One year ago today: May 15, 2023, birds, diodes, & Starbucks.
Five years ago today: May 15, 2019, the shirt’s still missing.
Nine years ago today: May 15, 2015, Camp Good Counsel.
Random years ago today: May 15, 2007, The Johnson Twins.
My sextant has rust, which some way is not right for a plastic unit. Yes, but tiny spots on it like the lanyard clamp and small screws are metal. They’ve been inside the original case and I admit to not taking many readings. Because it is boring and I did not know that until I did it some. Also, the job of reading means being awake and outside at inhuman hours of the day in any weather, it’s like shift work. In any case, the real work, and 95% of it, is done indoors, long after the sextant is back on the shelf. Today’s lesson is (once more) the kind you don’t get in the instructions. It is about accuracy.
The goal of measuring an angle with the sextant is to then use a series of tables and equations to establish a LOP, or line of position on a chart. So you might think the more accurate your input, the better the final result. That’s what I thought. But let’s take a much closer look at that line. You draw that line with a pencil, trust me, use a pencil. The nicest pencil line that you can draw is going to cover a space, to scale, that on your chart that is several miles wide out on the ocean. You will have gained nothing by using fractions.
A bit more obscure to grasp is that even if your accumulated rounding off does produce an error, it is in the position of the LOP itself, not the location of your boat. In the middle of the ocean, a factional mile isn’t that important, and if you are near to shore, you navigate by beacons, lights, buoys and landmarks, not by sextant. While it’s true the textbooks probably in total say all this somewhere, none of them I’ve read spell it out like I just did.
This is a picture of my relocated woodpecker bird house. Birds can be very picky about nests and this was unoccupied. Possibly it was too too low, so here it is raised up to nine feet off the tround. There are no more predator approaches than found on any tree. This is the third or fourth unsuccessful location.
How about another day off? Yes, by acclamation, so let’s find a project or two and relax. I worked late on the Tascam, finding a number of quirks not really covered in the user manual. To the tune of five or so birdies in the back yard, let me list a couple of these snags so I won’t forget. Worse is to save the recordings in a playable form, they must be exported by a process called “writing” which takes forever, and you cannot use the same file name as it was recorded. So make sure you remember that live session on Wednesday two weeks ago was called SONG005 or something before it becomes exported as EX002 or something. Up yours, Tascam. Or something.
Happy birthday, Climate Change. It was 35 years ago that the threat of Global Freezing changed to Global Warming, with entire nations supposed to be underwater by now. Another set of “146 polls”, says Big Media, show that Trump is 0.8% ahead. So begins the pre-election push to convince Joe Stupid that the margins are so narrow that Trump can once again lose by 12,000 votes out of four million cast. And Biden just announced tariffs on Chinese goods, something he screamed about when Trump did the same.
What a blustery “Gulf” morning, dwindling my coffee reserve. The back yard is completely alive with birds who have discovered the squirrel baffles make excellent rain shelters. Another small and fearless woodpecker has been helping me in the mornings and the peach tree is showing a slow, irregular recovery. Let’s check silver prices. What’s this, Canadians must now pay 66% tax on large capital gains? Serves them right. Biden’s campaign continues with the outdated method of thinking people will forget anything over six month’s past. Now he is claiming Trump lost debates to him in 2020 and now fears a debate. The popular perception is Trump is wining on every issue, so why debate? It just gives the crooked news a chance to spin his words—and his non-participation in that game has cost Big Media badly in their circulation. I’m surprised places like CNN are still in busines
s Silver momentarily hit $29.64 this morning. Will it break $30.00 or continue to be the most traded commodity that seems immune to the recent 25% inflation? And here is the reputedly worst webpage design in the world. And here is a link to the spacecraft collision with an asteroid, claiming it was a test to deflect an event that would wipe out the Earth. Myself, I would have told them to wait a couple hundred million years until there was actually any danger and give me the money they saved.
Tons of sports trophies.
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The latest on the recording box, I hope you like it. The hardest difficulty was the power cables. You can’t see most of them, they are now behind that small compartment at the lower back, if you can see it. Shown here the pieces are being fitted, there are more cables soon to be stored in the lid and two storage trays under the gear shown here.
Argh! Tonight I wrote two letters, one of them was the 600th (personal letter) in my life. Based on averages, that’s fifty times the output, Ken. For every letter you ever write, I come up with fifty. It came at a price. For longer than this blog has been entered, it was written by hand, and now my handwriting has deteriorated to a noticeable degree. The errors begin when I write more than roughly ten minues. I rattled off notes to Marion and JZ, and in each case found blots and stem errors unacceptable even two years ago. Even addressing the envelopes was sloppy, mind you the postmen who deliver these would know each address by heart That’s how rare such letters have become.
All else was on hold while I reviewed our song list. We are not ready for the big shows pending, but close. To front a proper show requires 32 songs played above standard. We have just 22, plus another 20 we have played before. This tells us how much work needs to be done.
The shed radio is cutting out. That is the old GE unit that has been playing almost continuously for over ten years now. Maybe that is why it only picks up Tampa. The world laughs as Biden “challenges” Trump to a debate. But it must be only on MSM, with no audience, and recorded, that is, not broadcast live. Yes folks, this can happen in a free country, because it is free—people don’t like to pay for or maintain freedom, they think once they have it, the condition is permanent. What’s that smell?
ADDENDUM
Enter a new vulnerability called the SSID Confusion attack. I quit with the details on these things 15 years ago, but they still get my attention. If you use a VPN, when you shut it down, your equipment will try to re-establish a connection with a device on your trusted list. You gave your system this SSID at setup and after that it is no longer authenticated. Some protocols use the SSID as an encryption key. The trick is for the bad guys to spoof that SSID.
They need not cry to me, I was part of the group saying this type of security should have been a priority from the day anybody first connected two computers. One feature I recommended was a single control on every computer that would list, in plain English, every site that accesses your computer and the ability to block them permanently—but keep a log of every attempt. If my original journals are ever publish, I believe I wrote that back in 1984 as part of a larger project.
For those who remember years ago when I described how A.I. was not the real thing. How it was really just very advanced pattern matching? By combing and sifting billions of private conversations and data, it could distill what the majority were thinking—but not why. And majority rule is rarely the solution for complex problems that require specialized but not mass input. There are probably 2 million useless bass players in America who would tell you I’m doing it all wrong.
After a typical lag period, the A.I. community has admitted I was right and given this phenomenon a name. When an infinite number of idiots with an infinite number if keyboards get it wrong, they are calling it an “A.I. hallucination”.
To me, the Raspberry Pi is always a microcontroller. It is not the “computer” that they are now calling their many copycat versions. I’m going to turn off my filter for news on that topic because they are going crazy over there. I don’t even like to bother going through their jargon any more. How they are selling some memory device called HAT. I could not figure what in hell they were on about, so I’m done with them.
