One year ago today: February 17, 2023, $7 bucks these days.
Five years ago today: February 17, 2019, dynamiting Italian villages.
Nine years ago today: February 17, 2015, proof I married an actress.
Random years ago today: February 17, 2010, using Dragon software.
That flickering light on my PNP model, I have a theory but it is complicated a bit, so you electronics buffs who get a kick out of my amateur tinkerings can find it in today’s addendum. I had planned a short night out but around 8:00PM I had the circuit in front of me, on the desk. Duh, I fell asleep sitting up until 2:00AM. Whether you see this as Boomerism or an earned privilege of successful early retirement will depend on your character. What slapped me awake was still thinking where I left off. It’s frustrating, I have a solution but lack the means to prove it. And good luck finding any help, this is Florida.
The Prez has glommed onto an old song I’ve long rejected for good reason—it is a waste of a good bass player. This happens after he jams with others, he forgets to listen for tunes with interesting bass lines. However, the most durable rule in this duo is you can play anything you want as long as it does not change the character of the original song. That is, we play the song, not the Zydeco version. Thus, he gets to play all manner of bluegrass that isn’t there because it sounds good. Now gosh-darn, doesn’t that “Family Tradition” song remind me of a bass run from a 1960s James Gang number? Yep, and it also steals the thunder, so I will only incorporate spots of it, like during the instrumental breaks. My famous four octave walkdowns. Be careful what you wish for.
Oh, the people in Georgia who obeyed their paymasters and tried to shaft Trump are on trial for real. It’s amazing the garbage minds that can get law degrees these days because they are minorities or whatever. Nothing bares their ineptitudes like being on the receiving end. America looks forward to the New York people who fined Trump $350 million over a crime with no victims and even his alledged enemy bankers testified he did nothing wrong. No good will come of this for New York, a festering sore on the collar bone of America. One can only suspect since their ballot-name blocking did not work, they are trying to bankrupt the guy.
The makers of Sora say it works best when using text that has visual meaning. Meanwhile, I still do not have my avatar account for this blog, but it isn’t a dead idea. The link was chalked up for last November, but the Reb was bitten. I’ve gone out for printer cartridges, but leave you with this thought for what’s left of this morning. This blog is popular (hundreds and hundreds of thosuands of views) and represents some 20 million words of largely descriptive text just waiting for a proper medium. This doggie photo is A.I. generated, the first such photo I have knowingly posted here.
Thinking to read the A.I. article later, I downloaded it to paste to a word processor. Funny, it has this placeholder that will not delete. I worked around it by minimizing the size. Is this some new copyright scheme, or just the way Win 11 interprets the files. I later find it is the same graphic on top of itself 45 layers deep and I had only deleted down to 33. Give me time to bypass it or delete it, but there’s the latest example of people who dig financial graves for themselves. It’s like they don’t want to admit they have to develop a whole new model of how to charge for their work. True, it isn’t easy, but then again, technology to make the copies was not developed because the publishing field was full of nice guys.
I’m adding a chapter to my (projected) booklet about the difference between secrecy and privacy. One implies that you have something to hide, and we’ve all been on the receiving end of somebody coming from that quarter. The ones that especially irk me think they are entitled to private information. My writing concerns bank privacy and how to defeat it becuase there really is no such thing. Banks are a security seive.
Discovery Outpost, Oklahoma.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
I may be getting on, but not fossilized, and I have said I may consider taking on some clients if it is lucrative enough. Wel gosh-darnit, as luck would have it, guess who is the local expert on REIT funds? Who’d a-thunk it? Where I spend nearly a year looking for the right company, this had a lot to do with minumum buy-in amounts and ease of usage. Caltier was the result, but you may have guessed it is far from ideal. Right now, I’m antsy about the delay between the time between money exiting my account and arriving on their books. Forget that, I’m looking at a place that allows a $10 buy-in. Fundrise has a better and faster website than Caltier, and it is properly designed to let you get in there and view what is going on.
Having said that, I don’t know if places that only put down payments on real estate are such a great choice. I may open a small account for comparison purposes even though there is a chance I looked at Fundrise long ago and rejected putting eggs in that basket.
Finding no source for bronze hasps or hinges nearby, I went to Ace and paid full price for five small hasps. They were $4 each, making it the single most pricey part of the box. A quick guess is the wood for each small box is around a dollar, plus two dollars for the hinges, screws, finishing, and then the hasp. To do this as a business, I would have to sell the boxes for $63 each, which will never happen. I could sell for less, but not as a business. I’m running out of the super cheap brass hinges I picked up for something like 22¢ a package. Have I really installed nearly 30 pairs of hinges? Then again, I am doing a better job of it these days. That means, in the end, there was no automatic or trick way to get it right. Grab a chisel and get down on it.
Next item is dealing with the Honda Civic insurance settlement. Are they nuts even thinking they can out-text or out-logic us on matters not contained in their fine print? Our situation demands they cannot defeat us sending form letters and they do not have the trained staff to even mix it up with us. That is, we need $2,000 more than they offer to replace the Civic. We did not discuss book value or salvage value when we paid full price for the policy, and will not discuss it afterwards, The amusing part is they are actually trying to buffalo us with “book value”. They are really admitting they are only offering 3/4 of a fair settlement.
ADDENDUM
Why is that LED flickering? (If I get ambitious, there may be a better video of this event.) The input signal is a steady 3 volts direct current, so my conclusion is the variation must be caused by the base current. But an examination of the wiring shows there is no signal to the base current, nothing to make it waver. It has one off-on connection to ground. Yet, there it is, winking at me almost in defiance. Here’s my theory.
Some weeks ago I mentioned reading about transistor amplification. It involved matching an incoming signal to the bass in the range of the transistor “slope”, the slight delay between the transistor off and saturation. I do not know how to make this calculation. I did a search to see if there was some easy way to estimate it with no luck. Putting the concept aside for later, should it become useful, I continued reading up on the switching function of NPN and PNP models. Then somewhere in the back of my head, I recalled that novelty toy that will cause a light to come on if you pick the object up the correct way.
The correct way was a pair of tiny pins on the toy. You hand it to the other guy, it stays out, but you pick it up with a thumb over those pins and it becomes a “lie detector”. It works because of a high value resistor that gets “shorted” by the natural lower resistance of your thumb, which is what, 70% water? Stay with me, we are getting there. Last week I had been explaining to Wilford the need for pull-down resistors, as static electricity is an irksome problem with small circuits. Then it hit me. Ready?
I chose a 22,000 Ω resistor for the PNP circuit base because it was handy. What if, and it’s a big if, I had inadvertently selected a size that dropped the base current into the range where the circuit was biased? It makes sense because then the transient static in the air could be enough to wiggle things. I even considered it might be my finger pressing the metal switch, but the same flickering occurs when hard wired. The switch is normally off because a latching switch allows the metal part to get hot after ten or so seconds.
All theory, but it is robot club theory so it stems from a certain amount of experience that is not in the textbooks. Or the labs, kits, websites, and tutorials for that matter. I’m almost sure it is caused by interference, I even connected a second LED in parallel to eliminate a faulty component problem. It flickered in unison. (Later at the meetup, we discovered they don't quite act at the same time, hmmm.)
