One year ago today: August 5, 2025, the countryside roars.
Five years ago today: August 5, 2021, saving Lilli.
Nine years ago today: August 5, 2017, repetitious remakes . . .
Random years ago today: August 5, 2005, don’t ask me.
I awoke famished, so I threw on a large helping of scalloped spuds with mushrooms and meatballs. I suggest you do the same. That will be a good test of your politics. A hungry Republican will bake a bigger pie. A hungry Democrat just wants a bigger slice for himself. My wish for today is American Idol would quit showing up on my news list. I’m weary of “shy” singers who astonish the panel, already.
That’s reality, but it’s getting better. We all like that brand of change. Still, two of the articles were 8-foot posts and that took me to my limit. I’m now back inside, under the 20” fan, and watching that old diVito movie where he becomes a teacher in the army. The fence panels in the back were, I now see, a poorer quality and I’m in the process of shoring them up. This isn’t as easy as others I’ve upgraded.
The reason is the flimsy 2x3” cross-braces. I can’t precut new braces at 45° and put them anywhere or they’ll bend the wood. You can see I used the floor jack to get the pieces back level. I’m going to have to install a new fence post in the center or that fence won’t be there in a couple more years. Now, it’s fair I add that I enjoyed this work. It’ll look funny when I start into getting it straight. Right now, it is level, also, it is crooked and warped. Take time to enjoy the video, these are also fun to create and they are not A.I. generated. Sure, I’m tired, but cooking is also fun so this morning was a treat.
The lumber is mostly done, I could not haul the last piece. I wanted to, but I wanted coffee even more. Then I laid down for just a moment. Zonk! I was busy listening to the radio, so the video does not really show the intensity of getting the work to this stage. Much of the work had to be on the other side of the fence, where the only access is through the work shed door at the other end facing the neighbors. Dodging wasps was part of the sport. Tampa is having a fit that illegals may soon be called “invaders”.
NPR also takes exception that some of the more anti-White exhibits at the Smithsonian are defunded. Trump says “blue” cities are filthy and dangerous, they don’t like that either.
Mall jigsaw maker.
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First the good news, I think. Friday, we have a music rehearsal slated for the morning That’s a great way to start the weekend. Steve is now in a house with a driveway, making life easier. I’ll drop an e-mail to the Prez, who I am convinced will wind up back in Florida. Penntuck has winter, people get spoiled in Florida and forget what 0°F is like. Here, I did find time to edit you a short video of the fence work this AM.
Write off the afternoon. That was a conversation and a half with Caltier. We finally have some news but it was like pulling teeth. I don’t know what they were expecting, but they were on the defensive immediately and for almost an hour. It was a matter of them saying the fund has been “halted” due to SEC filing requirements and my contention that this is between them and not part of our agreement. The fine print does say they can halt redemptions, but such clauses are always subject to reasonableness. If you withhold, it obligates you to give a valid, legal explanation and that has not happened.
Put another way, the redemption is so small compared to the size of the fund that it would raise greater concerns if, in fact, they don’t have the money. From my perspective they can take out a loan, or this will escalate into something a lot more costly than the amount I want. We have a conference call slated for next week. Like all such funds, and I understand this, we are one of many parties that want redemption—but my guess is few of those people are prepared to go the distance. Caltier’s reaction showed this was the case—most people must back down.
It was a conference call that was around half keeping the conversation on track. Fact is, 100% of the back-and-forth was the CEO and myself, the Reb finally stepped in because she has a client. But, she got a first class demonstration of playing hardball and what it means. That’s your report for now, and that fulfills my commitment from the beginning to document the investment with Caltier in easy terms.
Having said that, I’m still reasonably happy with Caltier. I’ve followed their web page and blog. They do have a newsletter but it requires a separate password which we do not have. None of ours work. That is a separate issue. The real estate climate is rough, but the Caltier properties were chosen with careful attention to their viability through downturns and I do not believe they are in any danger. That does not mean margins aren’t damn close, mind you.
You’ve seen my calculations concerning the “average” investor at Caltier, and I think I was right about inflation and the stagnancy in the market. Part of today was the preparedness of Caltier to offer up certain canned responses before they realized we are equally prepared to counter that tactic. I used the phrase that we did not want this to “escalate into something that winds up costing more than the redemption”, which telegraphs we are prepared to go the distance.
I still consider Caltier a good investment that has been temporarily sidelined by SEC paperwork. The average return has been 10.08%, which is darn good in this climate. And except for the troubles in Tennessee, I would likely have ridden out the storm. We also have an e-mail from here to the Reb that went missing and I think it might have gone to Valdosta, which by strange coincidence, has a similar addy and an easy mistake to make.
ADDENDUM
You will get more Arduino serial notes as I complete my review. If you are following along, I am looking at only one protocol and one speed. The Arduino asynchronous at 9600 baud. This won’t take long and is an opportunity to put a few things into plain English. I hate jargon almost as much as I do people who use it to sound smarter than they really are. Asynchronous is Latin for “no clock”. It means the data can move any time, it is up to the end destinations to make sense out of the stream of single bits as they arrive.
Which has always been one of my dislikes of the Arduino. Once a sketch (program) has been uploaded, there is no way to tell by looking. I like to program a quick message that identifies what is going on. But make it quick, as the Arduino needs a lot of “overhead” and it usually takes some 6,000 bytes to compile the simplest sketch. I’m looking at a module that will somehow signal the contents without interfering with other things. Not so simple. The Arduino does have an accessory LCD display, but it is expensive and bulky—and it cannot transmit.
Later, I found sample code that will print columns. The trick was to put the “tab” after the print characters. Now, if you don’t mind, I want to make a mug of cocoa and stare a the code to find what I missed. Here is what it looks like, ignore the cursor at the end, that’s my doing. I don’t imagine this video means much to anyone. But any excuse for a coffee makes the grade around here.
Even later, I found the cause. It’s a reminder that C+ coders are idiots. They slap together anything that appears to work and spend the rest of the time patching it up. In this case, it was the tab character. Some dork-brain replaced the non-printing control character with a ‘t\’. Wise programmers know you don’t mix ASCII and shortcuts, stupid coders don’t know any better. You use one or the other, and the code for a horizontal tab is 9, or in HEX, 09.
Worse, the control is inside single quotes. Correcting C+ code is 90% looking for what some demented MicroSoft/IBM bastard thinks punctuation is for.
Many people don’t understand baud rates, and I still refer to them as if they were bytes. Normally, each 8 bit data chunk needs a start and stop bit (because it is a string travelling down one wire). So it is 8+2=10, ten bits long. Baud rate 9600 means the signal moves 9600/10=960 of these ten-bit packets per second. Of those ten, eight bits are one ASCII character byte. Do the arithmetic and that speed is 960/8=120 characters per second, about twice the speed I can read. Your phone and Internet are serial, by the way.
