One year ago today: January 4, 2023, thirty bucks!
Five years ago today: January 4, 2019, no cut-off valve.
Nine years ago today: January 4, 2015, anonymous, my eye.
Random years ago today: January 4, 2003, this post mystifies me.
She’s too cool out there again. I stayed inside and got some reading done. It’s below 60°F, here’s today’s chart with a high of 58°F. The toughest book I’ve had this century is the history of the German Democratic party, the 1900 to 1914 era. While I like history, this is a description of the organizatinal problems in the earlier days of unions versus politicians as opposed to versus the factories. Two entire chapters concern the difficulty of devising a voting system that fairly represents both rural and urban members. They tried giving proportionate votes to groups based on membership, with the first category being 1 to 4000 members. However this quickly led to small unions of 50 to 70 members getting a vote and they dominated the process with a 57% majority.
These rural groups did not have to contend as much with commuting and rent increases. It is eye-opening to see these problems were well-known in Germany long before America politics began to use them as deliberate tactics. Here’s more politics, the news waves are dominated by more anti-Trump rhetoric as the Democrats and other libtards increasingly hit the panic button. CNN says Trump on the ballot means dictatorship. Other outlets say printing his name gives false hopes to “the MAGA facists”. Trump just smiles, he knows they are toast. Jointly and severally toast.
TMOR (to my overseas readers), regardless of what is reported, Trump has never been charged with insurrection and he’s never been convicted of any criminal wrong-doing. He’s been attacked by liberal courts and judges, but only civil suits, not criminal charges. The media knows the less-educated Democrat voters do not understand the difference. They are also going all-out to downplay the release of the Epstein list, going on about how it is already old news that has been explained away as noon buffets and sight-seeing tours. At the same time, they are up-playing that Trump was on the airplane, hoping you will confuse that with him being on the island. False. Trump was never on the island and only took the plane between Miami and New York with other flights were not available.
By noon I was again reading Arduino specs, this time the process of writing to SD cards. Sadly, the instructions given involve destroying the cards by soldering lead to Arduino pins. The theory is interesting because the cards use a different voltage and I find voltage dividers and interesting side-topic. It works because you can use resistors to get a point in a circuit where you can tap into a lower voltage. Watch this voltage divider tutorial (6 min) if you want the logic.
Beginners think, this solves my power supply needs. Wrong. As soon as you add the device you want to power, called the load, it alters the characteristics of the whole circuit. So I got to thinking is there not some way an Arduino can be used to keep the correct power to the load? I know umpteen others have worked on this factor, I want to see if a microcontroller can be applied. Again, I’ve never seen this done before. It would involve having the Arduino change a resistance—and that would be new to me. I’m also reading on op-amps, the component I understand the least because active feedback confuses me, always has.
Somewhere in Majorca.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
I’m crawling back under the covers with the Jules Verne novel. Phineas is now on a train across India, which today remains the only practical way of doing the same thing. It’s amusing to note I drew some of the identical conclusions about the place in the 1980s as presented by Verne and I don’t believe much has really changed over there. To me, they are still primitives who think the pictures are inside the television set. I’m barely on page 20 and he’s halfway around the world. I hope this is not another Moby Dick where all the action takes place in the last chapter. I’m now on page 60 as he nears Hong Kong, with a princess in tow.
Something is still off with this computer, so I’m running with the tast manager open. Now, a word processor is not a graphics environment and should barely take any CPU. Yet this unit can easily jump to 90% and stay there for 30 seconds. Open a single-page document and it gobbles up 145MB of RAM. This is an old observation, one that back in the 90s tipped me off MicroSoft was up to something. Remember those thousands of lines of unexplained code we noticed at the computer shop. Like DNA, the repetitious bits may represent something but it’s buried pretty deep. Let’s look at my Jules Verne book, as a previous owner has left it full of notes explaining unusual words and phrases.
Underlined are words like “scrupulous” and “chagrin”, with explanations of their meaning in the margins, usually a synonym using simpler terms. There is one page with “Xeria Keys” on the top margin. That sounded like a Greek name, so I looked it up. I bought this book in Tennessee and this search led to the town of Antioch, where I’ve never been. It is twelve miles from downtown Nashville and described as culturally and racially diverse, meaning crime-ridden. These notations show somebody at the student level struggling well with English.
There is a Xeria Keys who lived there, graduated with a scholarship to Vanderbilt, got a degree in Wealth Management (whatever that is) in Nashville, then returned [to Antioch] as a “solution developer”. LinkedIn says she was captain of the university dance team. (I assure you that kind of thing is only possible when you are taking less than a full courses load per semester.) This has affirmative action written all over it, but if it is the same Xeria Keys, her picture is nearby. Imagine, a woman who can’t read at a ninth grade level getting essentially a free ride to the Ivy League school of Tennessee, where I could not have afforded a single course. Yep, folks, with a fifty-year spread in age, it is me buying her used books at the Goodwill on Lebanon Pike. America, land of opportunity, as long as you are not from there.
ADDENDUM
Y’day I quipped that if something is offered as free and I take it, there is no obligation on my part to listen to or obey anything attached to the deal. I get some flak. I’m fully aware that I can specify “free” on a search, and some of the matches returned are not free. I get that. The fact is, that is no my doing, nor am I bound by anything that appears on my monitor that does not match my criteria. Got that? Read your basic business law, you cannot bind anyone in a contract by flashing something in front of them. You cannot compel them to pay you if they do not cease to do something they normally do. So if your service is not free, but it appears on a free query, then you have a quarrel with the search engine people.
I get the counter-argument, that just because some third party over which you have no control tells me your service is free, that does not entitle me to help myself. That might be true—but only if you prove that you had absolutely no idea this was going on in my particular individual case. If you were aware, and you should check your own product continually, then it is still the search engine who is fencing it. I’m taking it from them, not you. Lack of understanding is not a valid legal argument, much as so many sleazy Internet operators would like. That definitly encompasses the people who lie about "free", the problem it creates is yours, not mine.
