December 9, 2025

Yesteryear
One year ago today: December 9, 2024, basically, eBay sucks.
Five years ago today: December 9, 2020,over-groomed adults.
Nine years ago today: December 9, 2016, teenage commanders.
Random years ago today: December 9, 2002, never in your favor.

           I do believe that is the soundest have slept in years. Eleven hours, and I’m now grumpy for enduring a morning without coffee as a stress test is slated for 10:00AM. By now I know most of the staff and have mucho more strength yet only one meal in the past 14 hours. I say again, it is like a hotel with excellent room service, though I would not want to see the bill without my insurance. My estimate is around $12,000 so far and I have received no medicine. I reread several chapters on the Arduino knowing what I know now. Big difference.

           There were three tests this time, involving a lot of attached electrical leads. Here’s my wrist catheter thingee at, I see, quarter after eight. The conclusion was nothing was wrong and these were recurring symptoms of my earlier attacks. In a sense I see that, as these are similar to the sensations I had while hooked the monitor that detected driving was stressing me.

           These procedures meant a lot of waiting around lying motionless on a gurney. By now, I was deep-reading sections on byte arithmetic, something I grasp but was never that good at. While the room had Internet, it censored Gab and was difficult to use, always favoring sites I do not use, but I was able to get the silver ask at $59, meaning it will almost certainly pass $60 later today. Once outside the room, it was several long hours in cubicles along the hallways, a long wait eve though I knew I was already popular enough to get first in line for everything.
           Worst trauma wasn’t the medical but that somewhere down that long hallway, somebody was brewing coffee. By 11:00AM you can imagine I was famished. Beyond famished. However, by now I could tell I was okay as there was no longer any sense of urgency about my condition. If I didn’t say, I had a hard time waking up this morning, quite unlike ever before in my life. I remained unsteady for around ten minutes, causing them to slap bracelets on me as a fall risk. Also, I experienced a severe leg cramp, nothing to do with this situation.
           I was discharged a bit passed noon but didn’t get out for another hour. It is cardiologist time and I will change my primary care someplace local. This means largely the end to any connections to Miami other than visiting. I can foresee that trip becoming rare.

Picture of the day.
The Montgomery Riverfront Brawl.
(August 2023)
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Having been assured the tingling numbness in my lower left had is not threatening, I drove over to the music store to look at these recently advertised “desktop” amps. Well, maybe not new, they’ve been around a couple years “taking the world by storm”. Most in the $200 range, they are a guitar-only device and, I find, not a very good one. They have dozens of settings but not even the depth of tone found on old boom boxes. This generation of speakers have a definite “squawk” quality on the full bass settings.

           I found them disappointing and with nothing to show for years of advancing technology. I further test some of the small amp offerings from Fender. That company has gone downhill, not one of the units had a genuine low end even for guitar settings. I played bass through Fender guitar amps 60 years ago and got a considerably better sound. You get a better low end from $80 Wal*Mart gear and if they still sold the Tailgater, I’d by another one.            Before we continue, peek at this scan of my final hospital meal before they sprung me. Yep, a cheeseburger. I’ll have you know I’ve eaten cheeseburgers in some pretty fancy places in my time, but this was a first. Note all the trimmings, like pineapple slices. Two desserts, but no wee packet of salt.

           I picked up this month’s doggie chow and suspecting I’ll have a run on coffee the next couple days, I shopped a bit. The last hour in the hospital centered on a lot of questions about my diet, mostly about processed food, which I avoid. But folks, when you get asked about it during a medical event, you just know it isn’t any good for you. The one product they didn’t like me to eat is cheddar cheese, maybe I’ll quit, but only if I find an acceptable alternative.
           By now, I just wanted to get home but I spotted India as I passed the club, so I popped in to see her since she knows I want to ask about her selling system. I’m aware she has Etsy, but she has mentioned a site that amalgamates most sellers including Amazon and eBay. I’ll get her to show me, because something more important has come to light about her. I mentioned she’s in the midst of a brutal divorce, so I do not ask.
           Instead, I make general inquiries and she gave me the head’s up today. She stands to gain a huge house in the southeast end and, get this, on the property she describes a large garage full of woodworking tools gathering dust. Where would I fit in this picture? That’s easy, I’ve told you she is a startlingly good looking 41 years old—and I would be the only guy in town who has not hit on her. Even the least clever gals know you don’t make business deals with men after your ass. And I got the impression today I was the only one left standing.

           Then, I get home craving my home-made chili and, finishing that, find I’ve got a big round of mild insomnia happening. I switched to tea and found some on-line documentaries and just passed midnight watched silver break $60, an historic high. Got my fingers crossed on that one. Remember, my money tied up in Nashville is far from a sure thing and I could use a real boost. But, as I told, even at $100 per ounce, I would just be breaking even. Having said that, I also know that after you are 40, slow and steady if just as iffy, that it is equally risky to set yourself up so that should you get a windfall, you have a place to keep it.
           One of the documentaries was on European inventors, the one that stood out was the airplane guy, Anthony Fokker. (Ja, undt dem Fokkers vas flying Messerschmitts.) In several videos totalling an hour, not one mentioned where on Earth he got the money to build and fly airplanes, one of the most advanced and expensive technologies of his day. I don’t have to look further, I know when it’s all daddy’s money. Nobody who had to be concerned with mundane matters like what things cost could pull off the stunts he did.

           My research tonight was not on inventors, rather the development of the internally-braced airplane wing. I remembered seeing the spars in a museum back in my twenties. It was, to me, impressive woodwork. I also have some correspondence from the Reb piled up and I just know this is going to result in another cash requirement. I opted out of the recording realm because it is the very definition of corrupt. If you are not familiar with the workings, think of it this way. You enter into a deal where the other guy needs $10,000 up front to get things going. Then he squeezes you for another $5,000 so you don’t lose the $10,000.
           That is exactly the “lawyer” type of deal that media, not the music, pulls on you. There is always another fee that crops up the closer the deal gets to completion. And I know it is coming with the scenario she has described. Why? Because it hit me that day last year we were driving east on I-40 and her some came on the radio. Amazingly unique as that would be in one’s lifetime, radio is the original payola-grift-shakedown industry of the 20th century. I think I’ll pre-empt this one and start putting together some cash because my spidey-sense says do not trust anyone in that cutthroat industry.

           I'm here because I canceled a planned Nashville trip. But if I was smart, I' get in my van and drive there now and deal with the cash myself in advance. Check back tomorrow. By 3:00AM I’m tired and both my arms are swollen and tender where all four tubes were placed. And to fit in the gamma cam, I had to hold by arms above my head for 8 long minutes and my right shoulder is now deeply uncomfortable. What a day this has been.

ADDENDUM
           What did I read in the hospital? Poetry? Escape literature? Now, it was the Arduino chapter on dot matrix displays, but with a difference. I have figured out the internal wiring must closely resemble the way I wired my old ROM board, which is still around here somewhere. Where I had diodes soldered in place for each figure, a programmable matrix would have used transistors, a concept that intrigues me, what can I say.

           My model also used a separate circuit for each and with an Arduino, you don’t have that extravagance. Not only are there not enough pins, but binary is based around groupings of eight. This means the use of a shift register, and that’s a good part of what I wanted to gain by today’s study. This device takes in a serial stream of digits, portions them into groups of eight, and sends them out in parallel. By refreshing the display around five times faster than the human eye can distinguish, you get the impression of a symbol and sometimes the illusion of movement.
           This is a scan of the chapter title page, showing that I’ve read it at least nine times in the past ten years, each with a different focus. This time I’m wondering if I could use the laser cutter to wire up something that could merge these two concepts. A transistor driven ROM that I could hard-wire but use external commands to change the patterns. Just an idea, but it is driving me closer to setting up that 3D printer even if I botch the design part. But yeah sure, if you want to ride along, just keep reading the blog until sooner or later.

Last Laugh