One year ago today: December 30, 2023, junk bass lines.
Five years ago today: December 30, 2019, JeePee sends Morse.
Nine years ago today: December 30, 2015, the Z-A Theory.
Random years ago today: December 30, 2007, building computers.
Chinese food for breakfast signals I’m cheering up a bit. I’m about as broke as I can be, but still smiling. I have enough to do that costs nothing. Still, it’s a warning sign, 2024 was a terrible time of it. I’m sketcing out a plan for a tape deck in my van. It has only a non-working CD player, so I rigged up a portable unit. But they no longer make a decent cassette player. But, you know the beautiful Pioneer dual deck with auto reverse? It never gets used more than a couple times per year. I’m thinking because to work right it would have to be mounted where the controls can be reached. Or test how it reacts to an off-on switch.
Here’s a view of a “fast box”, slapped together from pallet lumber. If you can spot the details, this unit incorporates all kinds of lessons and experience. It’s missing the hardware, but I have plenty of used hinges and hasps these days. The fit is not perfect but that is one tough box and it looks okay from a distance. The box also benefits from the pneumatic tools and to me, it proves I was right as a kid. You do not need to become a master carpenter like they tried to fool me. It is possible to produce user-quality boxes like this almost entirely by using power tools.
See also a picture of a pallet plank sliced in half. This is the “half-size” lumber I wish experience working with. It reveals the table say has a misaligned fence and an uneven throat plate. I suspected as much but it was not a worry with the mediun-size boxes or bigger. The depth mechanism is also wonky. At maximum it does not quite cut through a 5-1/2” piece.
It was not a productive day. I did some cutting and sawing that didn’t need doing and raked a bit. That’s all, except breakfast. I was mulling over the band and our lack of gigs. We are the only country duo of this nature in Polk County and I know my research and calculations were not so wrong that we came up with nothing. Polk does not exist in isolation and our material is time-tested. Only so much can be blamed on COVID and there has not been enough time for demographics to change without somebody noticing. All of the clubs on my original list have folded. That’s all supply side. The demand is always there, just listen to radio stations.
A relaxing shed day. I had work to do, instead, I puttered away the day, mostly with boxes. I now have several pneumatic tools and there is no going back. They have the power to get things done and made a convert out of me in no time. I am okay with having three or four boxes happening at once. The shop is a mess, but that’s what I wanted for so long. A shop that doesn’t care how often I vacuum or sweep. So there.
How about a minor panic at noon. My safest, most protected and secure bank account was hit for $172. And I hit the roof. This ignited an audit of all bank accounts and sure enough, another $82 from the joint account. This tells me the discrepancies are in Tenness, so the panic subsides. But this is still a problem. The way the cross-referencing works, these accounts should not be used at all for debits. Turns out the $172 was a vet bill from September that just go process this month. And the $82 is gasoline which could fit into the definition of emergency use, which is what the account is for. My lady, even if she is not my lady, does not get stranded without gas. But wow, this audit did not do my blood pressure any good.
Another airliner with landing gear problems. One common trait, the airlines use DEI ground crews. The governor in Oklahoma proposes that to graduate, a student must qualify for college or a trade school. Otherwise, to graduate, join the army. All the dumbos scream that’s telling them how to lead their lives. Nonsense, it’s only telling you what you must do to graduate. You can stay dumbo all you want.
Nvidia’s latest chip, “Jetson Thor” is designed to integrate A.I. with robotics. I did my best to get a head start on all this back in 2010, but failed. I read every source I could find on the subject. The problem was not grasping the material, but following the way it was implemented by idiots. Like my cell phone. I know exactly how it is supposed to work. Yet I still can’t find the menu that erases only one chat, so it is all or nothing. Unless you were gradually groomed to think like they do, there is no clear and simple way to work the thing. If you’ve ever seen a cell-phone tech pretending he’s not resorting to trial-and-error, you know I’m right.
The claim is they can train the robots using “simulated environments”. Once again, we see a new field where regulations and standards will be ignored for fast market gain. The money and lives lost will not emerge until after enough dangerous errors appear that there is a public outcry, and the bad software will be incompatible with improvement. It’s the millennialware life-cycle. That’s why this blog is the only work of any size with indented paragraphs. Nobody who created HTML knew how type properly, and now the world is stuck with that.
In five years, the market for the human-like robots this will bring should be worth nearly a trillion. But nobody knows for sure what company will dominate the market. The winners will be once again largely a matter of chance. I say human-like and not humanoid, as they will be cheap facsimiles. And already the losers of the world are bellyaching about who will have equal access to this technology.
Napoleon’s birthplace.
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Several hours in the shed, I put a box together in 35 minutes, again just the wooden sides. It’s gluing up, a demo that I can build these fast enough if need be, but quality goes kaput. Corners a little off square, cracks between slatted pieces, that kind of thing. All reparable more efficient to make them right in the first place. Here’s a tale from the trailer court that is so old, I can’t find it in the handwritten material. The link is that I once ruined a desk when I was a kid and today I rediscovered red mahogany stain. When I was nine I wanted a desk. I grew up in a house where there was no quiet private place to work or read. Hence, the desk was logical in that nobody else in the place had any use for such a thing. It looked so nice in the display.
When I opened the carton at home, the desk was plain unfinished wood. What a disappointment made worse by the fact there was nobody you could dare ask. To openly inquire about anything was inviting ridicule, which in itself is nothing, but you’d never hear the end of it. “You get high marks is school and don’t know how to paint a desk.” So I bought a can of stain with zero experience and the only “fancy” wood I ever heard of was mahogany. I read the directions on the can but they did not make sense to a ten-year old. Put it on and wipe it off? I must have bought the only can with the wrong directions.
So, I applied it like paint and let it dry. I ruined the desk for looks, but it was all I had to do any work on. I ran out of stain so the back and the inside of the drawers were not done. Alas, when I was thirteen, we moved to a shack, the one where I dug my own room in the basement. It was too cold to work there in the winter, so the desk was mostly used for storing stuff that was snooped through every time my back was turned. I had a dislike for mahogany coloring after that.
Until today. I’ve left several boxes with unfinished bottom panels and some of the tool boxes have no finish as they are unplanned lumber. A recent trip to the used paint depot got me a pint of red mahogany stain. I figured why not use that just given the normally hidden lumber some kind of looks. What do you know, it turned out to be ideal for base plates and areas I never bothered to fuss over. Take a close look how nice this product worked. How that is how a bottom plate should look. See also the angle shot with the reflected light. This is to show this is not fancy planed lumber.
The discovery is that the red mahogany stain covers very well and hides a lot of smaller mistakes. I applied it to all exposed raw surfaces of today’s boxes. And found yet another plus, it makes smaller boxes look great. It gives a depth and tone I liked right away. The stain soaks in easily, I like that. I am ready to forgive red mahogany for ruining my childhood desk that was the precursor of my writing hobby of today.
I baked chicken, boiled up some spuds, and ran some numbers. I have this foreboding about 2025, I mean financially. I was recently asked if it is better save up a nest egg or to invest. Without more information, I could not say. If you are poor, saving is your only option because investing ties up your money. I’ve written a chapter on this effect—every time you save up, something goes wrong. To do it right, you need the discipline to conduct both. Most people never get there.
So the answer is that it depends. Is it better to have $20,000 in cash or $20,000 invested. If you are poor, you are poor, congratulations if you can maintain savings at that level. If you are rich, it’s dumb not to invest it. Crazy me I check Caltier the last few days because once in the past they paid an early dividend. Aha, I just connected. They paid out $61 on my $23,000 total investment, which is about average I’ve learned on months when they don’t buy or sell a property. The total return by their calculation is now 9.99%. They weight their calculations differently.
My calculations are based on averages so as to make comparisons easier. My average invested is half today’s total, since I started with zero and the deposits were fairly regual. So I show a return of closer to 14%, much better than bank interest indeed. This means Caltier remains the top producer.
I’m putting my regular check on house prices on hold unless I hear news of prices dropping. I’ve always held that any system where the majority of buyer’s use borrowed money will ultimately create the situation where nobody can afford to buy. America and Canada are just extreme examples. All the money borrowed for these mortgages is created out of thin air.
A cutting board. There must be an obscure law that every woodworker is supposed to start by making this no-brainer project. Except me, that’s another boat I missed. Reject pallet lumber for cutting boards as who knows what it was treated with or what got spilled on it. But for practice I suppose it would be okay. The connection today is that I read up on the food-safe products recommended for finishing the wood, and I like the finish itself. More reading shows this product to be a type of wax. While the price is low enough, at about ten bucks a tin, if the boards are in use they must be periodically refinished.
That cancels that unless you are equipped for the task. The experts are evenly divided on whether to apply a protective layer, so somebody is wrong. If the last layer is oil-based, isn’t that a hazard? I wanted to know if a non-food surface that is wax can be covered in poly. Seems nobody in our vast greatest generation knows. Good heavens, man, millennials purchase breadboards, they don’t build them.
ADDENDUM
An announcement that the deportations will begin in Chicago has other cities screaming for second place. England has refused admistion to Assad’s wife in a medical emergency, stating her passport has expired. Another DEI maintained Air Canada jet had a wing catch fire. Somebody in California won the $1.22 billion MegaMillions jackpot. Carter kicked the bucket, the meme making the rounds is he did it to avoid attending Trump’s inaugurations. Here’s a sample of the responses to the situation:
That didn't stop him from voting.The one thing I cannot forgive Carter for was how in funding the useless shuttle program, he stalled the mission to Mars by 30 years. Before the shuttle, there were breakthroughs in the news every other month or so. The shuttle has never produced one truly useful outcome.
He skipped his presidency too!
Who could tell the difference?
He had a more pressing appointment.
That’s commitment!
