One year ago today: September 6, 2023, marching orders.
Five years ago today: September 6, 2019, dock bumpers.
Nine years ago today: September 6, 2015, the declining quality.
Random years ago today: September 6, 2010, City of New Orleans
What now? My office air conditioner is giving out. Likely from overwork. Fact is, this whole place is showing signs of neglect since 2018 and we know what that is all about. The good news is I was up until midnight and now pretty much understand how microphone signals get amplified. I would recognize such a circuit now; they are also based on voltage dividers. From reading, which is a damn good source, I had early developed the idea that voltage was a type of power supply. Gee, I wonder how that happened? I saw it as a static supply of a certain voltage. Now I learn that is it a moving target, the whole idea is feed some source into the voltage divider so it reproduces that signal in a useable form. And a microphone is just another source. Good morning.
I took out my old silo monitor, see photo, to test this idea and noticed something. The display has something I just talked about y’day. While it is not a stopwatch, it shows the time and date. This gadget was around a third the price of the cheapest purpose-built.
Y’know, creature of habit I am, I kind of miss getting up early and sorting tubes. There’s a subtle draw to it if you like organization. I now have a small box of specialty tubes, such as car radio valves, automatic headlight dimmers, and such. And a small collection of socket holders. Here’s a couple odd spots, I keyed in a random number of tubes this morning and the wholesale price came to exactly $500. And one of the rarest tubes, a Magnavox, had the line number of my bank PIN.
As I was leaving, in walks this guy with two working computers that he wants recycled. This normally is the result of some millennial convincing the owner that his units are “outdated” because they won’t play the latest games or videos. If I had been a few minutes sooner, I’d have gotten both units, but the policy of the recycle site is to remove and shred the drives. I have both units in the van, minus the drives until Monday.
This photo shows the units stacked in my kitchen an hour later. They appear to have two matching sets of an optical disk reader and a writer, hardly used at all. These are Vista era, so they still have peripheral cards and DRAM memory. If I’ve scored, this means the silo finally gets its own computer to track and store, something I’ve always avoided keeping on my work computer. What usually gives out on these models is the power supply, but the guy who brought them in says they work fine. Wish me luck.
Rather than drive home and back, I stopped at a new place, the Haven. A family-owned coffee shop full of people a third my age. But they are quiet company assuming they have nothing in common with somebody who can do a New York Times crossword in twenty minutes. Ageism is an increasing factor as I begin to look my age. See addendum.
Being ahead on several budget categories, a result of effective conservation, I spend $17 and grabbed lunch at Catfish County. Their portions are as astronomical as their prices. I could only finish half, so the rest is in the fridge for a fish sandwich at suppertime. I’ll stop at the library and call it a day, and remind everyone Friday is my day off.
In Guatemala.
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A closer examination of the Dells, show they have this handy front-mounted card reader. Alas, the motherboards are different so I can’t amalgamate parts into one upgraded unit. It hinges on whether XP will install on these ancient boxes, as these are definitely Vista machines, some of which are deliberately designed not to load XP. It was a race, as a dead calm has settled over the interior, a sure sign of an approaching rainstorm that has has been holding back.
This morning also meant two hours of driving around, so I began a new audio-book, “The Stars Are Fire”, which the jacket said was an adventure based on the 1947 forest fires that shut down many towns in Maine. Wrong. I did not interpret the blurb correctly, it is the story of a young mother who loses everything. Before I continue, I remind all that I worked as the only male in a department of 300 women at the phone company for nearly 15 years. I know how women think and have no illusions about it—and I’m hardly going to accept any critique on that from anyone who has less that 15 years, is what I’m saying. I also know that around 5% of women do not think like the rest and note they are the happiest, most content, and sensible women that I know. The rest seen to never be fully satisfied or pleased with anything in life.
It must be nice to skip through life with those as one’s deepest thoughts and concerns. No curiosity beyond the immediate, no accountability, no need to tackle anything too cerebral. What a thin and one-dimensional existence. It’s a brainless, air-headed life and she draws no connection between that and how her husband at most talks to her a few sentences a day and only touches her two or three times a month. I grabbed the jacket and read the fine print. This book was endorsed by Oprah. I’m near the end of disk one, where a storm surge is breaching the seawall two blocks from her house, but her major concern is whether her new short hair style accentuates her cheekbones and as the evacuation begins, ponders that her mother only ever called her “beautiful” once.
I donated 40 pounds of dog chow the pound and discovered they have changed the rules. Before, you could enter the kennel area and visit with the doggies. There was the old guy who know all the animals by name and you could stroll down the aisles. Now, you must show ID, sign in, wait 10 to 15 minutes while they do something with your information, and must have a staff escort. So, if you visit the dog pound, the government will keep a permanent record of that, too.
Ha, once again everywhere around me is hit with the storm, while I just walked out to the van in the gathering cool. Being home all afternoon, I ran the bedroom AC. I hoped it would last until October. No such luck, I wish I’d learned to recharge those things despite all the warnings. While I believe it takes some skill, it can’t take much or the job would pay better.
Due to the Prez’s new job, we cannot rehearse until next Tuesday. To toughen my fingertips, I played twelve of our tunes on the Ibanez. We got a real challenge ahead of us if I am to strum guitar throughout. To name a few, playing the bass does not entail (as some might think) that I know the guitar chords. It takes a guitar player to think like that because he thinks bass is simplified version of guitar. I had to stop at twelve tunes because of my fingers, and my guitar is super easy to play. Nor does being able to sing along while playing bass mean strumming is natural, in fact, it is somewhat the opposite.
I may have to write down a lot of these chords. It is almost certain I will have to play sitting down. Then again, the fact I cannot play guitar means I have a much better match at faking the strums than most. Sometimes you can guess what I’m playing through sheer familiarity with the way I botch it. I don’t so much write new song lists for changing circumstances as update old lists, and over the years I’ve created quite a set of what amounts to a history of this development. You can’t see it, but I can and the COVID hoax caused a real upset. The list expands and contracts, and this time it has gone full circle back to the early 1990s when the Reb & I played the Commodore. Here I am, strumming and singing Patsy Cline. Suddenly I’m glad I did not keep a journal in 1990 and I’ll punch anybody who makes a wisecrack about the Patsy Cline link.
Other things that do not follow. While I can capo the bass, doing the same on guitar throws me so badly I have to memorize the sequence, not as easy as it sounds. What little harmonies I can add disappear completely when I get behind a guitar. The list of what I know I can do is frozen at 40 songs, and that includes pharaohonic material l like “You Are My Sunshine” and “Kansas City”. I cannot play in B or F#, I cannot hammer-on except in G, C, and D. I know only four 7th chords, and I never could play a proper F.
Will we do this? Of course. It’s already committed. Unless I can fix the Gigrack, we may have little choice. Did I mention the only PA I can afford is that 4-channel and it is priced twice what it is worth? At least I do not get guitar elbow when sitting down. Yep, song-list-wise, damn near a return to square one. All we need now is a chick playing guitar and signing while I switch back to bass. Say, that reminds me. Whatever happed to the mother-daughter band? What reminds me is I play guitar kind of like the mother, and by now we likely weigh about the same.
ADDENDUM
The tech at the computer store is a contemporary about twenty-five years younger than myself. This came about because I studied computers some twenty years before anyone I knew or worked with knew anything about them. That’s a full two decades before the Internet came along and made everybody both an expert and a genius. Thus he began learning computers around the time XP came on the market, however he knew very little of how things operated at that time. I gave him copies of all the cheat-ware that made computers affordable for mere mortals at the time.
Though millennial in thought and deed, he is very aware of the technical shortcomings of his generation. He knows there is little hope they can maintain the complicated and expensive infrastructure that made modern life possible. The few backyard mechanics that will remain in another ten years are hardly going to prop up the system that still relies on hundreds of thousands of highly-skill (and motivated) Boomers.
We have some interesting and fast-paced chats over computer lore and a hint of politics. He gave me some pointers on newer software that I distrusted by 2000, but assures me which brands now work without surprises, one of them being the app that burns installable copies of CD/DVD disks on a hard drive. And as proof at least part of my ills are diet-related, he is suffering many of the same conditions as myself—except he’s still in his forties. Loss of peripheral vision, random fatigue, slower recovery times, premature greyness, gout, and a heightened intolerance of ignorant bullshit from people who don’t look like movie stars.
Spending a few moments with my tube study, I got the datasheet for the 6DX8 and conclude there must be some trick to reading the datasheets. They avoid showing the names of what the pins are for, instead using tags like f, g3, g3s, and another f. Where there are numbers, they go like 1.3,5.4,7. Engineer-think. Only an engineer would give two pins the identical designation. I even tried following the symbols in the diagrams. By now, I’ve tried over 70% of the possible combinations and got plenty of nothing.
Even finding time to look closer at the voltage divider, sure enough once more I find a topic that is not on the Internet, namely a site with examples of useful applications of this circuit. Either I have a penchant for finding subjects that nobody else knows about, or the Internet is far from what it is cracked up to be. Turns out voltage dividers are like Darlingtons—something lots of on-line “experts” love to talk about the how, but have no clue about the why. I’ve designed a newer layout that replaces one of the fixed resistors with a variable unit. The plan is to find the Q range of an LED.
