One year ago today: March 30, 2024, 100% in our favor.
Five years ago today: March 30, 2020, more on Forex.
Nine years ago today: March 30, 2016, part of a convoy.
Random years ago today: March 30, 2008, job-hunting.
Here’s the mess in the kitchen as the wiring segment begins. This is normal clutter for renovating, you can see the tools are all handy, including nice wooded boxes for the valuable items. It’s been easier for some years now, like I knew it would be even when everybody said it was strictly a two-man job. Y’know, I agree with that, and even remind Alaine from time-to-time that it would be okay if she got JZ to actually drive out here some summer so we can get all of it done and give me back my spare room.
This next photo should be more familiar. It is the area designated for the new stove. That’s my temp prep counter with the hotplate and coffee maker. You can see to the upper left (along the red level handing on the wall) the mess of old wiring I first discovered some years back. This is where I suspect an instance of that weird 220V wiring first seen at Wally’s. It must have been some odd way of using two 110V breakers to get a 220V, since the odds of seeing the same [wiring] as a mistake twice are infinitesimal.
Youtube needs to smarten up. They are supposed to be a video host, but they are hugely taken over by A.I. generated graphics and talking stills. Europe is having a secondary immigrant crisis. The Somalis and such have taken all the entry level jobs in Spain and young native Spaniards can’t find work. They have fled to other European countries and are choking up the hostels and welfare rolls.
The deadline for tariff realignment is just 96 hours away. While it won’t affect me too directly unless other things go awry, this could be a huge adjustment of people living on credit. Not paying attention to real costs has allowed them to ignore changes in supply and demand for fifty years—all coming home to roost in a matter of days. You may know that auto unions have fat pensions, but are you aware that most of it does not come from wise investments by the union staffers. It is tacked on to the price of every new car.
Things are way out of whack and a return to supply and demand is going to wallop a lot of these people hard. It’s notions about what is normal that will hurt them most. Did you know their taxes support more Holocaust museums in America than all other museums combined?
One of the most useless on-line apps I have ever tried is this Podcast Name Generator supposed to enhance the success of your podcast. Or something. Examples: “My Life as a Podcaster”, “A Day in the Life of a Podcaster”, and “Podcaster Life”. Don’t you just love it already? Interesting how I rejected this sort of titling twenty years ago as being too damn trite for the onrushing computerized new world, but today it is considered top-tier material. Gag.
Abandoned US railroads.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
It’s one of those days where it doesn’t look like much got done. This shows where most of today’s work was put in. A bit of good news is one of the joists that jammed into place will now wiggle slightly. This means the building is creaking back to more level on the older joists. So, let’s examine this more closely. You can see I had to remove a portion of the wainscoting. It was fake, but it was 3/8” plywood and I hated to destroy it., br />
The old stove cable has to go. I ripped it out completely as the nearby picture shows the outer insulation is gone. That’s the bare copper shielding formed by the grounding wire. The new stove will be six feet further from the old connection and I can tell by picking this wire up, it is going to be expensive. It’s a priority but once done may cause a slowdown of the rest of the job. You know me when the living is easy and the food is good. I can live a while longer without a hallway light.
I’m not the only one. Granny raccoon is nearly blind and deaf, more than I thought. From twenty feet she cannot see or hear me working. If you throw her a peanut, though, she can smell it instantly. I won’t let her get tame. She no longer bolts across the yard when I walk past on the paths to the sheds. She has taken to feeding in the daytime in the front yard, having learned that is a safe haven.
You know who needs a kick in the ass? The millennial coders that changed the exchange rate convertors. To shove it down your throats that they are kewl, tolerant, and born assholes, the more popular sites no longer default to American dollars. Almost three quarters of the world runs on greenbacks, but they got to millennialize that. It’s been ten minutes since they last reminded you how wonderful and caring they are to everybody. Except you.
OpenCandy is still around. It only bothers Win 7 and later, but get it off your system. If you know DOS, this adware is so dumb it has its own uninstall capability. And just so you are aware of it, you should not download music off the Internet. You should play it and record it using your own software, preferably and older version of Audacity. And if you do use Audacity, don’t use the “Edit Meta Tags” feature when you export the file. Leave it blank.
Going over the new guy’s list, there is a lot of opportunity there. The reason is simple, most of his tunes have three or more guitar parts. Listen to old Jim Croce. Lead, electric rhythm, and acoustic rhythm. The presentation depends on which instrument is chosen, and Roberto has twice written that he is not that great. That means he has likely chosen the obvious strum—meaning he has to leave out any riffs from the other guitars. And who do we know that can ace the best ways to arrange that type of music?
For some down time today, I dug out the first “memory” circuit I built. It stopped working, but I had it for a while. It’s what is known as a logic gate, I built the actual gate out of transistors. It uses NOR gates, which I first breadboarded in 2012. This item goes by many names, the common one is SR latch, for set/reset. Understanding this gadget can improve one’s understanding of computer RAM, so I thought I’d run through workings. It is called a latch because it remembers whether it was last turned on or off. Ah, some say, so does a light switch. Yes, but that’s where the memory part comes in.
When a circuit has a latch, once you turn it on, it does not matter if you continue flipping the switch, the light stays on. The light remembers it was set on. To turn it off, you need a second switch called a reset. It sounds weird, but you have two switches, one is “light on”, the other is “dark on”. But it does not end there, and this is important—you need several gates to make a latch work AND every style of latch has something it will not do right (a condition called ‘hysteria’).
You need separate switches to turn the light on and off, and either switch only needs to be on for a split second. After that, you can remove them completely and the light remembers. That is because the circuit has its own separate power supply. You can also turn off the light by removing this separate power supply—but that also destroys the memory capability. You experience this every time your computer power cuts off and you lose what you were working on.
There is a bit more to the NOR gate and I think I will build another complete unit to find out what went wrong. It requires four transistors to operate the gates. You can look the circuit up anywhere on-line, most of them are built by dorks who have no idea how it really works. This I know, because not one of the first dozen authors I read explained one of the most important points—that the power to the R or S is NOT left in place. It is a momentary pulse only.
ADDENDUM
After an astounding response to y’days video clips (you don’t get to see them all), I need to address something. These are not A.I. generated for a basic reason—when you upload, you lose ownership of the material. That may mean nothing to most concerning content, but only because most people never go or get anywhere. I cannot find an A.I. video app that is downloaded to run locally. Even the software on-line requires a link to your bank account or credit card before it will work. (Ha, have you heard about the latest IoT appliances that won’t function unless you have an active subscriber link. If you fall for that, it serves you right.)
I have looked at Canva, Vizard, Kapwing, InVideo, Reed, Renderforest, and most other that show up when you search for downloadable free apps. I know they have to make money, but the point is they lie by lacing their site with falsities. Furthermore, the trial apps that demand a log-on are also suspect. They are also much slower (on the library computers) than producing the same short videos I do here in often less than ten minutes.
You’d think the millions of people who suffered front posting text and pictures on-line would have learned their lesson, but no. Now they are posting videos. WCGW?
It is a group of anti-Tesla protesters.
Wearing DOGE shirts and MAGA hats.
