September 9, 2025

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 9, 2024, hype, hype, hype . . .
Five years ago today: September 9, 2020, fake “pecan” tree.
Nine years ago today: September 9, 2016, WIP
Random years ago today: September 9, xxxx, WIP


As usual, an entry like this indicates I'm probably on a road trip. Please check back later or tomorrow?


           Three cups of coffee and I was off to the lumber yard for enough to finish the new work counter. Then over to the Sheriff’s pound to donate some super fancy dog food this month. While not recovered from the situation up north, I will be able to manage two fun-filled events this month. Soon as I get a call of an opening, I’m off to Miami and I finally have a new camcorder. Not the fanciest, but the proliferation of phone cameras makes good hand-helds hard to find. I hit some traffic so I listened to a few more chapter’s of Aubrey’s murder mystery. It’s degenerated into hopeless soap opera, see Addendum.

           Here is the first quick trial of the camcorder. It suffers all the defects of every such camera on the market, the worst feature is that the format is incompatible with most legacy movie edit software. Nor is there any easy way to convert the format without the stupid and dangerous process of letting some stranger access your files on-line. I’ll work with it until I find something, my preferred software is good old MovieMaker, but it will not import .mov files. This gif is the neighbors barn-slash-studio. The slight jerkiness to the clip is from stills taken off .mov format.
           The fact that all contemporary camcorders and software share this same misfit is an anti-trust issue that should have been addressed long ago. But we live in the Age of Corruption.

           And there is that laser cutter, can I afford it. It brings precision that has frustrated me countless times. It’s doubtful I would live long enough to get as good as I’d like. But I can learn to program servo motors to do it for me. Those are the geared motors that I was steering toward with my studies of PWM (pulse width modulation) on the Arduino. If you’re not sure what those are, you have a lot of reading to do. So do I, as I encountered a message that I knew must be in code, but a code that did not make sense. Until I noticed the only single digit was a 0 and there was no 5. Here is the message:

78 0 49 18 14 13 12 0 17 49 0 12 14 0 48 38 0 12 46 13 49 12 38 28

           It also defied conventional frequency analysis and has three two-letter words in a row. Then it hit me, the 0 means a space. It is semaphore, a code I do not know. But I know about it. I have not had time to decipher this string, but I figure it is someone tapping out the positions of semaphore flags on a kepad, so I know 78 represents the letter A, and so on. There is an explanation, want to hear it? Okay, when I was a kid there was nobody to practice anything with. I lived in a town of hopelessly lazy people. So I learned the first seven letters A thru G and that left them so far behind, I just moved on.

           I could not see myself, so I can only send, never receive. Thus, my“vision” of the semaphore alphabet is therefore backwards to all the charts. For me, I would have to flip the chart over left to right, as shown here, to get my perspective on a letter. That should make sense, or maybe this blog isn’t your cup of tea. Then again, thinking always helps, just mostly in the long run.

Later, yes, I'm off to Miami. Hey, now many blogs would dare post you a backwards code chart and try to explain their way out of it!