One year ago today: January 14, 2024, Operation Flush.
Five years ago today: January 14, 2020, holograms or nothing.
Nine years ago today: January 14, 2016, a generic day.
Random years ago today: January 14, 2018, robin flock.
Where am I? Like I just came out of hibernation. Are you ready for another day of post-retirement Florida news and good times? Too bad, all I want to do is build a box. It’s 57°F out there and I’m on my third refill. Maybe I’ll walk over and see how the lawnmowers are doing. I told him to sell the Honda. I took the early morning off, with grilled cheese and hot coffee and read up on Operation Bolo. This was the time the US airforce wiped out most of the MiGs in the North Vietnamese air force. I knew it was a set-up, and now I know how they did it. See addendum. By mid-morning, it is still in less than 60°F, so I hauled out the bass.
Yep, I sure would like to play “Only Daddy”, but who can sing that? And I devised an excellent walking bass line to “Diggin’ Up Bones” that’s even busier than before, which really offsets the chorus from the rest of the tune, one of my specialties. (And the one missed most when guitarists try it without me.). But since you have to hear both versions to appreciate what I do, I’ll never be famous for it. So, as it got up to 60°F I went outside and turned over the John Deere. It cranks just fine, but it is not getting any fuel. I’ve done all I can, time to get rid of it for whatever. Without selling off surpluses around here, my investments have shrunk to nothing meaningful.
I spent some time inventorying the blog posts. There are a lot of discrepancies. The hardest to resolve are posts that are simply missing. June of 2022 shows 29 posts but on-line there are 30. It’s been a number of years since Google took away the unique feature of BlogSpot, a beautiful app that let you pull up a month of posts at a time. Now, the only lookup is a tedious one-by-one field search, where you must type in the field name and the title exactly. So far, I’ve managed to log just 550 of the 7,000+ posts. You long-term patrons out there probably know more about this blog than I do.
The next picture shown the hinge recess being chiseled out. This remains a tricky operation. I need the practice, so even the cheapest boxes I build tend to have hinges and latches these days, plus a layer of stain or poly. Stain tends to make them look more expensive than they really are. If you examine the marks on the wood here, you can see the outline is chiseled, then the smaller cuts, as the final chipping is done by hand. This box may turn out the right size for my navigation tools, so there are some extras included. For instance, the hinges are narrower than the wooden frame, so you can spot the cut does not go completely across the wood. There is a small lip left on the interior.
It says here a major Canadian chain of movie theaters is bringing back $5 Tuesdays, and that includes the popcorn. It might just save their necks. In France, a leftoid theater opened their doors to 250 African migrants for a free show. That was five weeks ago and they have not left yet. Speaking of the French, how about that 53 y.o. Frenchwoman who fell for an on-line Brad Pitt imitator and sent him €830,000 Euros? My only question is where does an interior designer get that much money in the first place?
Space station garbage compactor.
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This next box is super cheap, made out of leftover chip board. (The corners will be reinforced later with metal drywall bead.) It’s for my ramshackle collection of long screw and bolts that won’t fit in my rack. This hardware has always been the worst organized, so bad that I often bought new pieces rather than go hunting around. Thus, I now have a lot of mismatched pieces. This box should hold most of that I’ve accumulated. This is another box built without measuring tools and totally using power tools. I also found a decent blueprint for a simple spline jig uses four pieces of lumber and two wooden slides.
Later, this is the third box mentioned. Argh, it is just under and inch too small for the longest tool, my parallel rulers. You can see the markings between my thumb and pointer in the picture below. Pretty dang close, however, since this box was also built to no specs I’m lucky even this near. I’m tempted to router a notch to make it fit. The staples are not very cosmetic but they make a very strong connection. I’ve learned several techniques that aren’t covered in the how-to books I use for reference. Like how attaching a bottom plate across the whole bottom of the box is not as strong as a recessed panel that is attached to the sides.
It was Gunsmoke Tuesday and Festus was not in the cast. We have watched most of the shoot-em-up episodes. Now the fare is kind of sappy, this week was about the daughter of a drunk trying to get herself married. Instead she gets as close to molested as they could show in 1950. The portrayal of poverty was very accurate, that I can confirm. Not the shortages so much as the way having nothing affects thinking, especially in children. How poverty can force you into decisions you know are wrong that materially affect the rest of your life. The ones that need help the most are ashamed to ask for it.
Nor do I care much for the group of “scientist” who are claiming that trauma from the Holocaust is in DNA and now passed to a whole new generation of wanting reparations to continue. They even gave it a name, epigenetic inheritance.
Wanting a challenge, I took on a chapter about 64-bit addressing. Did you know a lot of 64-bit computers do not operate at that full capability? That’s another story, I was curious about the addressing. Every byte of memory that operates your computer has an address. My focus is on-board memory, not storage. This harks back to my early experience with assembler. I passed the course but never really used the language. These locations are where the computer, when it is running a program, executes instructions and crunches the numbers. The addresses where the actual work takes place are called registers. That’s as deep as I’ll report, but I am reading this addressing in much more detail.
There are two address schemes, absolute and offset. Both are simple. For those who have ever wondered why the complication of hexadecimal notation, this is where it is used. Hex is a shorthand for these addresses. I’ve seen many examples of hex math and notations but addressing is really the only place I have ever really bothered with it Enough, this is not for everybody, and you bet this will put you to sleep.
ADDENDUM
I’ve always maintained the poor American performance in Nam was due to bureaucratic interference. One such rule was that US aircraft could not fire on other planes without visual confirmation. This just meant the MiGs always got close enough to do some damage. At this time, the American strategy was to bomb the snot out of the enemy logistics system, which should have worked, but again, due to politics, it did not. The MiGs would hit the bombers and be gone by the time the US fighter jets could engage. So, as near as I can discover, here’s how they got the MiGs to fight.
The politicians also said US aircraft had to follow a specified corridor into the target area. The Vietnamese quickly learned to place all their missiles, radars, and AA cannons into that slot. Then they picked up the jamming signals from the bomber pods, they went on alert. The Americans mounted jammer pods onto some fighter jets, and flew then down the corridor in bomber formation. They somehow had got the entire rest of the US military to keep their airplanes on the ground that day, thus anything in the sky that wasn’t ours was the enemy, good enough for visual confirmation.
The MiGs attacked and were getting blasted away before they realized the sky was full of fighters. The few that got away found standing “rat patrols” of other US jets around their airfields when they returned. I stopped reading at this point as it answers how 12 of the Vietnamese force of 16 planes was wiped out. A couple unanswered questions would be how the got the rest of the US services to keep out of the sky, but it could have been a simple fake bad weather report. Nor is there any info readily available over whether the rat patrols got any kills. I like it as it is the type of operation I would have planned given the chance.
