One year ago today: September 22, 2023, of course they did.
Five years ago today: September 22, 2019, I tried for year.
Nine years ago today: September 22, 2015, advanced and tedious, both.
Random years ago today: September 22, 2007, Disney barf bag.
It’s memory lane, since most of the day I will be puttering. Late last evening while clearing a space for hopefully my final tube shelf, I found a partial backup disk. I say partial, because in those days, I would generally try to fill disks, even if the material was not related. I found four priceless videos and some stills. You get some of the stills, but I cannot certify the captions or dates match the events, as some of these were promo shots. However, if I have this disk, it means I likely have the videos nearby. What a find that would be, video from 1998 and 1999, from South America. Here is a view of the taxi’s I owned, being washed on an otherwise dull Wednesday morning in 1999.
I put in four hours. Most of the work was applying vapor barrier to the red shed lean-to, the area that needs a whole new floor and the roof leaks. Hunt around, you’ll find pictures of the tinfoil and shelf if there’s room. What’s with this rumor that Blackrock may be filing for bankruptcy? I’ll need some confirmation, but remember I described how they were risking all by putting only down payments on all this property? You can’t do that year after year unless you are being propped up by some awfully shady people. If it is true, there you go, corruption is expensive and something that even slows down the grift, like an honest person winning the election, can bring down the whole rotten structure.
On the other hand, I’ve never had any problems with breakers tripping, as is common in Florida. Twenty circuits in a house that used to have five or six. Yes, but all my A/C, appliances, and bathroom circuits are dedicated, including the washer and dryer. That’s fourteen of the twenty legs right there. Both bedrooms have double wiring so one breaker doesn’t leave you in the dark, and don’t forget the two circuits for the attic lights and fan When I ever get around to moving the kitchen counters, that will take a new circuit off the main panel. I need a 240V breaker and they are over $50 each these days. So my heater really cost $180. Hang on, they are on sale at Home Depot for $37.
Instantly we have another problem. We’ve been millenialized. The specs on the box for the size of the heater do not mention the bracket requires another 1-1/2” clearance. That makes it too large to fit above the space where the door swings open. Way to go, Tyler. Next, my Easy-Shot, it’s a stapler, ceased working. I took it apart and put it back together. Not the first time I fixed things doing that. It’s seems okay now, which is lucky, that is one old stapler.
The 1971 western, “Lawman” is playing in the background. It was these movies that taught me in my early teens to beware of older women in ways that kept me out of tons of trouble when the supply dried up ten years later. I don’t mean in an evil or sexist way, but to watch out for certain behaviors. Nowadays the same could be said about most movies. Back then, there was nobody to warn you and the message from the movies was only there if you paid attention.
It got me thinking about my old pals, Zim & Smitty. I should look them up, it’s been a long time. Both became department store managers last I heard, as in forty years ago that I can remember. We were the “in crowd” and scored with all the girls in all three schools long before anybody else. Zim was a talented artist, Smitty was 6-foot-2 by the tenth grade, and I owned (and played in) the only “rock band within sixty miles. (There were two other bands, one was pop and they were good, the other was a country band and they were not.)
Anyway, it takes Lancaster until 14 minutes before the movie is over to poink an aging Sheree North (real name Dawn Bethel). You may know her as Babs, Kramer’s mother on Seinfeld. She made a career as a substitute for Marilyn Monroe, who was a notoriously unreliable alcoholic. She was also on Mary Tyler Moore, and Hawaii Five-O, however, I have never seen an entire episode of either show, so I’ll take the Internet’s word on that.
Next, I dipped two of the steel cans in an anti-rust coating and set them outside to dry. It’s like thick bright white paint. I get inside and I’ve got streaks of it all over my arms and belly. Now I’m not that clumsy yet. When I went out to check, they were not moved, but more paint on me. Can you figure it out? There was a long tall plant stem on my blind side. It had blown into the paint from a gust of wind and got paint under the leaves. As I brushed past moments later, I got smeared.
By sundown, I settled in with a good book on transistor base biasing. And finally found a few circuits that use the much-taught Darlington configuration. Instead of one the switching transistor turning the power transistor off and on, it “wiggles” it according to an input signal that is properly biased. That means the input signal is designed to operate around the Q point at the center of the linear portion of the transistor, which is what I’m reading about. If one of this makes sense, don’t worry. Two months ago, it didn’t make sense to me.
Mountain in eastern Congo.
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A good day after all, as all my work was in the shade. It gave me time to think and plan. One positive outcome is I believe the money from the tubes will go toward a better camera. By now you are as fed up with the Panasonic as myself, particularly the dull colors. The was one more shelf in the silo, I wound up putting two. I’ll need a small workspace and room for a printer. I could network one but it still means walking over to get the printout. The silo will be, at the time, officially full.
Insight. That was the name of the Mars lander around 2018. It carried sensors to measure seismic data from meteorite impacts. The conclusion is there is lots of water on Mars. I always knew that because of all the riverbeds and deltas visible billions of years later. The catch is, the water is 16 miles below the surface. Because fluids like water and oil form a flat surface, they bounce back a consistent echo. Last I read, the deepest we’ve bored on Earth is 8 miles, not much good.
It’s a science to do not understand, but a memristor is like a resistor with a difference. When the power is turned off, it “remembers” it’s former state. I have not given up hope on A.I., I just don’t think the existing concepts work right. While checking on memristors, I stumble on an article that somebody has learned to “comb” silk. Raw silk is a tangle of fibers that become two-dimensional when lined up.
The link here is this silk can somehow be fused with graphene molecules to form circuits that are smaller and faster than human brain cell networks. Now that I would consider real A.I. stuff. It would be some trick to get it to emulate brainwaves but just imagine an assembly half the size of a human brain that can do routine things infallibly. It does not have to match the smartest humans, just the dumbest ones and that would change everything. Especially politics.
ADDENDUM
And, if memory serves, this would have been one of the last pictures taken of me before the heart attack, on a trip to the Everglades. Slim, young, proportionate, full of energy, and able to wear tight jeans. This would also have been around the time I began to gain mysterious weight at around two pounds per week. They told me it was normal, turns out it was anything but.
There are also a number of music scenes with, relatively speaking, excellent audio. The Hippie and I playing the Hollywood Bandshell in the summer of 2004. The audio may pass the blog criteria but I’ll need better computer gear to process those tracks. I want you to hear them in case anybody tries to claim a bass & guitar alone can’t play a concert shell. Then again, there was never another team anything like the Hippie and I, this is the half-crazy yahoo that wound up fighting with everybody. Except me, but I finally walked out on him in 2017.
Many of these stills were used for blurbs and letters and my file-naming system of the day did not add the dates. So no taking any captions as gospel. It was not usual to use pictures several years out of date to write letters, although this blog is fairly consistent one digital photos came around. These other pictures were taken with those big lunky SONY camcorders of the day, I do not recall how I got digital copies of some scenes here back the late 90s. I never did have a proper cassette camcorder to speak of, only a few digitals. And no, SONY, a digital format on a cassette tape is not the same thing.
