Pictures!

     Findings from Saturday's outing:

     Goodell-Pratt is good stuff!  My brace collection is almost complete: I now own a "corner brace."

     It's more sophisticated than it may first appear.  The knob is flat on one side; the flat is tangent to the ratchet, so you can drill holes very close to a corner.  The little widget off to one side is the ratchet control: pull it out, turn it 180 degrees, and the ratchet is reversed!

     Here's the bit-holding recess, shaped to the receive the square frustrum of a typical brace bit.  The clamp screw is stuck -- I hope to free it up but the drive works fine without it.

     Tiny pipe wrench, just because.

     Set of wood-screw countersink/starting hole drills, not antiques but useful and they were priced to sell.

     Radio parts!

     (Pilot light holders, balanced-line insulators, binding post, 4-prong plugs, small knife switches, breadboard sockets, six-prong plug, quarter-inch phone jack.)

     Here's a telephone transmitter.  Dimensions appear standard, design is of an older sort.

     And a variometer!  Nifty variable inductor.

     I also picked up a dozen QST magazines from the late 40s/early 50s and a collection of the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe.  Not a bad haul!

My Laundry

     ...I must do it.  Pictures (of stuff from Saturday's road trip) later.  (Went to bed early, woke up about 0100 and could not get back to sleep for hours.  Grrr.  Finally dozed off, had to wake up to feed cats [0600], went back to sleep and was awakened [0830?] by Tam calling from the front porch, where she had locked herself out when she went out for breakfast with a friend.)

Road Trip

     Photos to follow, maybe.

    Later: no photos yet.  I am exhausted: Columbus (IN) Hamfest, Exit 76 Antique Mall and the dependable Montana Mike steak joint.  (And let me just say, MM has that whole "road food" thing figured out: their quality is consistent, service is fast and genuinely friendly and prices are reasonable.  Is it the very best steak I ever had?  No, I make the best steaks I ever had, but theirs are darned good.)  I did all that on six (6) hours sleep and a bowl of cold cereal for breakfast. 

Please Stay The Hell Off My Side

     So, some maroooon on NRA's Facebook page opines on the Leland Yee gun-running scandal, "The problem is all these new people with foreign-sounding names!"

     Calm down, paleface; this is the United States of America and we've all got "foreign-sounding" names, even the descendants of the people who were already here when the first Europeans stumbled ashore.  Nope, the problem ain't names, skin tone or where your ancestors hailed from; the problem is crookedness and unAmerican ideas -- politicians on the take (or on the con) and incessant meddling into the peaceable interactions of residents of the U.S. --You can't own a defined "assault weapon" in California; Texas has a fat handful of felonies involving lobsters and in Indiana, if you light up a smoke within eight feet of any entrance to a commercial building, you are A Criminal.  Yeah, even if it's the R. J. Reynolds building, those nice toasted Luckies will get you in more trouble than standing there "only reading Playboy for the articles." We've got a jillion laws (and more on the books every year), most of which are Nanny-type "for your own good" laws, or  laws that limit entry to a trade or profession, or serve to protect (or bail out!) well-connected enterprises. ...Or outright create black markets through prohibitions.

     That's the kind of environment that breeds crooks and sneaks, smugglers and bribery.  You only get rum-running when you have Prohibition; you only get moonshining when there are laws severely restricting distilling; you only get turf wars between drug gangs when drugs are illegal and by golly, "tough, common-sense gun laws" breed gun runners the way filth and darkness attract cockroaches.

     I suppose life -- and the policeman's lot -- would be happy indeed if all the bad guys were swarthy orcs from a Tolkien movie.  Real life is a lot more complicated and includes liquor-smugglers with good all-American names like Burke and Featherstone, Kennedy and McLaughlin (not a one of those names originated within our borders, mind you, but they do flow trippingly off the tongue of English-speakers, for all you probably got one of them wrong) as well as scary furriners named things like Lee and Yee and Moriarty.

     It is not the skin or the name makes the man, nor even the religion.  It's how he treats his fellow man.  Does he interact by persuaion and honest exchange, or by fraud and force?

      For Leland Yee, the public man was well into coercion, applying the crushing weight of the state to control honest, peaceable persons; we should not be terribly surprised that the private man now finds himself facing very credible charges of oath-breaking and smuggling, of using the laws he supported to drive up his profit from violating those selfsame laws.  --I have a lot more trouble with the crookedness than the smuggling.

     What I don't have any trouble with is that he's from China (came here at age 3) and has a name other than Snodgrass or Smith.  Big deal -- him and a few billion other people, otherwise different to one another.  The United States is a polyglot nation, settled by a mad assortment of religious flakes, outlaws, younger sons and malcontents.  And people who just plain wanted to be here.  It's worked well for us.  Get over it.

Mom X Is Back In The Hospital

     Overnight at least, probably longer.  Hers is a delicate balance. I'm planning to go see her tomorrow.  Think positive thoughts, please.

Athens Had It Right

     ...The People all start out as idiots:  "Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education."

     21st Century America (and other nation-states that do the "voting" ritual) has streamlined the process by removing that difficult and awkward "education" step and replacing it with simple-minded propagandizing, thus allowing idiots to vote without the necessity of acquiring the tools of citizenship.  Yay, us.

     (Our politicians have responded by being uniformly duplicitous; case in point, California's Leland Yee, standout bringer-of-schadenfreude to gunnies.  The recent charges against him illustrate a general rule: whatever a politician takes the loudest stand against, he or she is probably doing in private.  Which is why we need to vote 'em all out -- for the children.)

Chromebook Learning Mantra

     A Reader is not a Text Editor.  A Reader is not a Text Editor.  A Reader is not a Text Editor.  If you aren't hip to this, you will experience highly unexpected results.  Gee, and Google even tried to tell me.

     The Chromebook learning curve doesn't have much slope but that one was a heck of a ha-ha for about ten minutes.

Another Morning, Another $1.298

          Or something like that.  I've been playing with a new (refurbed) Chromebook; Amazon was selling Acer C720s for $150 and for that money, it was worth finding out what the noise was about.  It's a nice little widget; won't run Q10 (my fave word processor for writing) but what it does run runs well.  The "learning curve" is all but non-existent; you can galumph along as if it was Windows and not go far wrong.  It's about a third the thickness of my Eee and half the weight.

     I've been working on slimming down the briefcase I carry to work; bicycling/motorcycling season is coming and I'd like to start commuting on two wheels.  This may fit in with that project.

     Haven't tried moving files between this and my other laptops and desktop -- I need to get them all set up for Dropbox and Google Docs, and stop moving things on thumbdrives.  (In sudden thought, why am I not saving work-in-progress in either of those offsite services, at least as a backup?)

     ...In case you're wondering, I Work On A Starship continues, I just don't have anything to publish at present.  As I get better with Scrivener (a pretty powerful outlining-and-writing program), I will get to work on putting the current serial back on course; the storyline meandered and ground to a halt.

Thank You!

     Thank you, Martin, for the lovely scarf (and the nice postcards).  The scarf colors are one of my favorite combinations.  It is a treasure!

     Thank you, Elliot-from-the-phone-company, who came back on Monday and rewired the phones exactly as I would have wanted, with a filter at the NI and a dedicated run to the high-speed modem.  Very neat work, too, and Tam tells me you greeted the cats as if they were small, furry people.

     And thank you, Readers, for tolerating my late-Winter slump.  Too much snow, too little sunlight, which should be fixing itself any day now.  A-hem.  Any Day Now...?   Well, eventually.

So, Monday, Huh?

     I should post something but I have, in fact, been looking at and  listening to a documentary about Richard P. Feynman and I was so taken by his lecture style -- Feynman as a 30ish professor is a kind of Borscht Belt Bob Hope with an innate grasp of physics -- that I plain lost track of time.

     So, me this morning you don't get so much of but the link takes you to over an hour and a half of Feynman, much of it in his own words.  It's a fair trade:

 "There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre." - Mark Kac

Lousy Day, Decent Dinner

     I was ill through mid-day and spent a lot of it horizontal but managed to get the basement work done starting in later afternoon.

      Egg Pomodoro for supper again, this time with some diced Italian dry sausage -- pepperoni, more or less -- as the meat, cooked a little and the grease drained.  I liked it, over a bit of mixed-grain rice-like stuff, and Tam enjoyed her no-egg version, too.

Is It The Weather Why I Feel Half Dead?

     Maybe it was doing yard work, etc. yesterday while watching to make sure the TelCo installer didn't snag himself on my ham antennas or come to grief on the two power drops (house and garage) the phone line threads between.  (Yes, he knows his job and is unlikely to come to harm.  But wouldn't you feel like a prime chump to be sitting indoors with the music turned up while a guy strangled or fried in the back yard?)  Maybe it was cleaning the office floor yesterday morning, because I was going to have to be rummaging around down there and the closer I looked, the worse the clutter and dust got.

     Maybe it was the high-speed pennyfarthing bike ride over to the gyros place and back, fetching dinner.

     Whatever.  I went to bed early, slept very poorly (including one dream involving romantic love-at-first-sight with some guy I never saw before in my life* and Huck fighting -- and defeating -- a mountain lion), then woke reluctantly and late.

     Today I have much to do, almost none of it anything I want to do (a moderately dire family gathering, the very last of the nieces and/or nephews and/or their offspring dropping by Mom X's for "Christmas," which puts even my procrastination to shame, plus rearranging the basement so the Phone Man can get a fine new phone wire from the NI to the high-speed series-of-tubes box, bypassing the old demark and the assortment of ancient R/G/B/Y quad radiating from it -- including one long-disconnected run of cloth-covered twisted-pair-of-pairs that probably dates back to the original telephone installation).  The first one will just be a couple of hours of walking on eggs, the second several hours of hard work. (But it should get us even more speed and maybe less RF noise.)  I've got a short stack of 4x4s in the way, plus in this house of tiny closets there are several racks of clothes that live underground.  And at least one shelf of irreplacable old radios. --Okay, irreplaceable and largely unwanted radios; me and a handful of other geeks are the only folks who notice 'em.

     A full yet strangely empty day and I've got to go start it.   Still beats the unmitigated hell out of shivering in a cardboard box, sleeping on a pile of rags and digging through dumpsters for dinner, a/k/a "My Retirement Plan."
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* Where that came from, I'll never know, and it was as sappy and chastely romantic as a romance comic book from the 1960s.  Second adolescence?