One year ago today: July 26, 2023, ferry boats ban Evs.
Five years ago today: July 26, 2019, a brief sunny spell.
Nine years ago today: July 26, 2015, the $181 vacation.
Random years ago today: July 26, 2008, fantastically expensive.
The heat index is headed for 109°F by noon, I decided the best way to spend my day off is indoors. We started with French toast made with Italian bread. After a few trips to the shed I decided I’d spend the day with eBay. This is still new enough to be interesting and I am catching on to how idiots go about things. That’s the blog for this morning so here’s a bit of what’s going on with that. If you see any photos today, I put them in later to liven the page up. Any pictures today have been added later for cosmetics, may be repeats. Oh look, there's the porch door in Tennessee I never intend to fix again. And then some fancy cigar boxes.
But just this morning I found $109 in “missing” revenue, usually the result of the finicky eBay input screens. One of them was for $75, so I’m not likely to do something just because everybody else is. Part of the incompatibility was eBay’s crazy way of ignoring brand names. You don’t sell a Realistic Made-in-USA 6BK11 for the same price as an Indonesian knock-off. Yet eBay won’t allow you to enter 6BK11 twice. (It’s a tube used in Ampeg amplifiers.)
You quickly learn to invert the brand and model fields in the listing, then it works. But good luck when at the end of the day you want to print out your list. You won’t be able to group the way you want. Way to go, eBay. I glanced at the headlines and that was the laugh of the morning. The MSM is trying the old bandwagon trick of announcing that “voters are abandoning Trump” and “flocking to Harris”.
Then there is the CrowdStrike fiasco. What amuses me is not the system screwing up, after all, it was coded, not programmed. Instead, this is a massive wakeup call for people who worked computers without even trying to gain any in depth knowledge of what they were doing. The computer fails here, and we simply switch to manual mode. The computer fails at the airline, bank, DMV, and they panic. Nobody on staff knows how to mail a letter, tell time, or make change for a dollar. It’s hilarious.
But have you heard the latest in Russian millionaire entertainment? It involves booking passage on a luxury yacht. You are amply supplied with automatic weapons and grenade launchers for your leisurely sail off the coast of Ethiopia, hoping to attract some pirates. I have nicknamed this the “Somali Safari”. What do you say to such people? Good hunting?
Colorado ghost town.
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Keeping an eye on Ireland, where immigrant housing seems to catch fire rather regularly. What’s happened to the old IRA? Not following their history, I was recently informed they sold out to the government and are the ones pushing for the immigrant takeover. Could this be true? I also ran over some of the material we have on tonight’s list. We are short material, barely making the three hours. Last week we got the last half-hour by digging our oldest material up, tunes we have not rehearsed, not played in months, or played once. The only “polka” we know is “Jackson”. Several sources tell me there will be a larger crowd this time.
A mini-breakthrough with my sometimes hobby of navigation. I’ve described how the instructions are so poor that I resorted to memorizing the steps between calculating the Sun’s position (the GP) and plotting the line of position (LOP). This grey area includes using the sight reduction tables, which was confusing as hell. I continued reading the several texts over the years, some of the passages are marked with dates in 2012. Today it hit me, I get it. And realize I need a lot more practice.
What fell into place was imagining I was high up in the air looking down at a sailboat where a sextant reading had just been taken. The two triangles I knew about and that I was using an assumed point (AP) chosen because its calculations had already been done.. The first part made sense because you are taking some information, in this case a date, time, and sextant reading and using it to look up some information. After that I was operating on remote. This can be done and I have no doubt it is by thousands. To me, that is akin to cheating.
Now the second part is roughly the opposite. You are taking some information and looking up the readings. I’ll elaborate. The first half you are using data for readings, the second half you are using readings for data. You see, somebody has created a booklet that contains the entire set of readings that would be taken each AP. These tables are universal, they are all trigonometry. On the featureless ocean I now imagine that big triangle again. The site reduction book, a separate volume from the Almanac, allows you to choose which one of those thousands of spots is closest to where you think you are. I’m writing this for me, so I’m over-simplifying. You see, every possible reading has limits. The Sun may shine all over half the planet, but the physical points where it is actually above a spot on the Earth is confined to the narrow band between the tropics. This cuts down the set possible readings to a manageable size. It can be done without understanding what is going on, but that poses the danger that one cannot “check for reasonableness”.
Thus, it took a while but now I see how each author had a different method of teaching the material, some of it seemingly contradictory. I conclude with a quick description of the process as I now understand it. The purpose of the sextant reading is to calculate the single spot on Earth that the Sun is directly above. Then, using DR (dead reckoning), you choose another spot nearby that is contained in the site reduction tables. That spot (the AP) has all the calculations about itself pre-calculated, but it is the readings you would have taken had you been at that spot. Then, you compare those readings to what your sextant told you. Even if you guess your DR wrong, you will get a LOP that is useful, just not all that accurate.
ADDENDUM
How went the gig? The Legion is somewhat reticent but they remain satisfied with the material and that we are not loud. Alas, it was a dead evening with just ten or so patrons. The staff assures us this is normal for the summer and nothing to do with us being there. Still, it is a rare band that does not prefer a large audience. We played the three hours for tips only, but this time the house kicked in $40. The total is not enough, so the no more freebies, but there was an encouraging incident. If we play there again, however, the next move has to be theirs. The attendance tonight was disappointing, but here’s the encouraging word, read on.
You see, there was a lady waiting to hear us. After the first three or so songs, she wanted our contact info. She is the social coordinator for some chain of “over 55” communities or functions and said she was always on the lookout for suitable entertainment. She was more than pleased by us, in particular the sing-a-long aspect to more than half our list. We even played “You Are My Sunshine” tonight. We learned later she was there to hear us, keep those fingers crossed. There was a time I would shy away from “old folks” gigs, but that was before I moved to Polk.
The guy who really wanted to play mandolin with us didn’t show up. Since he was more than eager to see what we sounded like, I asked the bar maid if all was okay. I mean, the guy spotted we were could ace Bluegrass material and he really wanted to play. He is also the financial manager of the club and it turns out they did not get out of the place until 2:00AM this morning. He probably needed the down time and he isn’t going anyway, so we wait our turn.
As a band, we are fairly more responsive than usual to audience whims. It surprised us we got advice to turn up the vocals. Neither of us is a singer and we regularly forget lyrics. The music part, we can cover, we played around six or seven tunes unrehearsed tonight, mostly by theory, which got us at least one $10 bill in the box. I’m weak on vocals but the vote is we turn up. The sound is correct for that room. I have some bad news for myself, I have begun to miss ever more notes on stage. It isn’t a big deal as this duo has become very slick at covering errors, but this is a portent that my abilities are declining. It’s the old story, I play every note in my brain only to find the fingers don’t obey the commands. Hey, I’m still better than good enough, but my career is definitely on the wane.
