One year ago today: April 27, 2025, CDC Wanted List.
Five years ago today: April 27, 2021, my crabby mood day.
Nine years ago today: April 27, 2017, it is 2017
Random years ago today: April 27, 2024, photos from Mars.
Cream of wheat, coffee, and the most boring news day in ages. Melania is 56, the shooting is already old news (three strikes for the opposing team) but sets a record. Again, the MSM has cranked up the anti-war noise, and again at street level there is no sign of a war except gas prices. I went over to the churchyard and found the 24mm cap on the transmission pan. Nope, this will take too long, so I called the tow truck.
When I moved here, there were lots of good radio stations. That was before Biden started giving away free money to non-English buyers. We had Armed Forces radio, always good for old Lone Ranger stories. Interest history and mystery stations but now it is all shigga-booga except for talk radio. There is a phone in sales hour and that is where the neighbor got his dolly. But it is 10:00AM to 11:00AM, so without special occasion, a time slot I rarely hear it.
Let me slip in here that overnight was the first long interval where my leg wound behaved well. By no means back to spec, this is still a good event after a quarter of a year. I had the Reds over for breakfast y’day and had a nice long visit. Today they were happy with leftovers as I got busy with chores.
A bus bombing in Columbia. Strange how that country builds their cities so far away from their “resource-rich” provinces. It means so many road through the jungles and stuff like that. What’s this, Taylor is single again. I told you, she’s saving the best for last. The van, as I get more work done on it, it just cannot be the transmission by itself. Nonetheless, I’m out of theories and I left a message for the tow guy to come by between jobs. He’s the guy who bought his own truck and let me say, he is a natural for self-employment. You can sense that in the right character. Let me add up, he bought the truck in 2019, so that’s a business cycle and he will put his kids through college.
Old flak towers.
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The KIA is in the driveway here and that was a wise move. Here, one can get under the front end proper and assess the situation. You’ll want the tale from the trailer court that led to this. He was busy all day, so we got in the wrecker and talking along the way, he says my description is not that of a broken transmission. We are not mechanics but he says best let him have a look. I’m all for that. He pops the hood and says the leak is on the wrong side of the motor. There are no clunking noises, he checks a few things and declares I am in luck.
It probably needs a hose clamp and I have all those parts in the shed. It got too dark or I would have moved on it. If I made the day sound easy, that’s happy talk. I’m bone weary and feel a hundred pounds heavier and beaten up with a telephone pole. Not sleepy, I studied an intense chapter on sight reduction (navigation) tables until it clicked. It is another instance of the old ASA theorem. The layout of the tables did not help. Once I visualized the two latitudes as flat on a map table, the tedious tables became no easier to read but a lot faster. Just keep me north of the Equator. Should be easy, Tay-Tay has had enough of these dark and handsome types, so she can sail the yacht closer to me in Florida. All for a guy like me she can keep long-term. And who can blame her?
This is not intended to make sight reduction seem difficult. Conceptually it is easy and I could use them [by rote] before. I’m referring to understanding the tables, which for some reason gave me spells. It had to do with the Earth turning and my brain unable to forget that made no difference. I’ll say it again to convince myself, the tables are simply a big set of calculated information about what the Sun’s height and direction would measure like from every integer latitude in the sea lanes. There is some arithmetic involved but it’s nothing compared to calculating it yourself.
For those interested, it works simple in theory. Using a sextant and clock, you take some readings. Then you look up information using the Nautical Almanac. Finally, you use the sight reduction tables to find exact data and compare them with your readings. If you are good, you’ll find the results are quite close, usually within a few miles, which you mark as a line on a chart. You need a second reading, again following some rules. Where the two lines cross is your position. Only took me ten years.
Next, there was a type of voltage regulator called a buck converter I could not understand years ago. Because I had not yet met PWM, pulse width modulation. It would be an expensive waste to use a microcontroller for that, so I know there is more. That is why I made up a double order of pork pineapple fried rice and just sat down. I see I’ve used the term converter and it is really a kind of regulator. It is also a big deal to the people who use them. I’ll look a bit but no taking on something new at this time.
ADDENDUM
Many movies go on about the Japanese Purple Code, so I took time to read its workings. Surprisingly to me, it used English, not Japanese characters. I found out this was split into two groups of six letters and twenty letters. The groups were strangled differently. Once they figured this out, the Americans focused on the six letters and cracked those first. Tedious work. It is often asked, if the code was broken, why didn’t America know about Pearl Harbor. Because Purple was a diplomatic code, not a military code. The Japanese navy used a different system.
Another chapter on FPGA, the field programmable gate arrays. These are beyond me, my study is the gates, and old subject. But I know where many of you have heard of these arrays. Radar jamming. It was once done by sending fake or delayed return signals back at the enemy dish, or even launching a homing missile. FPGA works by stealth. It instantly analyzes the radar signal and sends an inverted copy back, canceling the beam out.
