nearby farms that ship but the only thing I’ve seen on store shelves is ostrich jerky, a type of product I associate with people I don’t associate with.
