One year ago today: July 17, 2024, eBay is labor intensive.
Five years ago today: July 17, 2020, wood & wire cage, hmmmm.
Nine years ago today: July 17, 2016, Armed Forces Radio.
Random years ago today: July 17, 2010, drum machines suck.
Let’s start with a challenge. Who says there is more or less than $10.00 in the Tennessee change bucket from the last trip? The difference is breakfast. If there is more, we are going downtown, if there is less, it just gets rolled over into general revenue. Ready? See addendum. The guitar player wants to do some tunes, probably newer than my newest, but it’s always time for a change. Trouble is, I got up tired this morning and need to work on my concept of a “morning siesta”. My inbox is swamped with notices that Trump’s latest cut-the-fat bill has passed, but I still have not seen my $5,000 DOGE rebate.
Last day required 8 hours driving time, during which the detective audiobook ended without a trial, as the charges were dropped. I do not recommend “Fugitive” due to character bloat and too much lawyer glorification. I used much of the travel time to ponder what celestial navigation has taught me that is not in the textbooks. Would you like to learn some if it? Sure, why not, but we are getting off the topic of navigation and into what I make of it. Remember seeing any of the “satellite orbit” diagrams when you were a kid? I thought satellites orbited in circles.
Ah, but now we can think things through. Those wavy tracks must be a satellite that is orbiting the Earth in a north-south direction as the Earth turns underneath from left to right in this diagram. Most of the USSR is in the northern hemisphere, wasting half of any east-west or even diagonal path. Time it right, and you can make most of the dark hours over Antarctica. So, circumpolar almost 90% surely means a spy satellite. That explains why they are not launched from Florida—if you launch north, any of the (many) failed rockets would fall on populated areas. Instead, they are launched from Vandenburg in California, so they would splatter in the ocean.
Now, these would be the capsule recovery “camera” satellites that eject film canisters. The “electronic” spy satellites can hover in place, like GPS, and pick up the almost elint instant signals, but for resolution, they still use digital photos for the best images. I read once they tried beaming them down but the very best TV pics are not in range of a receiver long enough to get good shots. Another thing that now makes sense is why the recovery aircraft snag the parachutes north of Hawaii. If I follow that particular wavy line backwards, that means the payload is ejected from the satellite over Alaska. Should it fail, it hits uninhabited US territory.
By the time it gets to recovery altitude, it is north of Hawaii, and area heavily patrolled by the air force, which now makes sense. My studies taught me such elaborate systems never work completely right, so if time permits (I have an appointment today about therapy sessions), I will see what data, if any, is on-line about those early days. What was it called? SAMOS or something, because they had to pretend they were weather satellites.
The code enforcement people should just pitch a tent up the road. It looks like they are making the crews dismantle some of the work and do it over. I’m seeing a new term in my casual reading on electronics. A “relay simulator”. Possibly it is a typo, but I think it may have to do with a two-position relay. That is, most relays are normally open or normally closed and switch to the opposite state. Is there a relay that is normally neutral? I’ve never seen one.
ESA shaped radio beam reflector.
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The event of the week was my medical review. Their parameters show I’m about as recovered as it gets. Everything within easy guidelines, please come back in six weeks. The activity level I achieve with comfort in that time is what I should expect as a maximum for the rest of my life. When the pain returns, and it will, time for another round of shots. Or possibility of burn the nerve endings. Sounds like fun. The good news is my dental plan may have approved crowns, a second latter says make an appointment.
I was late with the doggie food donation, but the staff finally recognizes and remembers me. Each evening this week I drove past the old club in Bartow to see it completely empty. Yep, the only busy night is Saturday, which we predicted and they can’t keep the doors open very long with just that. Across the street, the only four-story building in town, the court house annex, is being torn down.
My Kenwood stereo receiver is soon to become a radio player in the shed. It’s replaced by this small powered speaker from the Robot Club. However, it does not have the bass depth of comparable small units I’ve heard. It is relegated to a computer speaker. It has an internal amp but has a bad design that it accepts only line-level input, that is, it cannot be driven by an external amp via the 1/8th inch jack. And this is why I do not like the latest version of Movie Maker, the old app worke better.
A half-hours work, chop-sawing scraps into burn barrel length, put me out of action. Well, I did also unload more from the truck, haul some lumber around and cut up some tree branches. I was taking inventory of what lumber I have. Everything that cannot be used structurally is likely to be cut to length to build boxes. I need another dozen smaller units for valuable tools and instruments. I was right about that, these tiny boxes, less than six or seven inches long, prove ideal compared to the plastic cases they replace.
On the way to the clinic and back, it was a hoot listening to NPR as their funding cut looms. It’s a major budget cut, but face it, not all the public listens to public radio. I also do not like the millions in subsidies going to “rural” stations. People who live in remote areas by choice have opted out of services provided in the cities. No way should they expect to have the same levels of anything provided by a community. If they want a radio station, let them pay for it themselves.
But the laff in DC is that Comey lady, daughter of the FBI guy they ran off. She was fired and NPR broadcast a totally sympathetic version. Comey was not given a reason for the firing, but she did say it was “disrespectful” that she was not given a reason. That, she went on to say, is something only a biased, undemocratic, evil-minded, evil, cold-hearted dictator would do. To her credit, she did leave out racist, misogynist, nazi, rapist, felon, and pedo. She just cannot imagine why she got shit-canned.
NPR then ran a segment on the new tax on “professional gamblers”. They maintain it is just another career path that takes years to perfect. Actually it is a law that says they lose certain tax benefits. But I was too busy laughing as Tampa said this would result in massive layoffs of waiters, servers, and bartenders nationwide. As if gambling is integral to the survival of the country. But smoothest was the half-hour broadcast about the NPR/PBS funding cuts “after they had already been approved” without once mentioning the reason. That is, not a peep that is twas because they were accused of using their stations to broadcast woke propaganda.
Another lefttoid show is being cancelled due to lack of viewers, that Colbert show. I’ve only seen outtakes, but that was enough to peg him a woketard.
ADDENDUM
Technically, we are both right. It came out to $9.70 and the decision was made. Ah, but was it an accurate decision. One of the quarters did not look right. Is it a Susan B. Anthony? Not even close, although their faces are much the same. This is a Ulysses Grant $1 coin, described on-line as neither rare nor valuable. Those AOLs at the US mint are disconnected from reality. I will try to get rid of it at the money order store. It bears no date. This means we actually have $10.45, so let’s go grab that breakfast.
The staffers operating the auto-pen are tagged as “rogues” but not punished so far. A bill has been introduced (ho-hum) to prevent this and it is the name that got my attention. The “Ban on Inkless Directives and Executive Notarizatons”, that is, the BIDEN Act.
What’s this? Old Gunsmoke re-runs in 2025 have higher streaming minutes than Disney woke crap. I’d like to think I had something to do with that. I do not think I emphasized the importance of the decision last day to stop pursuing a business idea. This is a retraction, but only partially because I’ve always known the importance of infrastructure. Who has not noticed that most success stories are not geniuses or innovators, but dumb-asses at the right place at the right time—with enough money to say, “Hey, I can do that.”
The good news is this frees up a budget category that can now be used for improvements to the system. It’s already done, for example, the chop saw I brought back from Tennessee has a compound miter setting my others do not. In a way, this process has been working its way forward for a while. Like how I have a drill for every size of popular bit and now a different stapler for each size staple.
Here’s a photo of the type of saw I mean which resembles mine. Not the saw. All the damn sawdust all over the place.
