March 21, 2013

           Today, the addendum is a departure from standard blog fare. It has come to my attention (once again) that many adults still have trouble with fractions. I’m going to choose the two [fractions] that I find give the most difficulty and show you the tactics I’ve invented to solve them. Wish somebody had helped me with this back when.
           This is the town hall from PHC. Prairie Home Companion is the radio link I listen to most often and I think you should too. Toast or tea tastes better when somebody else makes it, and thus with radio stations, I'll set the dial for you. I prefer PHC to some ho-hum oldie station in the background. Give it a whirl, they have great musical guests. (I advise listening to several full shows to get into it.)
           I took time off (an hour) to study electronic switches. That’s a small science in itself. The mechanical switch types don’t interest me because they are, well, mechanical—and damn expensive. But the duplication of this behavior electronically really has my attention. Most interesting are the latching switches. You turn it on, the switch springs back, but the current keeps on flowing. This is not at all as straightforward as most of us assume. Every aspect has to be taken account of in the electronic version, even the amount of time before and speed at which the switch returns to position. Fascinating to me.
           Here’s more trivia, the kind that we don’t have time to look up for ourselves. Now that eBay has trampled all competition, they are about to hike their commissions. A lot of the anti-trust laws are difficult to apply to cyber-business, so eBay can get away with price fixing that would doom a competitive operation. On the same day, NATO announced it will condone drone strikes against hackers (there are two types of hackers, we assume NATO means the bad ones). While these two stories are unrelated, it might serve as a warning to eBay.
           What do I have against eBay? Paypal, that’s what. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but one of the greatest promises of Internet shopping was originally that it would be anonymous. There were plenty of proto-companies that would allow you to charge up an account under a code name. Only a party to whom you sent an encrypted key could withdraw payment. This is the ideal “cash” transaction. This meant the cashier holding the money never knew the identity of either party. They didn’t need to be sticking their noses in there.
           Along comes eBay, which buys Paypal, and now uses it to monitor and record identities. Is this wrong? Yes, in the sense that it crowded out the cash companies. There is now no real choice, it is Paypal or nothing. I still believe there are billions to be made by anybody who can devise a way to spend cash on-line. I believe people willingly obey good laws and break bad ones. Think of Prohibition. Right now you cannot spend cash on the Internet even if you want to. Thanks to eBay.
           I had two outings today. Coffee this morning with DeeDee and a mini-date this afternoon. The latter will not be repeated. Have you ever dated someone who is a total follower? They form clinging dependencies if you don’t apply a constant back-pressure of prevention. (Ma’am, you are going to have to do that kind of thing the same way you did before we met.) They resent that you are not “nice” enough to be their next mark. Is there a name for the type who are constantly thinking about how you could help them out instead of helping themselves? What? Very funny, I didn’t mean that name. Besides, the guy still owes me $1,600.
           One has to notice the new media take on white supremacists, this time in Texas. Without any changes in the law, supremacists have gone from political organizations to “gangs”. This came about after a prison official was killed, the 35th such attack on criminal justice bureaucrats in about two years. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that represents a highly organized and sustained assault (some say revolt) by American citizens who have a different view on “justice” than the one they were handed. The supremacists are shooting back, which is nowadays the same as fighting to the death. That’s something we haven’t seen in a while.

ADDENDUM
           Fractions. There’s your classic love-hate relationship. Solving fractions doesn’t require any advanced math. Yet it seems very few of us were ever taught any methods to help figure out where the numbers go, at least I know that I never got a lick of help. I’m only going to cover simple fractions here, that is only fractions with the small number over the big number, as in 5/9 or 11/16.
           This may help only one reader in a hundred, but learning electronics reminds me of how difficult it was to find a teacher who made sense. So my approach is to show a method that works for me because it is the easiest to understand without getting into theory. Read my lips—THE IMPORTANT NUMBER IS THE BIGGER NUMBER ON THE BOTTOM OF THE FRACTION. I often scribble this number, called the denominator, in the page margin before I start.

Here are two rules I developed when I run into a difficult fraction.

           Rule #1: when you see the word “of”, it means to solve this problem, realize you are going to have to divide by the big number on the bottom. Avoid the temptation to always leave division to the last. It may not be obvious where you have to divide just yet, but make a mental note of that bigger number. You will need it sooner or later.
           Examples: 1/6 of a dozen. 1/3 of the population. 4/5 of a ton. In each case, you see the word “of” and that means you will have to divide by the bigger number on the bottom of the fraction. You still have to figure out where to divide, but you’ve just won half the battle. (If this seems too simple an example, wait a moment, we'll go places with it.)

           Rule #2: ratios are NOT the same as fractions, you have to calculate the bigger number. If you have the ratio 3:5, this is not the same as the fraction 3/5. When I see the colon, I right away add the two numbers. 3+5=8. Thus, a ratio of 3:5 means TWO fractions, namely 3/8 and 5/8. I always pick the "least" fraction, in this case, 3/8 because small numbers are easier to work with. From this point on, just use Rule #1 again.
           Example: the ratio of trucks to cars is 4:11. If there are 77 vehicles on the lot, how many are cars? First add 4+11=15. Okay, it means 4 out of every 15 of the vehicles are trucks, and the other 11/15 are cars. (Aha, there’s that word “of”.) And, if I calculate 4/15 of 77 I get 28. Now I don’t need to figure out 11/15 because I just subtract 28 from 77. There are 28 trucks and 49 cars, and I only had to calculate one fraction.
           Now, about that raise . . .

           I’m not going to cover multiplying or dividing fractions because in real life, that happens so rarely I’ll look it up if I ever need it. But, we are having so much fun, here’s one more trick of the trade I’ve developed. Here's Rule #1 in a different disguise.
           Say you need to know 17/63 of 15,309. The fraction from hell! Well, not really. Rule #1 says I have to divide by 63 anyway, so let’s do that first. 15,309 / 63 = 243. Ah-ha, if I know that 1/63rd equals 243, then 17/63rds must be 17 times as much as 243. As long as you get the right answer, demand full marks.

           For the record, math has always been my worst subject.

March 20, 2013

           Trivia. Does anyone remember the World War II newsreels of the British airplanes firing their machine guns? Here’s the best photo I can find of my point. These are the machine gun ports on the wings of a British Spitfire. Look close to see how it appears there are ragged pieces of cloth around the edges of the barrel mouths. The trivia is that they really are ragged pieces of cloth.
           The reason for this was that a small sheet of cotton was wrapped and glued over the wing to cover these openings. When the plane taxied on the ground and took off, they prevented small objects getting rammed into the wing and damaging or blocking the gun. When the pilot opened fire, the bullets tore through the cloth, giving this appearance.
           I’ve finished “Life of Pi”. Yes, it does pick up near the end and delves into some real imaginative concepts. Although published in 1981, this book was just waiting for the emergence of special effects. Except for maybe some East Indian imagery, this movie had best skip the first 100 pages of indoctrination. The good news is the movie HAS to be better than the book. Still, unless it is used as a training film, this release is headed straight for the Crackle heap.
           So Monday I went to the jam at Buddy’s. There’s good odds this is the oldest average age musical event in Broward outside of the nursing home circuit. It’s so nice to see how many mothers can still fit into their daughter’s black dress. Well, sort of. Anyway, the two bar gals have decided to open a cat house with 90 year-old sleazeboxes. Then when the guys ask where are all the young ones, them two can jump up and wave. I scoffed at first thinking, “Where are they gonna find that many 90 year-old sleazeboxes?”
           Then I remembered ChristianMingle.
           Why did I stay home [today]? Because my eyes won’t take the bright sun and I sound like I’m contagious. I need time to rest up. Ah, so I thought, why not convert those songs I recorded to an editable format? Because I’ve got that lousy two-bit Boss BR-600, that’s why. I found a universal card reader for six bucks, but the slightest wrong move wipes out the CompactFlash memory. That’s the two songs I was about to send Elliot and Trent. I’m suspecting the card itself is a finicky design, but even if so, was it not Boss who chose that card brand in the first place?
           Thinking I’d made progress, I re-recorded my tracks, which took four hours. Then as I went to export those tracks, the BR to WAV converter informs me it will alter my originals. No way, so I make the copies. Then it informs me the converter can only use copies if I go into DOS and reassign the drive path. How may people here remember the SUBST command? I thought so. And you wonder why I’m a critic.
           Elliot and I talked about this and concluded there is no easy way around such recordings. These idiotic “digital 8-tracks” have become a standard in the sense that you have to spend real money if you want real equipment. By real, I mean a recorder that will input more than one track at a time. Until then, if your band has seven instruments, you have to make seven recordings to get one song. Trust me, it will be many more than seven, but that’s the minimum.
           This one-by-one layering is the cause of so much indie music that we now have a term for the sound. We call it “studio-plastic”. There is something unnatural about listening to a song where each instrument has been recorded over and punched to clinical perfection. (Punching is the process of over-recording small sections of the original track to eliminate mistakes.)
           What? You want to know how punch works? In easy terms? Okay. Suppose at the one minute mark of your tape, the guitar player hits the wrong chord. You put a little electronic marker a few seconds before and another marker after the mistake, these are known as your punch-in and punch-out points. They don’t affect the recorded sound in any way. Then you rewind past the first marker to a familiar point in the music. Tell the guitarist to start playing along, and as you recorder passes the punched area, it records over just that segment. In the hands of a pro, it works amazingly well. Thank you.

ADDENDUM
           Let’s discuss on-line dating. I have two memberships at opposite ends of the spectrum. One is club that accepts anybody, the other is quite picky. (These accounts are anonymous.) Both organizations claim exclusive membership, but in most cases this is not true in any form. My motive is to browse, to see what’s available. I don’t just flip through the pictures. I honestly do read the profiles of any woman who sounds reasonably self-supporting, non-possessive, and weary of shallow men. That’s not too many in a given year, let me tell you.
           Most of these people are looking for a shortcut, though that is forgivable in women. It gets kind of expensive moving around the countryside looking for diamonds in the rough. I don’t like most anything rough. I figure if it isn’t a bit polished up by age 24, throw it back. My findings are that these ads do not represent what is out there. Being a musician on stage will give you a better idea of the cross-sections.
           On stage you realize how few truly attractive older women even exist. The reason attraction is so desperately important is because most older women don’t have a thing to bring to the table. This is truly bizarre, but they mentally justify their lack of accomplishment by complaining it as a man’s world. I’ve actually met women who consider it my personal fault they have a dead-end job or never finished college. (Between 17 and 33, I never dated a woman I didn’t meet on campus. And again age 36 to 44.)
           Of the two clubs, the picky club is by far the better. Even if I bottom-fish, I get nearly 200 hits. For me, rock bottom is any degree (or college), any age, any religion, any place, any weight, any income. But I said I’m only looking. And what I see is that men and women learn different lessons from the same mistakes. The women posters today:
           12%: failed to include a photo.
           14%: failed to fill out a profile.
           19%: live in cold climates and won’t relocate.
           19%: specify only rich, tall, or materialistic men.
           30%: cannot play a musical instrument.
           33%: have dependent children.
           41%: are whacked out on religion.
           44%: demand something I’m not (as in rock-climber, vegetarian).
           45%: obvious high-maintenance.

Still, there are enough candidates to keep me reading for an hour every week. This is a sad process in some ways. I see women who simply will never get a date. Not just age or looks, but a combination of signals that set off the alarms. Like the Brazilian lady psychiatrist whose ad has been running for 1,320 days. Also, this whole age difference thing contrived by women is exasperating. Who gave women the right to assign age brackets, anyway?
           The lower-class clubs have something the uppers don’t: chat lines. And it is massive idle chatter that makes no sense. It encourages iffy contacts and attracts women who are only there for the talk. That’s like men who only read playboy for the articles. They are good company for each other, which is a nice thing to say.
           Another oddity of the higher-class clubs is the tendency for members to state what they do not want. I call it the “incompatibilities” list. For me, that would include women with children who call themselves single. Anyway, I prefer a membership that will outright reject those not up to standard well in advance. Holding oneself out as a prospective mate carries obligations in itself, the least of which is self-support these days. I have a name for avoiding losers, too: “elimination by experience”. It is not enough to say if it quacks like a duck, for one might not shun a duck.

March 19, 2013

           Here’s the scooter back with the new motor. You can see the shiny parts in the top photo. It runs well but still has a couple problems such as one of the muffler bolts broke inside the casing. But it’s my short-run wheels back and that is the mechanic taking it for a spin in the bottom photo. I’ll break it in over the next day or two. Psst, it isn’t a 150cc any more.
           In other good news my shoulder is mending fine. If I didn’t even go into the clinic until the second day it hurt, chances it was never that serious. The word is I will not require surgery, only therapy. It still puts me two months behind schedule. What can I do to make up for this? I’ll start looking, but travel comes to mind.
           Travel, and items like the scooter repair don’t keep showing up here by chance. These are intentionally given priority because how daily events occur in real life. Ask Charles Dickens, that’s who I learned the theory from. Blogs that try to report only the spectacular don’t last long. The same happens with blogs that are too contrived. A certain amount of the on-going is required as a tie-together or things can get too disjointed to follow along.
           As I walked into the bakery this AM, how nice it was to find all the ladies had been waiting for me. You see guys, the trick to seeing four women is to make sure they all know each other. Take them different places and spend different amounts of money on each. Whee! Then let them discuss you to death, they’ll be occupied for hours not believing each other. Avoid the Liana Morris types from the get-go and you’ll learn from experience. If you only date one woman, marry her. She'll make your life hell. So find the rare woman who has something which makes you consider that existence worthwhile. I know of a few, but that gets controversial.
           “The Life of Pi” is, by page 90, largely a comparative discussion of religion. There is no mention (or warning) of this on the jacket. It goes on without any apparent relation to the plot. This alone gets it a so-so rating from me. It is advertised as an adventure tale and maybe it will be, but with a quarter of the pages gone past already, things had better pick up. So far, it is more boring than Moby Dick.
           You can also tell how much I’m into a book by whether I begin reading a second before I’m finished. That’s the case here as I’m reading up on the history of air mail. It is a livelier tale than you think. What we call passenger service today is a result of people paying to travel with the earlier mail planes. The first airliner of twelve seats was built as a mail carrier, with the passenger fares considered “gravy”. The actual development and operation of airlines stems from the mail routes, which often had government backing.
           Next some Florida goof gets strip searched for bringing a boa constrictor into a high school. Poor baby. He should get the lash. His parents want to sue, but that’s a given. This is material for the talk show hosts. Okay, all you teenage boys with a big black snake in your pants take one step forward. Not-so-fast there, Tyrone.
           Here is a box of perfume. I had to look this one up in case it was some kind of stunt. How can you guess this is a men’s brand? FC is for “French Connection”, so they say. If I’m the last to see this as a horrendously low-geared marketing concept, could be [because]I don’t watch TV. Yep, this is definitely aimed at a TV-watching audience. Campaigns like this are so infantile they can hardly fail among the proles. Why do I get the funny feeling this is the start of a new low.
           Later. It is 7:34 PM and I’ve got all the symptoms of a terrible flu on the way. Didn’t I just get over one? This will be a bad bout, I can tell. Couple that with the disruption of my sleep pattern from my shoulder and I'm out of the game for a while. This would mean shutting down operations for the duration. So, can I resist saying it? Am I gonna say it? I'm getting powerless. I can't help it.
           Here goes, "Oh fcuk!"

ADDENDUM
           Music, in particular the performance of music. I play the electric bass, which is really the only bass played in modern country bands. The standup bass is not a related instrument on which one can double up. Those things are expensive, difficult to play, and not all that expressive when you get down to it. Some associate it with 1930s bluegrass bands, but I’ll match my playing to anything those guys could do. Which brings me to the point here.
           Playing electric bass is too often a discussion with those who think they know what the bass is all about. The majority have no idea. You hand them the bass they start all kinds of antics, popping, riffing, and soon it’s “Smoke On The Water”. But to effectively accompany throughout an entire song, well, I have yet to see it. It is almost comical to watch a guitarist “stand in” on bass unless he knows the exact tune.
           A guitarist playing bass immediately reveals that he has trouble playing the same steady patterns for the duration. Dedicated repetition is the very essence of playing bass as an accompaniment as opposed to a backup instrument. The guitarist will start overplaying by the second verse, thinking he is spicing things up. By third verse he is noodling. And few can play the same pattern for three minutes even when tasked to it.
           This is necessarily a generalization. I’ve seen all musicians doing a respectable job on the bass. But not that often. And when they try to jam, their guitar-think gets in the way unless they stick to well worn rock or twelve-bar sessions.
           The other misconception is that any instrument is suitable for standing in with the bass. This is not so. A jam tune or two is fine, but few people could stand listening to the same instrument all evening unless it is a guitar or a keyboard. Can you imagine four hours of banjo or violin? And of the two long-gig instruments, I choose the guitar for a multitude of practical reasons.
           I have failed repeatedly to find a proper guitarist. To a one, their egos have blocked their careers. This “guitar star” mind-set is the wrong philosophy for playing in a small combo, where the duties are best shared “60/60”. This is no idle observation on my part. I spent a lot of years and money auditioning every available guitarist in rehearsal distance and some beyond that. No success. They had a fixed list set and a fixed mind set, and regard all other players as cronies. It is not like that everywhere, but it is in South Florida.

March 18, 2013

           I should have known better. My recording schedule is thrown away because of a card reader. The Boss uses this obsolete memory card and the only available reader is an outrageous $35 that claims to read 20 other cards. These design bureaus know many ways to skin a cat, making the reader cost more than the card. There should be a law that all first designs have to be the largest, and all future versions can be smaller, but must include an adaptor to fit the same slot. Otherwise, it’s legal thievery.
           I’m reading “The Life of Pi”, which so far is well-written. Something is wrong when these paperbacks are priced at $16, but this one was on sale. So the independently wealthy can afford to read them, I suppose. Written by a Canadian (East Indian) who studied zoology and religion, he bases his characters on it. The imagery is great but a little artificial and stilted unnaturally toward theology. Long passages where it is unclear what the author is getting at or where he's going with this. I talking dozens of pages at a time.

           The most interesting passage so far is how animals are not “imprisoned” in a zoo. The author explains how in the wild, the animal would seek the very smallest territory that fulfilled basic needs. If food, shelter, and water are supplied, the animal will keep returning to the zoo. No free will needed. The real world is full of predators and parasites. The zoo has "room service" and a vet, so why leave?
           Okay, enough of you asked. I’m going tell you how to turn off those moronic idiotic pale yellow help bubbles that appear when you hover your mouse over something in your browser. The only thing they do is block your view. The catch is I’m only going to tell you how to do it in Opera. If anyone is still using Internet Explorer, I doubt there is anything going to help them.

           Open Opera, click on the small Opera tab on the top left corner of the toolbar. On the drop menu, go to Settings, then Preferences and open the Advanced tab. Find Browsing in the left-hand navigation column and click on it. Uncheck Show Tooltips. Click on Okay. You’re done. (While you have the Advanced tab open, you might want to check the Storage button to see who’s been spying on you. Opera should be ashamed they know about this and still allow it. What does the India Times need to watch me about?)
           Craigslist is still sore at me, I see. I’m the one who cracked their original source code, but [did so] only to identify the chronic flaggers. Old Craig didn’t like that and had to revamp his entire system to hide his scripts. I’m the guy who caused that. I may be the closest anyone came to bankrupting his little empire. All because of his stubborn insistence on giving veto power to the anonymous. He’s rich, true, but his site has become the washroom wall of the Internet. Think of where he’d be today if he’d followed my advice.
           I’m the guy who created most of the tactics now commonly used against Craigslist. I devised the first bank of multiple accounts that continually tested how many flags were needed to kill a post. Today, it takes extremely wasteful group efforts to flag what I used to do in a minute. I was expert at identifying the flaggers. All of this I did while killing time at my computer store after morning coffee.

           As for the Craigslist security system, it is primitive. That’s where you have to supply a phone number and their robot calls you back with a code. There is a workaround but I ain’t telling. I will give a strong hint. It involves an intentional spelling mistake to bypass the callback scripting branch. You force a string to evaluate to false and then back to true when Craigslist prompts you to correct the “error”. QED. And I’m even better at logic gates.
           And now a grammar error from last day I must set right. I wrote that each working day involved “at least a trip to the library” in my career days. That sounds like I dropped in to the library every day. That’s not what I meant. It should have said that I did at least one thing every day that others did not appear to, one example of which was visiting the library. I’m in the library at most twice a week over the past thirty years.

ADDENDUM
           Electronics, my hobby. Beware of sources that tell you electronics is easy. I’ll bet you whoever said that is referring to one single aspect of electronics that happens to be his specialty. I’ve been through agony, a lot of it due to faulty directions. There have been enough surprises, overall, to keep me happy. If you are curious about what is out there, take a look at Electronic Goldmine. Sites like this will show you most of the parts and projects I know anything about.
           What to look for? I can sure divvy up some advice on that. First, notice the complete lack of anything really new. Peek at the section for kits, say, the category “New”. Ignore the ones that say robot, there are no robot kits of any use in there. But all these projects are the same things you saw in the Radio Shack or Heathkit catalog half a lifetime ago. Blinkers, flashing arrows, cricket chirpers. Pretty tedious, actually.
           I’d expect to be flooded by a mass of new and innovative items, but you’ll find only said tedium. Look at the subcategory “counters” and you’ll the binary and decimal kits (rather expensive) that resemble one of my first self-designed amateur circuits. That’s where I tried to use ICs to display the 947 million pulses per second and ran out of enough parts. But I’d necessarily covered the design to have gotten that far.

           In another turn of fate, I may have gotten into transistors at a time they are falling out of favor. Even in the last year, it has become necessary to order the cheapest transistors (for beginners, the NPN 2222) in bulk, I’m placing an order for a thousand soon. Avoid anything in that says SMD or SMT, you can’t solder surface mount no matter how easy they’ll tell you it is. Transistors will always be available in our time frame, but there is a preference for MOSFETS, a type of transistor that works with voltage rather than current. That alone confuses me—varying the voltage would wreck some of my circuits.
           But it’s all been done [meaning there have been no breakthroughs or new ideas in years]. Where, one might ask, is all the new stuff, should it exist? Maybe on Mars. I don’t know. Everything I see seems to be a variation on a few basic ideas. Lights, switching, sound. The only one that intrigues me is the switching and I’m at the logic gate and relay stage at best. The good part is my no kit policy. I places me in n a situation where I can’t build a thing unless I understand the relationship between every component. That’s why I say there are too many specialists calling themselves experts.

           What’s more, there are no “middle level” projects or kits. It is either your simple crystal radio or satellite design. Nothing in between, which is precisely where I wanted to go. I wanted to create useful things (robots) and be on a team to construct them. But the teams that do this seem to be in laboratories with military funding. Maybe the articles I’ve read about the extinction of the solo tinkerer-inventor are true. But compared to other difficult courses I’ve taken, I intend to continue with these wires and batteries.
           Why pursue something that can be maddeningly tough? The mental exercise I always like. It helps to know I’m still advancing slowly over a broad front where others necessarily picked a specialty by now. Maybe I like looking at the Curiosity rover and understanding what’s going on. While I complain about not getting help until after I don’t need it any more, I find delight the creation process. [Time after time] I’ll conceive a circuit, cannot find it, build it the hard way, then find examples all over the place. I’m learning to watch for when that doesn’t happen. Because that means I’ve invented something.

           One example is the ultrasonic sensors. I have in my head this fanciful plan that they could be used for something more than measuring distance. I’ve looked closer than you’d think at the scans (sound images) of the chip on my shoulder. There are 300 disk images and they can be rippled fast enough to give apparent motion. Ergo, they can be unrippled to give stills, tell me if I’m wrong. It seems to me an array of these “sonar” sensors should be able to recognize familiar objects without the expense of laser halography. And folks, I first programmed an array at age 18.
           The Hacktonics site has returned. I don’t really know if it was the site or their Internet that was down, but they’ve got a smaller selection and higher prices. My contact is still not responding. I’ve got some unspent cash they probably want. I really hope they are flush over there.

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March 17, 2013

           This wasn’t an exciting day here. I’d still compare it to working for a living, but really, I went for a walk and that was it. Last night was a late party. That’s me, the leprechaun, I see I managed a little Irish fashion as well. Checks and stripes. Hey, it dropped down into the 70s and I was chilly. Laugh at the tie if you want, all the women talk to me, not the kewl types who stand in the corner. The posers.
2013-12-27: This was late night at Buddy's Place, back when they had live bands.
           Back to this morning, it was a perfect day. The bakery is closed Sundays now so I went to Dunkin Donuts again. To work the crossword and listen to the kids screaming and old men arguing. That’s the Dunkin over on Federal, I don’t know why I go there. It used to be a nice coffee shop before they renovated and drew in the working class, the misfits too noisy and oafish for Starbucks. Wallace loved that place.
           Certain days are actually more than perfect. That would include days with a nice wind from the northwest at exactly the same temperature as the air. You don’t get that much out on the wild prairies. I grabbed the eBike and went over to visit Fred. He’s got the workshop to die for. Everything from belt sanders to router tables. If he ever moves to Texas he’ll be friends with half the state.
           He’s got some land in Arizona around two hours out of Denver. It has water but is otherwise undeveloped. Desert, really, cactus and all. On my way to Amarillo last summer I drove past the area in Texas where I was born. It is a dry, cheerless expanse of treeless plains for hundreds of miles. The only thing growing there now is tree farms. But you should see them. The windmills go on forever. Not by the hundreds, by the thousands. They truck the blades on special extra long flatbeds and it is unnerving to see one of these things the first time.
           I’m afraid Arizona would remind me of Texas. Unless you buy the whole spread sooner or later you are going to have “neighbors”. Still, I looked at the Arizona land because it is impossible to how fortunes will change. But change they will as the post-war generation begins to realize they can kiss their butts good-bye. Living their entire working lives in a house they don’t really own, driving a car that belongs to the bank. Toodle-oo, you freaks of creative finance who thought you were smarter than the lenders.
2013-12-27: Fast forward to December, a head of lettuce is $4.00.
           Electronics. The club now has a laser printer, a critical phase in making our own printed circuits. I got so many conflicting instructions, we have a shelf of chemicals that are incompatible. As usual, the instructions are never so clear as after you figured the damn thing out on your own. My impression is that the design of these circuits is the most difficult step. I’ve read approximately six books which lost me after a few opening chapters. It would not surprise me to learn this single step is a major college course, but right now it seems everybody can do it except me.
2013-12-27: Months later, this laser printer is sitting unused because we can't find adequate design software.
           Real estate. Stagnant. That’s fine as I do not see the market bouncing back. The government is out of “spend and pretend” money and time is on my side. But not forever, I mean, I wouldn’t want to die right now while I’m living in a mobile home. That would look choice on my epitaph. Straight A student winds up in trailer. It isn’t even mobile, it sits on a concrete foundation and does not rock in the wind. On the other hand, this is my house, not the banks.
           The scooter. I halted the repair to drive over and view things for myself. I insisted on the best parts available, which pushed the cost up another $155 dollars. It is a form of entertainment for mechanics who do business with me, they find it hard to believe. Everybody else wants the cheapest repair possible. This is how most of Florida operates so they are not used anyone going the distance. I ordered a titanium alloy camshaft and a highly-rated piston that accepts a 12% larger input valve. When I decided to go ahead with the repair, I want it done right.
2013-12-27: This piston never did work right or deliver the promised improvement.
           How about silver? It is exhibiting signs of instability, but only fifty-cents either way. When it is swinging ten bucks a day, that will get my attention. For now, finances are fine, just like I promised my cheating, lying business partners they would be. No way will my doctor let me work, but there are no restrictions on business activity. You know, in some ways I prefer less pay and a job so somebody else has the headaches of ownership.
           Don’t underestimate this factor. I rarely like to rise higher than third in command, and that is where you’ll find me over the years. We’ve been on that vein before, how I’d rather let the other guy be the lightning rod. I know where the real power lies. But a job has advantages that workers don’t often realize. When I had a job, I would go out every day after work. A movie, a beer, a club, a café, a date, a drive. One can afford such dribbling expenses because you know precisely when the eagle shits.
           One thing I never did was drudge home after a workday, plunk in a chair and do the relax/six-pack thing. That is admitting defeat. I get this vision of an unshaven guy in a wife-beater trying to watch three baskeball games. Is there any sport more useless than basketball? (Curling.) When I worked, I made sure each day involved at least a stop at the library. Now, without a steady income, I’m more likely to go out once a week and really spend. It’s just that I miss the little bit all the time. Hmmm, maybe that’s why I’m single.
           That reminds me. Jackie decides that all the women I date disappear. So I hear him out. He’s right. Over the years, eventually every women he sees me with moves along. He doesn’t see the move, so they “disappear”. What are people to think? Well, I don’t own a crematorium and my back yard is way too small. Actually, except for Theresa who was really nasty, I know where everyone is. Ha! She'll wind up in somebody's back yard.
           But we all know about appearances. So I asked Jackie how many times he figured this out. Harumph, once. You see, it turns out in seven years, I am the only man in the damn place who ever got any dates. There you go.
2013-12-27: That is correct. In seven years, it is well know I am the only man in the place who has had a variety of lady friends.

March 16, 2013

           If you got here expecting anything marvelous, nope. How many times I gotta tell you my shoulder is sore? So I tested all my gear an extra time. From soldering irons to instrument cables. Man, I need about $500 just so’s I can throw all my junk out and start over. Almost everything electronic here has been repaired at least once. No wonder I’m all grumpy. I gave my recording mixer another chance found something. The next few days or weeks will make more sense if you read about this development.
           We all love companies that were great in the 80s and earlier who have now gone downhill and live off their reputations. I’ve already mentioned Sony so often that I won’t do it again today. But Roland, you should know better. Calling the BR-600 an 8-track recorder is a bald-faced lie. However, by painstaking research I found a capability of that unit that is a concession to interfacing with the real world. Something that actually works.

           I'm happy, as it turns out to be the only feature of the contraption I can really use for stage work. (Trent, ignore that last e-mail and call me over this.) The BR-600 will export the individual tracks as WAV files one at a time. There is software that will convert the files as a unit, but you require a card reader that matches the weird memory disk on the mixer.
           That's the big chip I'm holding here. I’m still twirling the metaphorical dials, but if this works, it is a considerable improvement. The one feature of the mixer that makes it compatible is not even listed as its own topic, but is found under the heading "Saving". How to do it is on page 167 of the manual, but not a word about how important it is.

ترافيك لايت

           This [calligraphy] is what I found appearing in the blog sources over the previous week. So I did what everybody else would do. I went to Google translate to discover it means “Traffic Light”. I have no idea about that one. If I quote Arabic, am I supposed to use quotation marks? Did you know you can't write Arabic in italics? Why is the Internet silent on these momentous issues?
           It is written that in his lifetime, each man shall find the café that is right for him. That is why I went to the bakery this morning and confessed. Yes, late afternoon after pushing the motorcycle, I stopped last day and bought a loaf of supermarket bread. I faced up to my weakness, I told them I had been alone, it was dark. I was so tired I spent money on some cheap Dandee whole wheat. It could have happened to any man so far from home and hungry. I assured the bakery, “I want you to know I was thinking of you the whole time.”

           That got me a free refill, and you get more about home recording. I stayed indoors all day. I finally stepped through every menu on the Boss mixer-recorder for the results above. It’s a matter of recording philosophy. I just don’t have a room full of musicians that I can signal from the sound booth. Like indie-clones, I layer the music up, but unlike that rabble, I’m inputting by musicians who don’t even know each other. This assures nobody is sloughing off or showing off.
           A feature of early music recording devices is they were universal. You didn’t need a technician to figure things out. The frustration level with the newer models is how each manufacturer wants you to do it their way. That attitude always puts me in a mood. I tried to relax with a fashion magazine and threw that against the wall. There are two types of men. Those who are cool and those who think they can act cool. I can’t stand men who try to act cool. Grew up like that, I did. Clint Eastwood is cool. My brothers are not.

           How does one go about acting cool? Try the unshaven look and put some perfumed grease in your hair. Then wear a winter scarf in Florida. Never smile. Talk in spurts. Pose in front of every reflection. What, am I giving lessons? These people know who they are, for crying out loud.
           My shoulder is not helping here. And I’m much too stubborn to take painkillers all day long. Instead I baked chicken and watched documentaries. Bachelors can get away with living that way in long stretches. My study pattern is a half-hour of reading, then a break, any kind of break. Today, it was a collection of video studies on the Six Day War. That’s the one where the media wants us to believe that scrappy little Israel kicked Egyptian butt all over the Sinai back in ’67.

           But that story doesn’t stand the light of day. We know somebody cheated. Plus, the bull-headed US backing of Israel has always been embarrassingly conspicuous. This doesn’t let Arabs off the hook, since they were clumsy braggarts whose military was only trained for the parade ground. One video features a Captain Deraz who did not recognize the sound of jet engines and ran outside without putting on his boots. Captain-wise, you can’t get much worse messed up than that. Mark my words, armies which allow the clumsy to become officers will sooner or later start sending women into combat.
           A different type of transistor, called “field effect” was my topic today. I’ve still miles to go with regular transistors so this was a distraction. The reading was as bad as anything else in electronics. I want to know when and why these things are used, instead I get techno-babble about “p-channel holes”. May I suggest a novel concept to the world of electronics publishing? Always put the power source at the top and the ground at the bottom. If they had proven capable of figuring that much out themselves, I would not have spoken up.

           It came as little surprise today to find most people who use a 4G network have no idea what 4G is. Sound familiar? I’ll give you the quick rundown, but really, since 2G there have been no breakthroughs. You never hear of 1G because it didn’t exist until somebody came up with 2G. In 1G, cell phone talk was analog. You could listen to it with any properly tuned receiver. In 2G, the bandwaves were timeshared, which effectively encoded the conversations. That was the last giant step.
           With 3G and 4G, the transmission speeds are higher. That’s about it. They offer no other advantages, though there are some minor improvements. Same as computers, with higher speeds you get more features like streaming video and less drop-outs between towers. At the end of the day, 3G and 4G came from the marketing departments, not the laboratory.

ADDENDUM
HOW TO UNINSTALL OUTLOOK EXPRESS – OR SO THEY SAY

C:\Program Files\Outlook Express\setup50.exe /APP:OE UNINSTALL /PROMPT.
           Message to all the geek-nerds on the Internet: Are the lot of you daft? You repeatedly post on hundreds of sites that to remove Outlook Express, just run this command. This command does not exist. If it ever did, MicroSoft removed it from the program file directory years ago. You cannot remove Outlook Express by turning off the switch in Control Panel, and renaming the executables will not work either. All these files will reinstall themselves.
           In reality, Outlook Express is one of the nastiest Windows components and there is no quick fix. You cannot disable it, therefore you must delete the files that call it, and rename the files that reinstall it. You must delete seven registry keys – make sure you know what you’re up to. You must rename at up to 18 files that may have duplicates in different directories. This is tedious, as Windows constantly fights back all the way. Because they are assholes, that’s why.

           I’ve slated four hours tomorrow to pull Outlook up by the roots. It seems it installed itself on my email when I inadvertently clicked a reply key in Craigslist. Don’t do that. Copy and paste the address into your separately opened e-mail, but I slipped up once and it will cost me half of one of my remaining days. I hate you, MicroSoft.

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March 15, 2013

           This uninspiring picture of the eBike is actually telltale. Once you use this transportation as a serious way to get things done, you treat it progressively more like a regular vehicle. Notice how I subconsciously took up a full parking spot. It never gave me a second thought until I tromped into the store and the staff said I parked like a boss. Pull up, brake hard, kickstand down, lock on, march right in to the newspaper rack. Hey, my take is at least one person in this town has to look like they know what they are doing.
           First things first, the whirlwind news of the previous week, which in total does not look so good for the music and entertainment industry. Remember Sweeney’s up on the boulevard? Gone says the rumor, and in spectacular style—a major police raid. Seems they weren’t paying their taxes. A police raid over taxes? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? I have not confirmed any details.

           Wise was I to sidestep the Karaoke vacancy at Jimbos, a lot of ignoble goings-on over it, at least from my point of view. The slot has been taken over by an unrelated act, a lady I recognize from Laura’s shows, but whom I can’t place otherwise. She knew my song list, so we’ve certainly met. She reports three more places have cancelled Karaoke nights. There has never been enough to go around in south Broward.
           Who remembers the praise I gave the crossword clue about the compass point? It now transpires this type of clue has become an industry standard. That’s where the author gives you a number of degrees and you figure out the compass setting. Why the honorable mention? Because it was instantly recognized by this blog as something new the instant it appeared, and it got reported here first—at least first enough for it to become a major keyword draw despite the fact I only mentioned it once.

           [Author's note: the crossword clue was the compass bearing in degrees, the hint being the decimal point. I found it blog-worthy on many counts. It is real brainwork to come up with new style in crosswords. Formerly, the conventional clue ran something like "Detroit to Chicago direction". This was not only stale, but begs the question of how someone smart enough to do a crossword would care about the geography of such places. There were many times I had to consult the atlas. I've flown over these towns and that was close enough.]

           A stunning success with the recording gear this morning. My equipment is “new school” where they record everything except the guitar with flat sound, adding the effects in later. Called post-production, I don’t see it so much as progress [but rather] as a sign of the diminishing aptitude of the user pool. I come from an era where people had to do the job right. Now [meaning these days], recording devices try to eliminate the need for skill except in the guitar and vocals and damn, it sounds like it. Take this Boss [BR-600] I’m using.
           The input on the mixing board has dozens of pre-set guitar noises. Alas they cannot be turned off, you have to pick one. There are several “can’t-really-play-bass” settings like Punk, Fretless, and Squeeze but in general the Roland records what bass it feels like. To really make friends, the Roland has no memory and cancels all your settings when you power off.
           I finally dug out my old Radio Shack equalizer and forced a real bass sound into the Roland. To the untrained ear, there’s not much difference until playback. Wow, what a great sound, it was like I was in my teens with a stack of Ampegs. That's the success I'm talking about. I also like to capture fret buzz and string zip, your assurance of live music in this wasteland of indie recording perfection. By under-driving the input, I can get it just right.
           Looks like I’ll be missing Andre Rieu tomorrow. I asked all the women in my life to go but none could make it although nobody outright said no. I will not go to the symphony alone; it’s one of my rules. I’ll wait for another turn. What’s the bright side? Think of the money I saved. But, but, I’m not in this to save money. Carry on.

           The club meeting this Friday ran over into the early evening. We now have a massive screen projector if we ever go on a lecture tour. It was retrieved from a dust bin and needed only a $38 repair. Agent M cut a hole in the closet wall to beam the light onto the entire north side of the living room. It has been slightly over two years and we have no robot, but that’s a well-covered subject. It boils down to money. It is satisfaction enough to know we could build it. And we may, yet.
           We’ve decided to look into the communication capability of the Arduino. The extra parts, called a “shield”, cost twice as much as the microcontroller, but we can manage. In all these years, I still have never found a clear, nothing-left-out explanation of how modems work over the Internet. I’ve connected and repaired them by the dozen, but I don’t know what I’m doing and that is why I know that others don’t know either. Have you detected the paradox here?
           How is it I fix things without knowing the score, but when it comes to my own hobby, I must study and test for years? It is the nature of work itself. At the phone company, I was around people all the time who didn’t understand the electronics, but I as I’ve made clear before, the work got done. In general, the phone company runs their equipment right. So there is no absurdity to my fast-paced work and slow-paced hobby. Just completely different goals in mind.

           Taking inventory, I have exactly 29 integrated circuits in my little lab work area. After over two years, that is it. They aren’t even a matching set. Yes, there are common groups of ICs and except for the displays I was into last year, nothing [in my parts bin] is compatible. That's another thing the "experts" don't tell you about. I’m also low on relays. I like to watch videos of home-built computers. From my own experiments, I can tell by the clacking [relay] sounds when the computer is adding. Neat.
           The degenerate search engines have imploded again. No matter what you plug into Google or Yahoo!, you will not get more than one direct match. This blog went from three pages to a single hit—without SEO I point out. Is this a change for the worse? Hard to say, since it is clearly a counter-measure of some sort. The good news is those who rely on cheating the system must really be hurting. And that is only right.

ADDENDUM
           Much later, I got taken for thirty bucks. I admit I’m a schmuck on that one. I drove up to Jimbos to get some cables to repair. Then I stopped at the French place, expecting to see Harley but he was gone. I’m about to leave when Sally comes along and she is actually half-decent to talk to, initially. As soon as I’m buying, she switches to $8 drinks.
           She was smooth. It took her an hour to slip up and let on she was married. There must not be enough problems in the world already, the way some women go out looking for them. What? You want a few more particulars? Okay. I intentionally bought the last drink because she didn’t at first realize she’d messed up. I wanted to see how far she’d go before she clued in that I knew. How long? About a half-hour before I walked out on her.

           During that time, I asked plenty of leading questions. Yes, folks, she was one of them women to whom all men were horny, so therefore they would commit adultery at the drop of a hat. Thus, she considered herself a catch. She did not see herself as a sinner, but more like an outwardly unwilling participant, but inwardly plotting the deed. What comes next is even funnier. She brought up the subject of sex, in general terms, third person. That is, she was talking about other people in the room.
           Her vocabulary kept me glued in place. All the men had “worm-things” and “doing-doings”. The women had a “naughty place”. She thinks she’s captivating because I’m in stunned disbelief that I’m hearing this. Women complain about a double standard but how else could a kook like that have survived? Let me see if I can estimate the number of times she said, “Everybody’s doing it.”
           Twenty-five?

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