One year ago today: May 16, 2023, mostly the yard.
Five years ago today: May 16, 2019, Valdosta, Atlanta, Hermitage.
Nine years ago today: May 16, 2015, more on PWM.
Random years ago today: May 16, 2014, and even then . . .
Silver just touched $30 and the banks reacted swiftly. It’s a pressure cooker. Same for Biden, who has a date with destiny on June 27. Trump has agreed to a debate with CNN rules. I wonder what Trump has planned, since we know they will only ask Joe scripted questions and will cut Trump’s mic if he makes any points. It’s a known setup, so what’s he up to? Another Boeing incident, an engine catching fire. Yes, I know Boeing does not build the engines, but fires happened due to bad maintenance. Some smart aleck posted on-line that Boeing has become the South Africa of the airliner industry. Climate change is now blamed by BBC as their new black version of Dr. Who flops on opening night.
The Cuban money system is frozen.
I used a phrase in a memo I sent them some months ago which seems to have entered their parlance. See if you like it, “sub-optimal procedure”.
Who’s this adorable gal? That’s Seven, four years ago as a puppy. Part of my review includes checking in with the executor of my tiny estate and this is now the big dog with the massive ears you’ve seen here time to time. That reminds me, Mitch is back from Mexico and now has a tattoo. It must have been quite the party. Let me check, do I have the okay to post this photo? Yep. That’s the tattoo and I’ll defer any opinion from this direction. Then again, I’ve always understood people who don’t play in a band often have different methods of disguising themselves.
That makes sense, as each step has enough rules and mnemonics to scare most away. The process begins with getting your sextant and ends with drawing a line on a sheet. Even that is not complete, because you need at least two lines to plot your position. Note, where most people would say the start is the sextant reading, but it is not. The actual first step is to check if the sextant has been zeroed out from the last usage. My guess is the entire process takes around 35 distinct steps and many not-so-distinct. Thus, I would narrow my outline to just those which require you to calculate or record something.
This may be optimistic. Because I’ve not seen it spelled out before means nothing. Baking a cake is easy. Using a sextant reading to produce a line of position is not. Maybe I should work on some circuits, which would place me directly under the back room air conditioner. Hush, I’m thinking. Later, there are two generations of red cardinals who frequent the back yard. And they’ve learned the sound of the washing machine means check for treats.
Nebraska, I think.
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This is the circuit I chose to examine and build. It is called a Universal Relay Driver because it can be adapted for use in most any circuit. I recognize the components and the theory is easy. A small voltage applied to the base of the transistor will operate a relay using a much higher voltage. I want to know more about the physics. How fast can the relay operate? How sensitive is the input? Do any of the parts get hot? Is it noisy? I’ll get around to it. Usually I add pilot lights to show what’s going on, but I still have not found my bags of LEDs.
This is interesting history to me. My marginal notes show it was 9 years and 10 months ago I first looked at this topic. I found many of the steps confusing because I set out to understand them, not memorize the routine. And that made it much harder, as a mass of small details had to be carried forward and remembered, usually when “entering” the tables. That’s what they call looking things up, you don’t really enter anything.
One frustration is the textbooks themselves. The subject is complicated and each author explains it as he understands it. No two are alike. I have a rough outline, but it works as long as you remember my steps are different than theirs. Some go into incredible detail of, say, taking the sextant reading, others say close enough is good enough. The overview has already helped me better grasp how each figure recorded leads toward the goal. Is it ever clear now that so many different people over the centuries have stirred the pot. Plenty of the terms now mean the opposite of what they say. I may try a few start-to-finish runs, but this is a lot like work.
Each step has many approaches. An example is the timing of the sextant reading. Some say get a radio that picks up signals that broadcast the exact time. Then you buy a stopwatch and record that tone to the moment you take the reading and declare “Mark!”. Others say just go to Wal*Mart and buy a digital watch and set it to Greenwich Mean Time, which goes by a few other names these days. Which is better? Understanding the process, because batteries go dead.
What was not fun was Windows in any form, in this instance, Win 11. It affects the way Excel commands are executed. I even got into a mode where the entire spreadsheet locked up with no indication how to get out of it. The keyboard just make a clicking noise, I mean, what manner of bastard sits around coming up with these stupid ideas? Can you imagine a scenario where such a feature does any good? If so, you got serious problems grasping what is best for most of the people. I had to reboot the computer, I think it disabled the keyboard and who in their right mind thinks that is important enough to assign it a shortcut?
MicroSoft has severely gone downhill, but still has a grip because their most successful business maneuver was blocking others from entering the market. They have sunk to adverticing built into their new opsys, including messages that suggest your computer needs repair if you use competitor’s software. But their most annoying tactic is to flood consumer repair and tip lines with messages saying the best fix is to switch to their products. When I searched for the best ad-blocking apps, I got a message that I could stop the ads by enrolling in a paid subscription.
I miss Tennessee, so let’s run some numbers. I don’t have to stick around as much as before and the boys are super-okay spending the whole day with me. Maybe clear out of here for the cooler climes. But don’t go too far north. Canada’s new Bill C-63 empowers their Gestapo to sift through historical records and arrest anybody who has ever posted in the past what their new law has defined as hate speech. Will Canada ever have the mukluks to oust their dictator? Probably not, 2/3 of the country is on some form of welfare.
ADDENDUM
The Creationists are up to their old tricks, claiming that Darwin was wrong because man did not descend from apes because their religion said so. These people have never read Darwin’s book. He never said any such thing. All of the components of the Theory of Evolution existed long before Darwin. Mutation, natural selection, heredity, variation, all of these were old themes before Darwin was born. But they all were stifled by a religious objection—that the Bible stated the world was not old enough for any of those events to have taken place.
What Darwin did was document that there was a fossil record dating back millions of years, meaning that there had been enough time for species to evolve. He pointed out there were no major species which did not have relatives and that once a species goes extinct, it never evolves again. This can only happen if, far enough back in time, there was a common ancestor.
