Buckets of Pure Cocaine Would be Safer

The weight-maintenance-cookie plan was a disaster of Hindenburgian completeness. I have firmly concluded that it is not possible to adjust my calorie intake using cookies made from my own recipe.

I was doing just fine using Oreos. I ate three or four a day, just to take the edge off and restore my mental functions. I figured there was no reason better cookies wouldn’t do the same thing, cheaper and more enjoyably.

The batch of cookies I made from scratch is completely gone. It vanished in two days. I could not stay away from them. They taunted me They jeered at me. And now they are no more.

Lesson learned. Night before last I picked up a new bag of Oreos, and yesterday I put them to use. I went through a grand total of three. Oreos just don’t have the temptation punch my own cookies have.

The oatmeal cookies I made were stupendous, but now I can’t have them. One more recipe I can’t use. Dang it.

I wonder if I could come up with a recipe for mediocre cookies. Probably not. It seems like anything that comes out of a home oven beats anything that comes from a plastic bag.

Oreos have gone nuts. Things got weird thirty or forty years ago when they came out with “Double Stuf” Oreos. Someone at Nabisco realized fat people were only buying the cookies for the filling. Now they have “Mega Stuf.” Next they’ll have “Pure Stuf” or “Gallon Can o’ Stuf.”

They have birthday-cake-flavored Oreos now. Wonder what that’s like. Do they come pre-sprayed with spit, to simulate the blowing out of candles?

American consumers are not hard to please. The buying habits of chubby ladies prove this.

When I was a kid, Nestle started selling raw cookie dough so incredibly lazy people could use it to make cookies. At some point we all accepted reality: fat girls were buying it to eat out of the tube. Now you can buy ice cream and protein bars made to taste like raw cookie dough.

Prefab cookie dough is very popular, but the thing is, it’s not good. I don’t know what Nestle puts in their dough to serve as shortening, but I’m confident it’s not butter. The dough tastes sort of like toothpaste with sugar in it. People love it anyway.

My cookie experience shows how things really are: the supermarket junk we think is good is actually pretty lame. We like it because we’re lazy. The British have a saying: “Hunger is the best sauce.” I would say laziness is second best. When you get off your rear end and make real cookies, or even cookie dough, you understand the depth of the compromises you’ve made in the past.

God has given me more strength to turn food down, but there are some things I still have to stay away from. I can’t keep bags of fun size Snickers in the freezer. I can’t keep miniature Reese’s cups on the coffee table. And I can’t keep homemade cookies anywhere near me.

I feel like he’s helping me get off caffeine again. A long time ago he showed me that caffeine destroys peace. I quit drinking it. But when I had to take over my dad’s business affairs, I jumped off the wagon. The boredom of using Quickbooks and straightening up chaotic files was more than my mortal frame could stand. Now things are more orderly, and I have to give up the crutch. I do not want to spend the rest of my life feeling peppy and cheerful until noon and then crabby and crotchety for the rest of the day. I don’t want to have to take Benadryl to get to sleep.

God changes peoples habits, and it seems like he really hits hard in the beverage department. You find yourself cutting way back on alcohol. Sugary sodas turn into occasional treats. Fruit juices are just sugary soda without the gas, so they’re not the answer. That leaves coffee and tea, right? Wrong. Caffeine.

Today I’m going to get a bag of decaffeinated coffee beans. I can’t drink room temperature bottled water at breakfast every day. I am not ready for that.

I’m still fooling with the CNC mini-lathe. I got it to function with Mach3, the most popular home CNC machine-running program. I haven’t been able to get it to work with KMotionCNC, the nerdier, learning-curve-heavy free program that came with my controller board.

I think the people who made the board don’t care about lathes. They’re not going to come out and say that, but it seems to be true. Their program comes with a little viewing window that shows you an animated movie of your cutting tool at work. It’s set up perfectly for a big milling machine, but if you try to scale it for a lathe, it looks ridiculous. The software doesn’t give you a way to fix that.

The documentation that came with the boards says you need to know the computer language C in order to really understand what the software does. For that reason, I looked around for C courses yesterday. I tried Udemy and Edx. I wasn’t too impressed. C is an old language, and if I understand things correctly, it has morphed into newer languages like C++ and C# (C sharp). The online course offerings for plain old C aren’t that great. I decided to settle for a Youtube course.

The instructor said I had to get a compiler called Dev-C++, which is free. Right away I had problems. He uses version 4-something in the videos, and the current version is 5-something. It looks and works a little differently. So far I’ve been able to figure it out.

A compiler is a program that takes the code you write and turns it into program files. For example, you might write 30 lines of C or Pascal or whatever code, describing a program that lets you enter two numbers and then adds them and prints the result. You feed this into the compiler, and an “exe” file comes out the other end. When you want to experience the thrill of adding two integers, you double-click on “add.exe” or whatever you named it, and the program appears in a little DOS window (assuming it runs in DOS).

The first (only) language I learned was Pascal. I had to learn it in college. I used a compiler made by Borland. It was called Turbo Pascal. Dev-C++ is surely capable of much bigger things than Turbo Pascal, but to the user it looks pretty similar.

I learned a few things that were almost, but not quite, interesting. For example, the nerd term “ported” is a corruption that comes from “portable.” When you move a program from one OS to another, it’s portable, so you are–nails on a blackboard sound–“porting.” I can’t actually remember the other things, so I guess they truly were not interesting.

Here is how much interest I have in programming: zero, or even a large negative number. But if it will help me not have to go to surly, condescending nerds for help with technical stuff, I am all for it.

I’m still trying to figure out what kind of screws I need to make the lathe work well. At first I thought any ball screw would work. Then I found out some ball screws are very crude, so buying such a screw would fail to help or even make things worse. Then I found out there are levels of accuracy, designated “C” this or that, and I learned that most affordable screws were C7, which didn’t seem good enough.

After that, I read that the rigidity of the machine and the skill of the user make more difference than the quality of the screws. Is this true? I don’t know. The truth is a jittery target that skitters away every time I try to draw a bead on it.

A guy who supposedly knows a whole lot claims a plain old Acme screw will do fantastic work if you set it up right, and he says rigidity is more important than worrying about the number that comes after “C.” So maybe I need to buy a C7 screw in a big diameter; 3/4″ or better. I can do that for around a hundred bucks, if I go Taiwanese.

I’ve wondered why Acme screws were not considered useful. If I machine manually, I can get accuracy within a thousandth of an inch, relying on Acme screws and hand dials. Somehow that is not possible with a machine tool. You would think the computer would get better accuracy out of a screw than I can, but it looks like it doesn’t.

The topic is insanely complicated. Good screws aren’t the end of the discussion. For really accurate machining, some people use “screw mapping.” As I understand it, this means examining the screw with precision instruments and recording all its imperfections, so the computer will know to apply the correct compensation at every point on the screw.

Obviously, I am not going to do that. If I can get parts to measure within 0.002″ of spec, I will be the happiest man on earth. I’m not making crucial parts that prevent hydrogen bombs from going off. I don’t have to have perfection.

Now that the machine functions, I have to figure out how to design parts. I have a workable CAD program. I have to decide how to turn the CAD files into Gcode Mach3 can digest. I’m using Fusion360, from Autodesk, for CAD. It’s free. Not sure if it goes past CAD. I should design a part and see where I have to go with it.

Some day when I have room, I’ll get a mill. It will be a real CNC mill. I won’t spend my life on Ebay looking for bearings and screws. I’ll just place an order and wait for the machine. That will be nice. It doesn’t have to be big. Just sort of mid-sized, and it has to be something I can operate without pulling my hair out.

The CNC lathe will be very useful, but if you want CNC, what you really want is a mill. In fact, if you want to machine, period, you want a mill. I do not understand people who claim lathes are better. Most of the time, when you need a part, it will be something a mill can make easily, yet which a lathe can only make with weird, denial-reinforcing attachments.

If you want to make pens all day, sure, get a lathe. You’ll wish you had a mill, though.

Whatever you do with CNC, buy lots of plastic. You do NOT want to practice on metal parts. You will crash, and the crashes will damage your machine and cutting tools. Plastic will give, and it will provide a nice buffer between your mistakes and your checking account. Also, remember you can run programs in an animation window with the motors turned off. If the program looks funny in the animation, you do not want to run it with the motors on.

You can practice with wood instead of plastic, but it makes a mess.

Is this information useful to you? My hopes are not high, but I don’t care, because writing it was a very effective means of procrastination. I got what I wanted.

C What I Have Done

More progress on the CNC front.

I’m sure I already said I ordered some acetal rod for CNC practice. If not, now you know. For less than ten bucks, Zoro Tools sent me six feet of it.

Acetal, also known as Delrin, is a very tough plastic. It feels and looks like polyethylene. It’s so tough, they make gears out of it. I used it this afternoon.

Today I had a couple of goals. One was to get my backlash correction working, so the lathe would not wander all over the place while it cut. The other was to get the initialization code fixed so the motors wouldn’t disable every time I looked away for ten seconds. I believe I accomplished both goals.

CNC is an interesting thing. I got very excited about it in 2014, because I saw that it should–SHOULD–change the world by giving ordinary citizens the power to make all sorts of things in their own homes. Guns, for example. But I may have expected too much from the technology.

There is no reason why a big outfit like Microsoft can’t come up with a program that allows relatively unskilled people to design fairly complex parts and turn them into code so computerized tools can make them from raw materials. There is no reason why a big outfit like Samsung can’t make a machine that reads the code and creates what you designed, without a lot of bugs and accidents. These things have not happened, though, because demand is not there yet.

Right now, real CNC is not plug and play. You can buy a 3D printer, which is one kind of CNC tool, and you can make stuff all day, but if you’re like 99.98% of the people who own printers, you won’t be able to make anything useful. You won’t be able to design new parts worth a damn, because CAD is hard, and even if you did, they would be printed in crude, flimsy plastic.

Recently, someone wrote an article saying 3D printing was “dying,” and he said something like, “Eventually you get tired of printing out little plastic skulls.” This is what people do; they buy printers, they download files other people wrote, and they print worthless knickknacks. You can do better, but you won’t do it on a $300 printer, and you won’t do it without acquiring some skills.

If you want a CNC machine tool, which is infinitely more useful than a printer, you will have to either lay out some serious cash or find an incredible Craigslist deal with a seller who has no idea what the tools are worth. If you can get a decent used mill for several thousand dollars, you’re doing very well. Then you have a giant mill that takes up half of your garage, and you have to learn manual machining, CAD, C, Gcode, CNC machining, and God knows what else.

You can get a CNC router, if you’re happy being unable to work in metal. I don’t see the point.

To make it work, you will have to get a ready-made CNC machine, or you will have to put a lot of stuff together. Then you have to learn how to make it run. I don’t mean making it make things. I mean you will have to learn things like how to make the motors run at the right speeds, moving in the right directions. It’s not easy. Believe me, there is no one-sheet “Quick Start” primer that will get you on your feet.

I didn’t buy a machine made for CNC. I did a conversion. I had to get two computer boards to make my lathe work, and then I had to make a cabinet for them, install a power supply, make the manufacturer’s software work with the boards, and make the software and boards work with the lathe. Then I had to make the software work with Mach3, which is probably the closest thing we have to Photoshop or Word for CNC. It helps people who aren’t programmers run CNC tools.

After all that, I had to make all of it work with Windows 10, which is a terrible operating system when it comes to connectivity and drivers.

I had to do all this, just to create a machine that functions. Making new parts with it that are more complicated than drumsticks…that’s still down the road.

The manuals for my computer boards are horrors straight from hell. The guy who wrote them is an engineer, which means he is not really a human being. They probably seem very straightforward to him. To me, they seem disorganized, vague, incomplete, and misleading. And I can’t say anything bad about him. He had a Herculean task to perform. It’s a wonder he did it as well as he did.

So anyway, home CNC has astounding potential to put manufacturing power in the hands of ordinary people, but it hasn’t come through yet. It’s at the stage where computers were when people made them from kits, using soldering irons. If you want to be a CNC hobbyist, giving up your other hobbies is a really good idea.

CNC is having a big impact on people like me, but people like me aren’t that common. It won’t really explode until an average guy can take a prefab, user-friendly, plug and play setup and start making parts in a couple of weeks. That’s probably five years off. It can be done. If the Mach3 people had as many software engineers working on it as Bill Gates has working on the next bad version of Word, it would have happened already.

It will be a while before printing your own household items will be as common as printing your own annoying family newsletters. But it will happen.

Here is the part I made today. You are probably wondering what it is. Me, too. But I made it, and I had very few problems. I wonder why I didn’t try machining acetal sooner. It’s very useful, and the finish is incredible. I used a pointy Chinese carbide tool with, essentially, no radius, and this thing is so smooth it looks like it came out of a mold.

I’m still wondering what’s up with the steps/inch settings. My x screw is supposed to do 1/25″ per turn, and the motor makes 3200 steps/revolution, so you would expect 80000 steps/inch. Measuring the lathe’s movements, I came up with 79760. Explain that. Maybe the screw is actually metric, and it only approximates an imperial pitch. Hmm…what if it’s 1mm per turn? That would give me 78740. Who knows?

The lead screw is not metric. Definitely. Probably. It’s American. It moves 1/2″ per turn, which comes out to 6400 steps/inch. But I have to use 6321. I haven’t figured that out.

I had a horrible time getting the screws right. I kept measuring the movement of the lathe, doing math, and adjusting the motors. I finally realized the lathe motors jumped every time I turned it on. This jump wasn’t recognized by the computer, so it threw everything off. The guy who makes the boards told me, “Oh, yeah, the boards do LEAP ON THEIR OWN every time they come on, and it happens all the time because I put code in the program that makes them time out and go dead.” I am paraphrasing. I had to look through the C initialization program and try to figure out which part of it meant “time out and stop,” and then I had to figure out how to rewrite it so the motors would always stay on. I succeeded at that, and things started to fall into place.

I also had issues with the backlash stuff. You can’t just tell a machine, “Add 0.005″ of backlash.” Backlash always has to be taken off the same side of the screw. You apply a correction when the lathe moves in one direction, but not the other. You have to be consistent. So I had to root through the manual and find out where to put the correction. It turns out that if you have a KFlop board, the backlash correction is only added when you move in the positive direction. Good to know.

Keeping the motors on all the time makes it impossible to locate the tool manually, turning the motor dials. I had to learn how to use the “jog” controls to move the tool into position. That was a nightmare. The z jog was like a rocket launch. I found it unusable. I wondered why anyone would ever try to use it.

I got my screws accurate to within 1 part in 500, and then I tried to run a simple program, and the lathe jammed. I had to turn it off. The tool just rammed the work, like it was mad at it. Finally, I found out the acceleration figures for the motors were too high. If you set your acceleration too high, the motors just ignore commands. Like, “Are you kidding? I’m not doing that.” So if five lines of code, which the motor likes, say, “Go left,” and five other lines it hates say, “Go right,” it just keeps going left.

It turned out I had the Mach3 acceleration figures so high, they were roughly comparable to the acceleration of a rifle bullet leaving the chamber. This is why I had jog problems. And guess what? You have to put acceleration figures in Mach3 and also in the software that comes with the board. So pitfalls abound.

Anyway, I made this white thing, and I’m really happy with it.

Now that I know the lathe will function, I can pay for a Mach3 license and get the full version of the software, and I can think about ordering a z axis ball screw. I also have to get to work on the spindle encoder thing. I’ll need to buy hook spanner wrenches. You can never have enough tools.

CNC is great, but if you want to get into it at your house, you will still have to play Robert Goddard, even though CNC is over 50 years old. If you decide to do it, go with a mill. Don’t even think about a lathe, because you will be ALONE. Even a router will be easier. A mill is the best CNC tool, though, so that’s what you should get.

I’ll bet no one read this far. I don’t care. I love my shiny new part.

I Will Beat This Thing if it Kills Me

I have been trying to rehabilitate my wayward CNC lathe. I built it in 2014, and for some reason, I quit working on it. I don’t recall the final straw, but I know that I was frustrated with the motor setup, and I was disturbed to learn that the screws that move the carriage (one of which cost a ton of money) were not adequate for good machining.

I started working on it last week, and I learned a few things.

First off, the screws aren’t that bad. The screw on the x axis (toward and away from the operator) is accurate to within a thousandth or so, which is about as good as I will ever need it to be. The other screw (z, or left and right) can be made accurate to within a couple of thousandths, which will do for 98% of hobby projects. I would be better of with ball screws, which have no significant backlash, but I don’t need them at this stage. Better to put my effort into making the motors and programs work.

Second thing: ball screws are getting cheaper and easier to find. I should be able to replace the z screw for under a hundred bucks, and the x screw, if it needs to be replaced at all, will be less.

Third thing: you don’t need a compound rest on a CNC lathe. A compound rest, for those of you who haven’t stopped reading already, is a second slide on top of the main carriage slide. The main slide, or cross slide, moves the tool toward you and away from you. The compound sits on it, and it can be swiveled, so it can move the tool in all sorts of directions in the horizontal plane.

A compound is very useful in manual machining, but with CNC, it’s a problem, unless it’s connected to a computer. The computer needs to control all movement and know where everything is, and that doesn’t happen with a compound that isn’t wired up. You have to leave it in one position all the time, so the computer knows where it is. That means it takes up space for no reason, and because compound rests are inherently wobbly, it adds error.

I took mine off and replaced it with a nice aluminum block. I was really happy with the block. It’s probably the first thing I’ve ever machined successfully, in one try, with no errors.

Now if I can just get the lathe to work.

The little flat part that projects in front of the tool post is probably not necessary, but I left it there in case I found a need to mount additional stuff. You never know.

Fourth thing: if you use a KFlop controller, like mine, you will not be able to do threading without two spindle inputs. Mach3, the program just about everyone uses, will let you observe your spindle’s movements with a single sensor that, obviously, sends a signal once every rotation. The KFlop isn’t having that, so I have to rig up a two-sensor thing.

The mini-lathe came with variable speed and a tachometer, so it has a spindle sensor already. There is a disk around the spindle at one end, and there is a hole in the disk. The disk runs through a caliper-looking thing which contains an optical sensor. Every time the hole goes through, the sensor sends a signal to the tachometer, and the lathe tells me how fast it’s going.

The CNC plans I bought say to buy a new sensor and install it on the spindle. The sensor is inductive. That must mean it has a coil in it. Anyway, you mount a small flat piece of metal on the spindle, and every time it passes the new sensor, it makes current run through the sensor, telling the controller what the spindle is doing. When I realized the lathe already had a sensor, I decided to try to hack into it and connect it to the KFlop. That’s when I found out it won’t work. Now I have to put a second disk on the spindle with two cheap optical sensors at 90 degrees to each other.

I still can’t get the software to work right. That’s largely because I made a lathe and not a mill. You have to be stupid to make a lathe, because no one does it. Because there are so few hobby CNC lathes, there are very few people who can help you with problems. Also, the people who make the KFlop do not provide computer code for two-axis machines, so you may have to learn to alter C programs to work in two dimensions.

Aggravating.

Nonetheless, things are moving right along.

I have one problem which is strictly physical, i.e., not in software. I crashed the lathe a long time ago, and now it tends to sputter. I changed the brushes on the motor, and it didn’t help. The old brushes were fine. I am now wondering if I damaged the contacts on the switch that changes the lathe from forward to reverse motion. Anyway, it’s one more thing to fix.

I bought a long piece of Delrin rod from Zoro Tools. I figured it would be more forgiving than aluminum when the lathe crashed. We’ll see. And Delrin is very useful stuff.

In other news, I am learning a lot about dementia. This week I realized that dementia is like dissection. It shows you what’s under people’s skin. It tells you what’s inside them.

My dad keeps having problems with his prescriptions, which I dole out for him, putting everything in a pill organizer. His doctor is supposed to keep them flowing to him by mail, by keeping his refills up to date. The supplier is supposed to send new pills automatically. Over and over, they screw up. I call the supplier, and they say the doctor didn’t update the prescription. I call the doctor, and they tell me to talk to the supplier. No one ever says the obvious thing, which is, “We are incompetent. Sorry. We’ll fix it.”

He ran out of one of his medications, and there was turmoil for about half an hour.

He can’t keep the names of the companies that supply his drugs straight. He can’t remember who sends the prescriptions. He became very angry and agitated, and he kept asking me the same things over and over. I was very calm about it; this is a problem that literally takes 30 seconds to fix. You make a note to call the doctor and the prescription people, and you go on with life. He kept telling me he couldn’t have this chaos in his life, and he was clearly upset that I wasn’t upset.

I had a sudden realization: he enjoys being angry and upset. It brings him pleasure. He doesn’t like to see it end. In the instant I saw that, a lot of things from my childhood started to make sense.

Most people don’t like being upset. When they get upset, they look for solutions to put an end to it. My dad never did that. When he got angry, he looked for ways to prolong it and spread it to other people. He used to get mad at people he couldn’t rattle. He thought there was something wrong with them. He had an employee he criticized for being unflappable; he found the man extremely frustrating, just because he didn’t burst into tears or share in the hysteria. I didn’t understand that. Now I do.

My house was always full of stress and yelling. When we would ask him to calm down, he always said, “Don’t tell me to calm down!” Now I see why he did that. He was enjoying himself.

You couldn’t tell him you were sorry and have an end to the problem. Even if you fixed the problem on the spot, he kept going. He didn’t stop until he got tired, and that could take hours. Sometimes he would run down and stop, and then it would start up again later. Sometimes he resumed days afterward.

I can’t believe I never saw this before.

It shows how harmful bad habits are to older people. When you’re 50 and you still have it together, you can change. When you become demented, forget it. People can’t help you with good advice, because you can’t receive it. All they can do is try to limit your suffering. And theirs. By spending less time with you.

Whatever you’re hiding from your kids today will eventually be so obvious it might as well be on a billboard.

Awareness of the problems my parents and grandparents have or had is not useless. It can’t help them, but it can help me. These things are caused or exacerbated by spirits, and those spirits leave the dead and prey on their descendants. As is so often the case, I am presented with a situation in which I can be blessed through others, yet I can’t bless them in return.

My dad’s potential to change and enjoy life is limited, and my sister is a lost cause. I don’t even know if she’s alive. The strange thing is that I’m not agitated about it. Many Christians have the idea that you’re never supposed to stop weeping and worrying over people; that’s a huge lie. We are supposed to be blessed, and you can’t be blessed if your life consists of perpetual handwringing over people who choose, habitually and over a course of decades, to harm themselves.

The Holy Spirit killed Ananias and Sapphira; people forget that. Peter spoke curses to them, and they died on the spot. He didn’t weep. He didn’t beg them to change. I’m sure he wasn’t happy about what happened to them, but the Holy Spirit tells us which battles to fight and which to drop, and he apparently chose not to have Peter wear himself out on Ananias and Sapphira.

We don’t know what people did for them in the time leading up to their deaths. They may have fasted and prayed for them every day for months.

I pray for my dad every day. I do what I can in the supernatural, and I make his life easy. That’s plenty of effort; I’m doing what I’m supposed to. Results can’t be guaranteed; I am not responsible for them. I am content.

I have more peace now that I understand what’s going on. That’s good. It’s bad when other people can’t be blessed, but I’ll take my blessings just the same.

Progress Isn’t Always Pretty

A friend of mine is taking serious steps to get aligned with God, and he has all sorts of problems. People let him down constantly. Things go wrong for him. He got in trouble with the law, in a moment of completely inexplicable irresponsibility. He has all sorts of financial issues because of his credit history, and because his legal problems–combined with Miami’s Spanish-first policy–make it hard for him to get employers interested.

If you think bilingualism is a great idea, wait until you try to get a job in Miami. It’s no wonder Cubans think it’s heaven. They get first dibs on every job because of their remarkable and unique refusal to learn the language of the country that saved them. Strange way to thank us.

He still makes a lot of mistakes, but I keep working with him, because I know he’s not joking about fixing his life. Also, I know I’m going through the same thing, even if my experience is not nearly as difficult as his.

The other day while I was in prayer, I got a picture in my mind. I don’t mean a magical vision; just something that occurred to me. I thought of a dirty, blind canal full of dead fish, floating turtle grass, and junk.

When you aren’t led by the Holy Spirit, you’re off course. You’re like a boat that has turned up a blind canal. A canal that goes nowhere will fill up with crap over time, and at the end of it, there is nothing but a concrete wall.

If you cruise up a blind canal, you will have to go by all sorts of obstacles. The debris in the canal will be in your way the whole time. When you wise up and turn around, things don’t improve right away. In order to get out, you’ll have to go through the same mess you passed on the way in.

My friend and I–you are probably in the same situation–putted our way up our blind canals for a long time. Then we reluctantly, grudgingly turned around, and we expected everything to be fine. Of course, that isn’t what happened. The junk was still there, and now we are cruising through it.

Today I thought of this, in connection with the work I’m doing, putting my dad’s financial transactions in Quickbooks. I don’t mean to whine (this time), but it’s the opposite of fun. I had to study accounting briefly, which is just about the most boring thing a human being can do, and then I had to learn how to use the program. I also had to get special materials to make it work with rental properties. Now I sit for hours every day, entering checks and bills.

It’s a drag, but it was predictable. For years, I tried to get my dad to keep track of things week by week instead of all at once, during a yearly two-month period of hell. He would not listen. By the time I got ahold of things, over a year’s worth of transactions had to be dealt with.

The work I’m doing is not fun, but the main reason it’s not fun is because my dad sowed for it over a period of decades. If he had been doing what he should, I would be entering current transactions, which would be relatively quick. Because he didn’t, I’ve been entering things going back to December of 2014. The work of entering transactions has been multiplied by about 18.

In a couple of weeks, I won’t hate Quickbooks any more. I’ll love it. I’ll tell people how wonderful it is. I’ll be living in the world of a responsible person doing maintenance, not that of a goofball doing tons of remedial work.

I brought it all on myself. I’m not saying other people didn’t screw up. I’m saying I let a lot of things pile up over the years, and now I’m paying for it. I don’t know if I could have made my dad use accounting software, but I am confident that one way or another, God would have arranged things so this experience would have been much better.

The Quickbooks thing is but one example of old, creaky problems I’m having to fix now.

God aligns things. He straightens our paths. The promises of the Bible are true, but they’re only true for people who truly give themselves to him, and when you change your ways, things don’t necessarily change instantaneously.

God doesn’t just do repairs; he also puts thorns in our paths to show us we’re screwing up. Or he merely lets others put thorns in our paths.

When I was living in Israel, I saw a very strange thing: impenetrable walls of thistles. You would really have to see these things for yourself in order to believe it. They looked like something out of a movie. The plants they grew on were very tall; they must have been seven or eight feet in height. They grew right against each other, so you couldn’t walk between them. They were covered with razor-sharp thorns. There is no way a human being could get through them. I couldn’t even see through them.

I think about that sometimes. Israel was arranged by God to illustrate Biblical principles. I think those creepy thistles were there to show the Jews what life was like without his help.

In some ways, we expect too little from God, and in other ways we expect too much. We don’t think he’ll fix our lives, so we stick with our own stupid plans. Once we turn around, we expect him to make everything wonderful overnight.

The things at which you fail are signposts, telling you you’re going the wrong way. It’s that simple. If you want to get past them, you have to stop leading yourself. When you accept God’s leadership, you will start to defeat your obstacles, but you shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t clear up all at once.

I eagerly await the day when I can honestly say I like Quickbooks. I may throw a party. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be deductible.

The Pun Mine is Deep Indeed

I watched a little bit of Top Gear with breakfast today. What a horror.

Chris Evans showed up, wearing the same seemingly smelly outfit he has worn on every episode, topped off with a plaid hunter’s cap that would make Elmer Fudd turn up his nose. He screamed his way through a review of a British lightweight roadster, and after two or three minutes, I had to fast forward. Up side: if he threw up, I didn’t have to see it.

Matt LeBlanc followed up, reviewing a gorgeous blue Rolls-Royce convertible. What a contrast. He was relaxed, as though buzzed on warm bitter. He was witty. His comic delivery was magnificent.

It made me realize there are two things wrong with Top Gear. First, they hired Matt LeBlanc. Second, the talent is the talent.

Hiring Matt LeBlanc was a bad idea, because he’s so good, he throws the badness of the rest of the crew into very sharp relief. They stink on ice. They are unredeemable. But for the presence of LeBlanc, their lack of ability might cause me less suffering.

The young guys are a big danger to the show, because neither one does a good job, yet they look better than Evans, so the suits are pretty likely to bump Evans off and promote one or both of them. It would be a classic tone-deaf corporate move.

Chris Harris, the angry-looking bald guy, has almost no personality. He hollers a fair amount, although less than Chris Evans, but he never says anything funny or interesting. Top Gear is a comedy show; an unfunny host can’t be made to function within that frame. He needs to go.

Rory Reid, the nonthreatening black guy, has the soft, reassuring presence of a chubby maiden aunt with whiskers. He is just as not funny as Harris, and his personality has no edges. Watching him is like being a girl in a movie theater sitting next to a guy who will always, always be in the friend zone. It’s like a sympathy date.

As for the show’s second problem, I guess I need to clarify. When I say, “The talent is the talent,” I mean all the talent that matters is on screen. The writers and producers didn’t make the show work. Clarkson, Hammond, and May did. That’s why they succeed on other shows, even when they’re apart.

Many shows are not like that. Take Breaking Bad, for example. When the show ended, people scrambled to hire Bryan Cranston, thinking he would pack theaters the same way he packed living rooms. It didn’t happen. Why? Because he wasn’t the engine pulling the train. Vince Gilligan (the creator) and the writers did that. Vince Gilligan could create a great show using crash test dummies. It really doesn’t matter who the actors are. They’re just sock puppets.

Joss Whedon is like Vince Gilligan. He created some shows that were very good, and when you watch them, you think the actors are fantastic. They’re not. Joss Whedon and his writers are fantastic. Usually (ahem Ultron). Firefly is my favorite show of all time, but I don’t flip channels looking for Jewel Staite and Nathan Fillion, because they didn’t create the magic.

The Beeb needs to fire everyone except LeBlanc and Eddie Jordan and start over. But they won’t. They’ll fire Evans eventually, probably after another awful year, and they’ll promote the boring kids, who will fail worse than he did. LeBlanc will disappear unless–maybe even if–they open the British treasury to him. Although with Britain’s welfare system, it’s probably full of old biscuit tins and IOU’s.

Like ours.

Except not biscuit tins. Maybe Cheetos bags and Air Jordan boxes.

Does this mean the Clarkson triumvirate won? I don’t think so. Not exactly.

The triplets moved on to Amazon Prime, which nobody watches. Okay, yes, they’ll get paid a lot, and they’ll have a huge budget, but what difference does it make if no one sees it?

Jeff Bezos thinks he can make people watch Amazon the way they watch cable. He’s probably right. In 2025. He’s like Elon Musk; he has a great idea that doesn’t work yet. I think Clarkson, Hammond and Mays will sacrifice two years out of the primes of their careers in the name of electronic progress.

Will Bezos syndicate the show so people can actually see it? I think so, although he’s nuts, so he might not. He may have the Apple psychosis. He may want to keep everything in the family, to the point where he makes his company a marginal player perpetually on life support. If he does syndicate, it will be at least spring of 2017 before we get our fix. By the time a sizeable demographic gets to see fresh shows with the troika again, the boys may be doing their mobility scooter episode all over, for totally different reasons.

The US version of the show has been canceled again (thank you, inept History Channel execs and Rutledge Wood), so at least we don’t have to worry about being plagued with that. I hope this time they pounded a stake into it and buried it under garlic. Last time, the execution didn’t take.

Fairly credible news stories now say LeBlanc (and everyone else in the organization) can’t bear Chris Evans, and that LeBlanc will leave if Evans stays. I guess there is hope, but there are a lot of ways for the Beeb to make things worse, and there aren’t many ways to make it right. When you rely on blind luck instead of competence, you are chance’s plaything, and the odds in this game are not good.

I still say they should hire Jason Statham and pay him anything he wants, plus all the rain and bad British food he can handle.

That’s today’s gripe. Now I must go and do something useful. Briefly.

Humans Bury Them; Satan Cremates Them

First, some housekeeping. Or at least some trivia to warm up.

Do you have a Windows 10 computer? Do you have an SSD (solid state hard drive)? Is your system still taking a long time to boot up? If so, kill Cortana. You may have killed this wretched, intrusive, domineering fishwife before, but she has a tendency to come back to life, like a tumor driven into remission.

You will want a program called Unlocker. Go get it. Install it. Then navigate to Cortana’s filthy hidden burrow, position her carefully, and give her a curb stomp. I’ll paste directions I found elsewhere:

Navigate to the following folder: “C:/Windows/SystemApps/Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy”
Right click “SearchUI.exe” and select “Unlocker”
Under the action menu, select “Rename”
Give it a new name such as “Disabled.SearchUI.exe”
Click OK.

Recently, I’ve been tormenting myself with the Oresteia of Aeschylus. I recommend renaming Cortana “Clytaemnestra.exe.”

Cortana will come back one day, and when she does, just stomp her again.

I guess I’m out of touch, but I do not want a computerized nanny. I don’t want to be able to talk to my PC, because that means it listens to me. I don’t want to be able to communicate with hand signals, because that means it watches me. I don’t want it to hear my questions and give me totally inappropriate and useless answers. I have Google and ten fingers (the table saw has been treating me well).

I don’t want my computer to take forty minutes to boot so it can bring me the latest sports scores every time I turn it on. I hate professional sports. I don’t want to see headlines. I don’t want to see great new stuff that just popped up on Amazon or Ebay. LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE AND SERVE ME. That’s what I want.

I think the nerds who run the world are involved in a race nobody wanted them to run in the first place. They’re trying to recreate Tony Stark’s Jarvis on everyone’s desk or in the pocket of their fashionable but not stylish Banana Republic hipster shirts.

I guess if you were accepted by Cal Tech at the age of five and you’ve never had a date, you may think having a computer take care of you is cool. Just like having our wonderful government take care of you is cool, because hey, no government has ever gone overboard and done things like genocide or thought control.

The fact that you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should; just because you can write a presumptuous, paternalistic program doesn’t mean you should. I’m a big boy; I can pull up my own pants and wipe my own nose. I don’t need a computer to do absolutely everything for me.

I have a bloatware Siri copy on my Android phone. I never use it. I need to root the phone and get rid of it, along with Google- (did I mistype that?) and Google Hangouts.

I rejected Google+, so now I can’t get comment feedback on Youtube. Probably for the best, considering my tendency to get on people’s nerves.

Some of our modern electronic minder programs are useful, for certain people. I got my dad an Android phone because I needed to be able to find him at any time, using his GPS signal. That’s nice. The phone has a program that will help emergency responders if something happens to him. Wonderful. But as far as I know, I’m not suffering from dementia yet, so I would like to dodder along unassisted until the shapes on the wallpaper start talking to me.

Naturally, my dad’s phone only works with Android Device Manager about a third of the time, and every time he puts it in the holster, the flashlight comes on and kills the battery. But I give the nerds credit for trying. I’m sure it will be 100% successful at gathering information that could potentially be used against him.

I still can’t believe Google tracks our movements by default. If you haven’t checked out your giant Google GPS map yet, you really need to. I looked at mine. It showed trips I had made years before. I’m sure Obama would never use that to put me in prison or anything.

What else was I going to write about? Oh, yeah.

Yesterday I continued working my way through a book called Death Dealer. The author (or at least the person who wrote most of it) is Rudolf Hoess (not Rudolf Hess), a man who served as Kommandant of Auschwitz. He describes himself as the greatest mass murderer in history.

I find reading about the Holocaust instructive, because God uses it to show me Satan’s patterns of behavior. Hoess’s book has shown me a lot. For one thing, it has shown me the great similarities between Nazi genocide and the child-sacrifice (better known as “abortion”) movement.

I’ve always compared abortion to peeing in the pool. If you stand on the side of the pool and pee into it from above, people are outraged. If you jump in, you can pee all you want, and no one cares, even if they know it’s happening.

Everyone who uses a public pool knows it’s full of pee. People jump in at noon and get out at two, and they never go to the toilet. People don’t mind, because we are used to shutting down disturbing thoughts about things we can’t, or don’t want, to change.

Abortion works the same way. If unwanted babies had to be torn apart publicly, we would be lynching abortionists, the way we used to. No question about it. Satan got around this issue by arranging for executions inside the uterus, inside medical exam rooms, where the carnage goes unseen. We rip babies’ bellies open and twist their limbs off without even the courtesy of an anaesthetic, and we tell the mothers they’re losing “clumps of cells.” They decide to believe it, and instead of going home with immediate, crushing guilt, they go home with hidden guilt that grows inside them and reemerges later.

The Germans and Austrians (and many other anti-Semites around the world) treated genocide the way we treat abortion.

The Nazis committed a lot of murders publicly, but they eventually adopted a practice of hiding the killing. They started out with rifles, but they later opted for cyanide gas. Why?

In his book, Hoess reveals that violent, open killings were very hard on the SS!

Hoess says that when SS members were required to line people up and shoot them, they became depressed. They hated the Jews, but they were not completely blind. They had to get large groups of strangers to dig pits, strip naked, and stand beside the pits while they were shot and shoved inside. Among these groups, there were many children, women, and old people. For some reason, murdering the weak bothers people more than murdering the strong. Anyway, SS men became drunks, and a number committed suicide.

Zyklon B, a cyanide preparation originally created to kill bugs and rats, changed all that.

When the gas chambers were built, the whole process became relatively free of stress. The Jews were ushered into the stripping rooms and told they were going to be showered and then relocated. Other Jews, the Sonderkommandos, were forced to do most of the work of herding them, lying to them, carrying off their possessions, and burning the bodies.

It was very much like abortion.

Today, if you want to kill your unborn baby, you drive to the abattoir in the privacy of your own car. You go into a privately owned building (or a public hospital with security), where employees work to suppress your guilt and fear, just as the Sonderkommandos lied to the Jews. You and your family never see the baby you kill. Some of the employees see, because they have to count the parts and make sure every finger and toe has been removed from you, but you don’t have to deal with it.

You’re just like Adolf Eichmann, who issued extermination orders and then sat in his office and let people like Hoess carry the water.

Here’s a remarkable parallel: Hitler burned dead Jews, in a Satanic effort to violate Jewish law and remove not just the Jews, but all evidence of their existence, from the earth. We burn aborted babies.

After the war, we found out that almost no Germans or Austrians knew about the slaughter. Neither did the Poles who collaborated. Almost no one knew! But that’s not surprising, because there were no former Nazis. After the way\r, we learned that everyone who had been in Germany and Austria had hated Hitler and his ideas. I wonder where the Nazis went. Maybe they’re still there, hiding in basements.

Obviously, people knew, and most Germans and Austrians adored Hitler and supported him with all their hearts. They were thrilled to see the Jews go, and they helped Hitler get rid of them. They smelled the burning flesh and rotting meat. They saw the ashes. They saw the full train cars going one way and the empty cars coming back. They heard from witnesses who worked in the camps. But they didn’t have to see the killing, and they got all the stuff the dead Jews left behind, so they were okay with it.

Hoess’s book is remarkable. From the tone, you would think he was describing his stint as a Wal-Mart manager. Eichmann and his other superiors didn’t understand his problems. His underlings didn’t obey orders. Bad things happened, and he couldn’t stop them. He couldn’t get enough food or water. There weren’t enough guards. The pastries in the conference room were never fresh. It’s all very cold and matter-of-fact, and he’s talking about a place where babies were fried alive in the hot fat of burning Jews.

Kermit Gosnell could not be any less empathetic.

Hoess never repented of anti-Semitism. In his book, he complains about anti-Semitic propaganda that pandered to the lowest instincts of the Germans…because it undermined “scientific” anti-Semitism. He continued to call the Jews Germany’s greatest enemies. He firmly believed that if even a stump of the tree were left, it would grow back and annihilate the Germans and Austrians.

He remained faithful to National Socialism. He thought it was the answer to his people’s problems.

He sounded a lot like people who defend abortion. They talk about the unborn as though they were landmines that need to be dug up; as though they were plague-carrying lice. You don’t get emotional about landmines. You say, “There are lots of old landmines in this region of the map, and here is the most efficient way to get rid of them.”

Abortion-lovers say, “They will grow up to be unwanted (i.e. black). They will grow up to be criminals (i.e. black). They will grow up to be poor (i.e. black) and have to go on welfare. They will be unhappy. They will cost us a lot of money. The most efficient way to prevent them from causing problems is to ‘terminate’ them before they fully arrive.”

Abortion is all about getting rid of black people. Don’t fool yourself.

If you want to get people to participate in something horrible, first you hide the horror from them. You make it look clean and peaceful. Later, you convince them that it’s holy. You make them think anyone who opposes it is filthy and evil.

If the Nazis had won, we would now be arresting and killing anyone who tried to keep a Jew alive. Such people would be enemies of the state. They would be reviled. Similarly, we now treat abortion opponents, who are simply objecting to the murder of babies, the way baby-murderers used to be treated.

Evil is good, and good is evil. That’s how the depraved think; this kind of thinking defines depravity. It’s the reason God destroyed the world, and it’s the reason he’s going to destroy it again. Depravity is worse than mere sin, because it makes you incapable of being corrected. It’s the reason hell exists. Our loving God, who is always right, throws depraved people into it every day, because he can’t fix them, and they are a danger to the rest of us.

American Christians are strange. Many think abortion is wonderful. Many of those same people read about the ancient Jews sacrificing their children to Moloch, and they feel superior. We’ve murdered dozens of millions of babies in the name of convenience. The ancient Jews never began to approach that kind of body count. Who will be judged more harshly?

At least the Jews had the courage and honesty to deliver their babies and kill them openly.

The story of God versus Satan is the story of a race war. No one seems to understand it. Genocide is an integral part of it. God’s people are one race, and Satan’s people are the other.

Christians will be wiped out eventually, and very few Jews will be left on earth. The devil will win the earth, and then God will come and take it back. It’s like the Nazi notion of liebensraum (“room to live”), which was used to justify conquest and genocide. One big difference is that in the war between Christians and the lost, the victors will be the ones who die. Strange.

Christians who believe in organizing and taking over are crazy. It will never work. God’s kingdom is not of this world. He will not help you. Your enemies will have his permission to defeat you. If you want to own guns for self-defense, great, but you will never be able to conquer America for God with them. You will just give the lost ammunition for propaganda.

It’s good to know what you have permission to do and what is forbidden. It helps you avoid wasting time and working toward defeat.

Try to get in touch with the Holy Spirit and get his guidance. Without it, you will just have to learn from hard knocks, and some of those knocks are very, very hard.

Mars Attacks…my Last Nerve

Yesterday I decided to watch The Martian to kill time while the birds were out. Now I am annoyed.

Spoilers ahead. Duck and cover.

This movie is about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who gets left behind on Mars. The rest of the crew thinks he’s dead, so they go back to earth. Then they find out he’s alive, so NASA goes nuts trying to bring him back. Because life on earth without Matt Damon is unthinkable. Without him, his duty to preach sanctimoniously to the public would fall on Leo DiCaprio, making it necessary for him to charter twice as many carbon-belching jets.

The rescue job is not easy, because Mars is not very close to the earth. At best, in the story, it takes over a year just to get him new couture underpants from Dolce & Gabbana, let alone bring him back.

I don’t care about the nerd issues. Some people, I’m sure, are flipping out because of minor technical errors and deceptions. They’re probably upset because the sand storm that drives the crew off Mars couldn’t possibly be as damaging as it is in the movie. Stuff like that. Hey, this isn’t science class. News flash: there is no such thing as warp drive, either, and during your lifetime, there never will be. Get over it.

The plot issues are what bug me.

First, the deus ex machina problem. More accurately, let’s cut off two letters and call it what it is: deus ex China.

Ancient Greek dramatists often ran out of bad ideas, just as dramatists do today, and one of their fixes was the god machine. They would rig up a contraption that lowered a totally new character onto the stage. This was the machina, or machine. The character was the deus, or god. The god would wave his magic wand, click his heels together three times, and make the gorgon disappear or afflict the Spartans with the pox. Or whatever.

These days we don’t see Greeks being lowered with pulleys all that much, except in German nightclubs, but we do see similarly unsatisfying copouts in movies and shows. It’s a crappy trick to play on an audience. You spend an hour or more developing a terrible problem for your protagonist, and the audience tries to guess how he will fix it, and then you slap them in the face with Proteus or Poseidon or Steve Jobs, swinging in on a rope.

I mean, obviously, it wouldn’t be Proteus today. It would be Bruce Willis or maybe Sylvester Stallone, whose machina would probably be a walker or mobility scooter. “Stop, or my Certified Nursing Assistant Will Shoot!”

I love obscure references.

Screenwriters should take the time to come up with clever solutions, instead of sandbagging people with unsatisfying cavalry charges from left field.

I also love mixing metaphors. And to joyfully split infinitives.

In The Martian, NASA tries to send a supply ship to Mars, and it blows up. Matt Damon is a dead man, right? And he can forget about that crate of Clinique moisturizer. Or maybe they’ll come up with some clever plan! But no, nothing like that happens. Instead, they cut to a mysterious office in China, where two Chinese people start talking about giving their secret Chinese rocket to NASA for another shot.

Come on. Where was this rocket six months earlier, when the whole world was clamoring over the potential earth-shattering loss of Matt Damon? Nowhere. The writer hadn’t thought of it yet.

Cheap.

Maybe it was still on the truck to Harbor Freight.

By the way, the rocket doesn’t have a fuse or a colorful wrapper with something like “Dancing Fire Dragon Cluster” printed on it, and it’s not launched from a bottle. Chinese technology has improved a lot.

I think it’s safe to assume the owner’s manual is incomprehensible. “For make mission Mars, to apply pressure dial A in direction of Mongolia.”

Here’s another thing: one of Damon’s main torments is the presence of disco music. The mission’s commander is a woman, and woman have hellish taste in music, so she only brings disco, ignoring the desires of the rest of the crew. When the crew leaves the planet, the only music Damon can find in the Mars shelter’s computers is garbage like “Ring my Bell” and “Push Push in the Bush.”

The cruelty is appalling.

Here’s the question: how does anyone get to Mars in the smartphone/micro SD card age without a ton of MP3’s? It can’t happen. Totally impossible. I think my phone has 80 gigs of storage. Not sure; whatever it is, it’s full of demotivational posters and pictures of Grumpy Cat. Anyway, there is no way NASA would let a crazy woman strand people in outer space with Leo Sayer, in an age when you can store 400 albums in a card smaller than a Chiclet. And if she did, he would kill himself after a week. He would boogie-oogie-oogie out of the airlock and do the hustle with his helmet off until he died.

Pretty lame, right?

When Damon sets up a communications link to earth, he is able to send email. If he can send email, he can receive music files, right? Apparently not. We can put a man on Mars, but we can’t send him The White Album.

Here’s another problem. NASA decides to send the crew transport ship back to Mars with stuff for Matt. He has to launch a rocket NASA left on Mars and rendezvous with the crew ship to get food. Being Matt Damon, he’s probably hoping for Evian and organic free-trade seaweed paleo yogurt.

Okay…if he can rendezvous with the ship and pick up food…WHY CAN’T HE GET ON THE SHIP AND LEAVE?

Final problem: Apollo 13. Hello? We’ve been here before. Unforeseen technical problems on a space mission, followed by frantic cooperation between astronauts and brilliant people on the ground, garnished with numerous astonishing McGyverisms that keep people alive. And Apollo 13 was a real mission, and the movie was better. So what’s the point of The Martian? It’s not even the first survival movie sited on Mars. Does anyone remember Robinson Crusoe on Mars? Maybe not. But it happened.

I haven’t seen the end of the movie yet. I assume Matt will live, although the person who wrote this thing may have the unfortunate idea that it would be original to let him die. Unhappy endings are not new to cinema, so I feel like he might as well live. If the movie ends with him sitting on a rock, watching the sun set on Mars, feeling peaceful about becoming a piece of frozen jerky, I will probably have another rant to throw.

They say there are no original plots. Maybe that’s true, but we can do better than this. The movie is entertaining; it shows what NASA disasters would be like in the lolcats era. But it’s not The Third Man. More like The Thirdteenth Reheating of the Corpse of Apollo 13.

I guess I’ll fire up the DVR and see if Matt Damon dies. I’m not optimistic. I own a lot of Chinese tools.

More

Well, now I’m even more upset. It looks like the plan was to bring Will Hunting back, not to drop off Chinese food. I totally misunderstood. But I still feel vindicated, because I remembered another plot hole.

To take off to get to the mother ship, Damon has to get to another rocket. His crew left on one rocket, and NASA had another one miles away, waiting for a new crew.

So…he’s sitting around for months, starving, scrounging for tools and food…and he knows he can get in his rover and go to the other rocket, where he can find useful goodies.

Why doesn’t he go? Why? Why?

I much prefer space entertainment that doesn’t even try to involve reality. Give me Captain Kirk with a flip phone and a phaser, engaging openly in intergalactic racism and genocide without a care in the world. Hipsters in space? You can have them.

People Who Live in the Real World Wouldn’t Understand

I had to clean bird cages today, so now I’m in the mood for anything other than bird cage cleaning. I will write again.

Yesterday I was reminded of one of the big paradoxes of the Internet: being able to shop for things from the convenience of your home results in giant delays instead of time savings.

That’s kind of a distortion, but here’s what I mean: when you try to buy anything on the Internet–even paper clips–you will learn so much about the choices you have that you will spend more time studying and searching than buying.

Yesterday I had to solder something, and I saw that I was out of good solder. I still had bad solder; the kind that never seems to work right. I needed the good kind.

Two years ago, I would have driven to Radio Shack and bought whatever I saw. I would have been finished in 20 minutes. This time, it took me something like three hours. I learned things about solder while I was shopping, and I fell through the Internet-shopping looking glass, where you find out that the thousand things you believed before breakfast are, sadly, impossible.

There are lots of different kinds of solder. I did not know this. I knew about two types: lead-free, which sounded unwholesome, deluded, and leftist, and leaded, which, I figured, had to be the best, because, hey…lead. Anything that contains ingredients hippies hate will always turn out to be the best kind available.

I am not even a little scared of lead. I used to chew lead split shots because I liked the taste, and while I may be strange, I never got stupid or incontinent or whatever. Based on what I’ve read, I think the government keeps adjusting lead standards to silly levels in order to keep EPA bureaucrats employed. If lead was that big a deal, I’d be in an institution. I’m sure it’s toxic, but lots of stuff is toxic, and most of us manage to survive.

I started rooting around on the web, and I learned that there are lots of solder types. When it comes to electronics, the three main types are plain old rosin-cored, RMA (rosin mildly activated), and RA (rosin activated). Also, there are different leaded alloys. Two of the popular ones are 63% lead/37% tin and 60% lead/40% tin. I think. Maybe the tin goes first. On top of this, cored solder can contain 1.1%, 2.2%, or 3.3% flux. The word “flux” refers to the rosin, which is a substance that eats oxidation when it gets hot. Again: I think. Basically it cleans the joint.

Let’s see. There’s more. Solder comes in lots of diameters. You can get 0.015″, 0.020″, 0.025″, 0.031″, and up. If solder is too big, it tends to go all over the place when you solder little things. If it’s too small, it takes forever to fill a joint.

It gets worse. Chinese solder is not reliable. Big shock there. So you have to look for quality brands.

You have to wonder how bad Chinese solder is, since most of our electronic devices are full of it.

I also found out you’re supposed to clean solder joints. I had never heard of that. When you solder, you may unintentionally (or in my case, intentionally) leave melted flux on your joints. It’s ugly, and if I understand things correctly (doubtful), some types of flux can cause corrosion.

I went nuts researching this stuff. I looked at all sorts of nerd forums. I wanted to spend $20-$30 on a pound roll of solder, and I did not want to get the wrong thing.

By the time my eyes had gone buggy from scrolling, I had determined that what I wanted, probably, was 63/37 0.025″ 2.2% RMA solder, from Kester, AIM, Alpha Metals, or Multicore. And it’s impossible to find.

I’m sitting here thinking about the guitar amps I’ve built. Are they going to explode because I used the wrong solder?

I learned that it’s really hard to find the solder I specified above without paying a ton. I had to compromise and get 3.3% flux, which some people say is better anyway.

Now I have to wonder: was I better off when I simply drove to Radio Shack and bought the wrong thing?

The bad solder I already had came from Home Depot. I took a look at it and saw that it was Bernzomatic brand solder. It’s for electrical connections, but it’s not the right thing for electronics. I threw it out. Then I thought maybe I would need it for something, so I took it out of the trash. Then I thought about throwing it out again. Then I put it on the desk and stared at it.

I should also admit that I solder incorrectly a lot of all the time. When you solder, you are not supposed to heat the new solder directly and melt it onto the tip. You’re supposed to heat the wire and apply the solder to it, so the wire melts the solder.

Yeah, right. Try that some time. Your insulation will drip off or go up in smoke, unless it’s Teflon. In real life, you do whatever you have to. I plan to try to solder better, but I’m not going to melt components and insulation.

As for cleaning the joints, I don’t even know how. I think you use a Q-Tip with alcohol on it. I have never had a joint go bad, but maybe I need to try to do things right.

I read that rosin fumes cause asthma. Geez. What am I supposed to do? Solder in the front yard when the wind is blowing? Wear a sweaty respirator? But then I think about the hundreds of guys I know who’ve developed serious asthma from soldering. The ones who didn’t die first from lead poisoning.

I jest.

As I researched, I learned more stuff. You have to try to set your soldering iron so the heat is right. Different solders melt at different temperatures, and some electronic parts can be damaged by excess heat. I sort of knew that. My iron goes to 5, and I have been known to operate it at 4 because it seemed to be hard on PCB’s. But there are irons that actually display the temperature with digital meters. I’m not going that far. That’s just crazy.

Arrgh. I’ll probably go that far. Some day.

It’s frustrating when you splurge for what you think is the best tool available, and then you find out it’s second-rate. I feel like a guy who bought a Bose stereo and showed it off for his friends before learning the awful, humiliating truth.

I’m not sure what my advice is. I’m tempted to tell people to pretend they never read this.

The solder I finally ended up with is Kester 24-6337-9718. If it’s horrible, I’ll tell you. I fully expect to be unable to tell the difference between this stuff and Radio Shack Random Idiot Solder.

If you’re still going to real stores and buying wrong stuff, you should probably keep it up. You will never know the difference, and you will save lots of time. I love the Internet, but sometimes you just want toothpicks; you don’t need the best OSHA-approved, fair trade, organic, North American hardwood toothpicks.

If you use rosin-cored solder and you get asthma, leave me alone. If I told you to jump off the Empire State Building, would you do that, too?

This is Where Trees go When They Die

Life is changing rapidly.

My dad’s problems took another plunge a couple of weeks back, and now I have to handle his business. I have to get his tax stuff fixed up. I have to sort his monumental collection of papers. I have to set his home office up so it actually functions. I also have to apologize to a few people, because some things got screwed up before my dad threw me in the deep end of the pool.

I have realized I don’t know how to set up an office. That’s today’s main challenge.

How can a lawyer not know how to set up an office? Actually, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Practicing law at home requires very little paperwork. You create paper files for your cases, but as a sole practitioner (I hate “solo practitioner,” and I’m convinced it’s a corruption perpetuated by lemmings), you aren’t going to get into cases that generate tons and tons of discovery, invoices, and checks.

When you start fooling with business, you have to deal with more stuff. You have invoices coming in all the time. You have a lot more bookkeeping.

There is a hoarding streak in my family, and it comes from my dad. We hold onto junk. Over the last year, I’ve been going into my dad’s home office and throwing out pounds and pounds of papers. Do you really need ten pounds (or even one ounce) of The Florida Bar Journal, dating back seven years? I think not. You also don’t need ancient legal files or emails you, for some odd reason, felt the need to print.

Old people (older than I am) seem to think they are legally obligated to print everything they see. I think one reason is that they are way too lazy to learn to use the built-in filing systems on their computers. This takes about three and a half minutes, so I’m not sure why it’s intimidating. They prefer to print everything so they know where it is, and then they put it in random piles which people like me throw out without telling them.

Never buy a printer from an old person. They wear them out.

A friend of mine told me her mother has ONE Word document. When she writes something, she opens the document, modifies it, prints it, and closes it without saving. When she dies, there will be no record that she ever wrote anything. Well…there WILL be the giant, unconstitutional backup the NSA keeps, but they won’t let us access it. That’s a real shame. It would be great to be able to call Obama for a download, every time something important gets deleted. Fortyish wives could send their husbands the naked pictures of themselves they took when they were in their twenties.

Okay, I’m not endorsing that.

Yo, Obama: we know you’re backing our stuff up, so why not let us retrieve it? We could save a lot of money on “cloud” services.

In the future, the government will be happy to produce everything bad we’ve ever said about homosexuality and socialism so they can persecute us. They will be happy to document our porn downloads and sexts in order to discredit us. Seems to me they should also be willing to provide copies when we accidentally delete term papers and family photos.

My dad had ONE folder for everything. Briefs, research, offensive chain emails sent by his incorrigible heathen friends…everything. It had thousands of items in it. Going through that was fun. I’m glad I got the opportunity, though, because it was like having a six-foot-tall pile of horse manure in the middle of the office floor.

As for objects that are physical, not virtual, I will guess that I have thrown out 350 pounds of useless items. As far as I know, he has never missed anything.

Here is a tip for anyone who has to clean up someone else’s business PC: get a solid state hard drive. If you have a separate drive for storage, replace the boot drive with solid state. This will speed the computer up like you would not believe. It makes a big difference when you have 12 years’ worth of files to go through, and you’re searching for every document that refers to “roof” or “plumbing.” You can get a very nice 240 GB solid state drive for sixty bucks, and they’re simple to install. I guess you will have problems if your computer doesn’t use SATA cables, but if it does, a solid state drive will pop right in.

I stuck such a drive in my dad’s office computer, and now Quickbooks opens in fifteen seconds instead of two years. The computer boots so fast you don’t even need to walk away and get coffee.

That boot thing is important, because it’s really hard to convince older people not to use “Shut Down.” They think “Sleep” wears out the computer and drives up their electric bills. Or maybe they think that if they click it, they’ll fall asleep. If you have to work on an old person’s PC, you will get really tired of doing a full three-minute boot every time you sit down.

Today I’m looking around for information on setting up offices; I do not want to reinvent the wheel, although I will probably have to. My dad has investments, so things come in, and things go out. I think I need to put an In/Out thing on his desk, but I’m not sure. I definitely need to cut a hole in his wall and install a new electric socket, and some of his cords and cables need to be made longer or shorter.

I learned something interesting while I was trying to use his PC. Windows 10 has a huge pile of spyware in it. I mean, more than I already suspected. It logs keystrokes. It tracks your location. It tries to send you ads it thinks you will like, so when you let your mom use your PC, it puts up banners advertising midget porn. It listens to you through your mike. It watches you through your webcam.

There is nothing we can do to bring privacy back; the inhuman sociopath nerds won that battle. But you can dig up your Windows 10 privacy settings and turn off a whole bunch of crap, making your PC run better. I had to do that today because I was getting keyboard hesitation. Seems like it’s all cleared up now.

Or not. I had a little issue there. Maybe the keyboard needs batteries. Maybe the computer hiccuped while the NSA installed new stuff to compensate for me turning their crap off.

You may be 95 years old and not too interested in Worlds of Warcraft, but if you have Windows 10, it is taking information from you and putting it in a database for gamers, and I think it’s safe to bet this slows down your PC. It’s hard to believe Microsoft/NSA/Hitler puts this worthless junk in computers by default, but there it is, so you need to root around and minimize the footprint.

I almost look forward to the day when Christians will be banned from the Internet. Think how relaxing it will be. Until they gas us, I mean. I suppose that will be relaxing, too, though.

I should put more thought into the things I write online. One day they may be downloaded and displayed at my homophobia/nondiversity/refusal-to-worship-Emperor-Warren trial, and I really want to make a good impression.

And now back to my search for office advice. I am not optimistic.

Here’s the Check

Once again, I am very glad God got me off of social media.

In case you don’t know, the social media tyrants are mounting a new initiative to censor “hate speech.” The obvious issue: who gets to define “hate speech,” and who holds them accountable? The answers: the social media tyrants, and no one.

The article I linked to says the point of the initiative is to “combat the use of social media by terrorists.” Comforting, right? Not really. This is the same excuse George Bush and Barack Obama used to erase the Fourth Amendment and destroy the privacy of every American citizen. It’s the reason your vehicle is tracked every time you drive in an American city or on a major highway.

Uncle Sam’s rationale seems to be this: you can’t limit government surveillance to terrorists unless you know who the terrorists are, and the only way to find out who the terrorists are is to direct government surveillance at everyone. Instead of netting the fish you want, you net everyone, scooping up their private information in wholesale fashion, and then you look at the information and other factors to decide who deserved the intrusion.

If you look at the article, you will see that the initiative was spurred partly by a lawsuit filed in France by a French group dedicated to protecting Jews from hate speech. They didn’t just complain about anti-Semitism, though. They complained about “homophobic” speech, as well as “racist” speech.

Who decides what “homophobic” means? Is it homophobic to say you believe what the Bible says about sodomy? Of course it is, as homophobia (a new word designed as a weapon) is now defined. Who decides what “racist” means? Is it racist to use the word “illegal” to describe aliens who are inside the US illegally?

The lawsuit was filed in France, but the social media tyrants operate all over the world. Are they going to have different standards in different countries? If I live in the US, will I be allowed to tweet, “Sodomy will ruin your relationship with God,” on a platform that will be seen in France?

It’s amazing how blind we are to Internet trends. We can’t see the obvious. We didn’t anticipate the corporate takeover of blogs. We didn’t see the liberal conquest of the Internet coming. Now we don’t see that social media sites are going to be used to destroy free speech.

Back when Myspace and Facebook were minor players, people blogged and used independent forums, or they avoided the web altogether. They advertised in the Yellow Pages and newspapers. They didn’t need social media.

Now, people who used to have their own independent Internet outlets are abandoning them for outlets that are controlled by small groups of godless leftist technocrats. And the worst thing about these outlets is that they have no accountability. They don’t charge, so they don’t owe us good service. They don’t work for the government, so they aren’t obligated to tolerate diverse opinions. They can throw you out or delete your writing whenever they feel like it, fairly or unfairly, and they wield their power very arbitrarily. Twitter seems to be the holdout, but they’re part of the new initiative.

It seemed like a great deal when we were given Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and the other outlets, free of charge. They let us advertise for nothing. They let us air our views without the need for hosting. People became addicted. There are companies and individuals that have integrated all this free stuff into their operations, to the degree that they might fail if they were expelled.

Think about that. Imagine what it would be like to wake up one day and learn that your company’s Facebook site, Youtube ads, and promotional tweets were gone forever, because you expressed your Biblical opinion about gay marriage. What if you also lost your LinkedIn and Google contacts? What would you do?

It’s going to happen. Don’t fool yourself. People who are financially dependent on these services are going to be faced with abrupt, bitter choices. Want to make payroll? Disavow the things you said in good conscience. Retract the things the Holy Spirit told you to say.

Most Christians will cave in, just like the Jews who rejected circumcision in Greek-occupied Israel.

If you have your own blog, and you don’t use social media to make money, you have a little freedom. It won’t last, but for now you can say what you like. There is no safe haven, but when a ship sinks, it’s a good idea to run to the part that sinks last.

I wonder when the ghost of Nuremberg is going to make its formal debut. Right now, it’s hiding in the wings, waiting for its cue, teasing us by exposing a foot or a hand. The stage has to be set. Pretty soon it will leap out in all its glory, and we’ll see how leftists and God-haters really feel about mercy and tolerance.

The devil suffers from fear of the truth, also known by the recently coined term “alethophobia.” The truth is that his ideas destroy people. The more power he has over communication, the better he can hide the truth. He coats his poison with candy, and he doesn’t want anyone to pull back the curtain and show him at work. Always the angel of light, with God always the punisher and mad dictator. Control of the Internet will be a huge coup for the supernatural propaganda machine.

The people who run our world used to go after people who were building bombs and amassing weapons. Now they’re starting to go after people simply for disagreeing with them.

It’s a wonderful end-run around the First Amendment. Entities that aren’t part of the government aren’t barred from restricting speech, and the Internet oligarchs aren’t part of the government. Not officially, even though Mark Zuckerberg visits the White House so often he probably has his own dresser drawer in the Lincoln bedroom. Now that a large percentage of public speech goes through social media, powerful, legal restrictions are possible.

I’m not going to worry about it (or about anything else), but people should be made aware. You have to have your prayer life together. You have to pick a side, because to refuse to pick a side is to pick the devil’s side. The one that loses.

It’s sad to see the great wealth and technological advances of the current age come with such a cost. Human beings find ways to ruin everything.

We Live in Beeblebroxian Denial

Herodotus’ Histories is not a book. It’s a maze. You enter through the front page, and you never get out.

The Columbia University Lit. Hum. syllabus says to start with pages 1-140. I believe I’m on about 120, and I have really been trying. It is slow work, unless you skim it and let the confusing things lie.

The print is tiny, the margins are small, and I keep running into things I have to look up. For instance, there was an ancient nation that used swipes for irrigation. That’s not even in the dictionary. It’s a counterweighted crane operated by a miserable, but very buff, peasant.

One interesting thing about Herodotus is that he draws connections between Egypt and Greece. I suppose every educated person has heard that the Greeks stole their culture and technology from the Egyptians, but most of us haven’t troubled ourselves to dig into the matter. Apparently, the Greek “gods” were worshiped in Egypt at the time of Herodotus (fifth century B.C.), and if Herodotus is to be believed, many of them were old Egyptian “gods” with new names.

Isis, for example is sort of like Hera, the wife of Zeus. She is also conflated with Aphrodite to some extent. This is the same failed angel or whatever that was worshiped alongside of Yahweh by the ancient Jews. They called her “the queen of heaven,” and they put little Isis/Ashtoreth/Hera/whatever altars in their places of worship.

Zeus is apparently our old acquaintance Baal (or Bel), which means he’s really the devil. The Egyptians called him Amun and Amun-Ra. There was an Egyptian city called Ammon, and Zeus had himself an oracle there. People went to give him offerings and have their fortunes told.

Zeus is an interesting character, because he is the supreme god (I will give up the annoying quotation marks) of the Greeks, and he is strong enough to fight all the others at once, but he is the grandson of the first supreme male god. He had a beginning. His grandfather was Ouranos (Uranus to you and me; Greek for “sky”), and his son was Kronos (Greek for “time”). Gaia, the earth, was the wife of Ouranos and the father of Zeus. She got angry at Ouranos for some reason I forget, and Kronos sided with her and castrated Ouranos. The organs and drops of his blood landed in the sea and became various peoples, Aphrodite, and/or assorted giants, depending on whom you ask.

Kronos fell out with Gaia, and Zeus overcame him and replaced him.

It’s all very interesting, because in reality, the battle between Satan and God is about reproduction. It’s genocidal. Each one is working to exterminate the seed of the other. Satan’s greatest desire is to emasculate God and replace him, and to replace God’s children with his own.

Herodotus is full of accurate pagan prophecies. Modern scholars discount these, saying the prophecies were made up after the events they addressed. Who is to say, though? False religions have real power; talk to a Haitian some day if you don’t believe it.

Herodotus writes a lot about Croesus, the ancient king who is known for his wealth. Supposedly Croesus sent messengers to a bunch of oracles, and he told the messengers to go to the oracles on a certain day and ask what he was doing. On that day, says Herodotus, Croesus put turtle meat and lamb together and cooked them in a bronze pot. The oracle of Delphi spoke of turtle meat and lamb cooking in a bronze pot. After that, Croesus was a major fan of the Oracle of Delphi, and he donated all sorts of treasure.

Are any of the stories true? I don’t know, but I suppose some of them are. The fact that a religious person serves a false deity doesn’t mean his practices don’t work.

Back when I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church, I worked alongside a very reserved, serious Haitian man. He told me about an event he had been to in Haiti. A woman who was a servant in a house presided over it. She was a priestess.

They built a bonfire, and the woman started dancing around it. As things progressed, people became more and more emotional, and she got more excited. She danced closer and closer to the flames. At the end, according to my friend, she was dancing in the fire, unharmed.

This was a guy who talked very little, never gossiped, and never tried to impress anyone. I have no reason to doubt what he said, and I can’t pass judgment on the tales Herodotus passed on. Herodotus made lots of mistakes, and he handed down a lot of gossip. That is true. On the other hand, he went out of his way to distinguish rumors from facts.

My guess is that many of the prophecy stories are true; particularly the ones about Cyrus. His rise was predicted by Jeremiah. He truly did depose his grandfather, as predicted by a heathen. He truly did defeat Croesus and become emperor.

One of the unfortunate things about technology is that we use it to convince ourselves the supernatural doesn’t exist, and that we don’t need God. We can’t seem to measure the supernatural with instruments. When we try to document it, it slips out of our hands. Our earthly power keeps increasing. We cure more and more diseases. We find better ways to protect ourselves from nature. We have decided that we are gods, or if not gods, close enough to gods to justify reliance on ourselves.

We think we’re stronger than we are, so we have stopped looking for help. That’s sad, because the supernatural realm is where all the power and answers are. And our beliefs don’t change God’s order. When you die and find yourself dealing with supernatural beings, you won’t be able to escape judgment by saying you’re an atheist.

I’m glad I’m reading these crusty old books. As I’ve said, I have a couple of huge books about the early church, and knowing a little bit about the world from which the church emerged will surely help me understand them.

I’m also glad I’m not reading on the Columbia University schedule. They give people seven days to cover all the readings in Herodotus. There is no way to do it justice in that time while keeping up with other courses. But that’s how college is. It’s like a bus full of Japanese tourists at the Eiffel Tower. Have you seen what they do? Everyone assembles outside the bus. One person runs forward and takes a picture of the group. He rejoins the group. Then another person does the same thing. When everyone has taken a picture, they get back in the bus and leave.

I always feel lucky to live in a time when we have things like air conditioning, fairly good medical knowledge, and power tools. But when I look at Herodotus, I see him referring to “ancient” people, and he lived 2400 years ago. His “modern” is our “primitive.” That means we are primitive, too. We just can’t see it. I always think it would kill me to go back and live in an age of lesser technology, but I suppose the age I live in is also pretty bad. We can cure a toothache or burn off a wart, but the world is still full of hardship and agony.

I feel like Arthur Dent, who lived in a world surrounded by astounding space ships he couldn’t see, yet thought his own crappy digital watch was pretty cool.

Now I’m bummed. I think I’ll fix a steak.

We’re All Exhibitionists Now

I did my time today working on Quickbooks, and then I relaxed with Herodotus, after which I flew the drone. People probably don’t believe me when I write about my thrilling life.

Accounting is still a horror. I’ve gotten to the point where I understand it well enough to enter things in Quickbooks, and I will be glad to have the skill and knowledge, but once again, I am reminded of one of my dad’s courtroom stories. His client passed out in the street drunk, and a man backed over him and broke his leg. The defendant’s lawyer testified that the man had no damages because a broken bone that has healed is stronger than a bone that has never been broken at all. My dad asked him how much he would charge to break the other leg.

That which has not killed me has made me stronger, but it definitely has not put a smile on my face.

Herodotus is surprisingly entertaining, but after Homer and Sappho, the phone book would be entertaining, so my perceptions may be distorted. I have the Robin Waterfield translation, and I would describe the tone as “folksy.” When you read it, the voice you hear in your head is like an American talk radio host. Somewhat irreverent, not altogether serious, and very informal.

I have been reading about the rise of Cyrus, the Persian emperor who helped the Jews. In case you don’t know, a prophet mentioned Cyrus by name in the Old Testament. I am too lazy to look it up, but the prophet spoke long before Cyrus was born.

I don’t know if Herodotus ever mentions the Jews, but he mentions lots of figures who are either in the Bible or separated from it by only one or two degrees. Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal, Darius, and a bunch of others.

Herodotus wrote about Cyaxares, a Median emperor who married a daughter off to Nebuchadnezzar II, who happens to be the guy who sacked the temple in 586 B.C. Cyaxares was the grandfather of Astyages, and Astyages was the grandfather of Cyrus. Herodotus says Astyages had two dreams that indicated that Cyrus, whose father was a Persian, not a Mede, would depose him and take his empire. Astyages told his consigliere Harpagus to kill the child, and Harpagus delegated the job to a herdsman. You can guess the rest. It’s a lot like the stories of Jesus and Moses. A deliverer is promised, so a heathen ruler tries to kill children.

Cyrus reminds me of Donald Trump. He was extremely bold and decisive, and things went well for him, as though a higher power had given him extraordinary favor. Of course, that’s the correct explanation.

I cant’ say I approve of Cyrus, any more than I completely approve of Trump. Cyrus was not a good person, but he served a purpose, and he did a job.

Herodotus is incomprehensible if you just read what he wrote; you have to look at external sources. I use the Internet to explain things and fill gaps. I use it to put dates beside things. For example, the Scythians ruled the area the Medes later ruled from around 553 B.C. to about 525 B.C., until Cyaxares got them. If you put dates next to things, you get a picture of what was happening outside of Israel when various things happened in the Bible. The dates are highly dubious, but they’re better than nothing.

I don’t know if I would call Herodotus a historian. To me, he’s more of a gossip. He can’t verify what he says, and he admits it, but he passes it along all the same.

It’s a funny coincidence (if that’s what it is), but a good friend of mine generously sent me two huge books about the Revelation, at about the time I started going back over the books from Columbia University’s Lit. Hum. course. I’ve written about this. Evangelist Rick Renner wrote the books, and they’re stuffed with information about the ancient world.

The neat thing about going back over the torment of Lit. Hum. is that it will help me understand Renner’s books. Herodotus will not cover the time period of the early church, which appears to be Renner’s focus; Herodotus died in the fifth century B.C. But he provides a lot of groundwork on the ancient world that provided the foundation of the world that existed in the time of Jesus and the disciples.

After the Greeks and Virgil, Lit. Hum. shoots directly to Augustine, who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

I don’t know how anyone learned anything before the Internet. It makes this stuff so much easier.

Abusing my brain with accounting and ancient literature has to be countered with pleasure, so I keep working on my drone skills. Sometimes I’m able to stay aloft for maybe 20 seconds now. The drone doesn’t drop out of the air as often as it used to. Maybe something in the power trains has loosened up.

I made a fourth drone purchase. Revell, a company that makes the kind of plastic airplane models we all used to set on fire when we were 12, makes drones now, and they have a neat one with six props. It has lots of lights on it. Clearly I needed it.

Once my second drone arrives, I’ll have the ability to fly more or less continuously for maybe 15 minutes (my flights are lengthened by frequent pauses to retrieve the drone from behind furniture). That will help me practice efficiently. When I have four drones, I’ll be able to practice considerably more than I want to.

Some day I’ll get a drone with a camera. Sounds extravagant, but you can get all sorts of cool ones for under a hundred bucks. I don’t have any neighbors who sunbathe naked (as far as I know), so I don’t think I can be condemned for operating a camera drone.

Of course, I may get a surprise when I fly it. Hmm.

I think the most annoying thing about camera drones is that the punks who use them to torment us have put us on the defensive. When people complain about drones in their yards, the punks will actually say things like, “You can always stay inside and draw your blinds.”

Technology is going to get incredibly cool, and we will lose all semblance of privacy and liberty. Then Jesus will return. That’s my guess. So I feel like I need to get my droning in while I can.

As I have said before, I don’t think God will tolerate the destruction of privacy and free will. Without them, you can’t have judgment or reward. A world like that serves no purpose.

I’ll put up a Youtube of the hexacopter. I hope you like it. After all, we bought these toys with the rights we held precious.

My Trove of Useless Knowledge Increases

I feel like regaling you with more tales of my drone adventures.

Yesterday I spent quite a long time trying to fly my new Sky Viper M200 Nano drone. I learned a whole lot, but I did not fly all that well.

The most obvious reason is that I have no skill, but there is another reason. This drone doesn’t work.

The drone kept quitting and falling, usually when I tried to reduce altitude. Sometimes it quit when I was doing other things. I could not figure it out. I saw various “solutions” posted on the web.

One guy said the controller was weak, and that it was overwhelmed by nearby 2.4 GHz signals. That apparently includes things like cell phones, routers, and your neighbors’ routers. I put neighbors’ routers in a special category, because you can’t turn those off. You can turn off your phone and router, but there is nothing you can do about the fat guy next door who spends 19 hours per day beating nine-year-olds at Worlds of Warcraft or whatever it is they play now.

Doesn’t matter; it looks like that explanation was wrong.

Another guy claimed the batteries weren’t soldered correctly. I reject that explanation, because the dropping problem is pretty much universal. They can’t be doing all the batteries wrong.

The third theory is that the props are no good.

I don’t know a whole lot about drones, but I know that even the little ones are highly sophisticated. Think about it. How would you like to balance something in the air using four fans? That takes some electronics. Drones sense various things, including increased current draw due to prop obstruction. The drone I have shuts down when it thinks the props are stuck.

My guess is that under certain conditions, bad props will behave in a way that makes the motors quit.

Anyway, a Youtube guy who calls himself Frequent Flyer RC had trouble with the Sky Viper M200, and the problems stopped when he put different props on it. He uses props from a drone called the Hoverdrone Nano, and he says you can also use certain other props. He has a video where he flies an M200 all over the neighborhood.

I’ll put the video up. Look at the tiny space where he flies that thing…without losing it!

The M200 I bought dropped and dropped, and finally one engine quit.

I took the drone back to Toys R Us and got a new one. I am being careful with it. It drops like the other one, but I ordered new props from China, so I expect it to work eventually. If not, Toys R Us will eat it.

In the meantime, I found a better drone: the Cheerson CX-10.

The Cheerson is even smaller than the M200, and it flies like crazy. It comes in colors other than lost-in-tree-camouflage green and black. Best of all, you can get it for twelve bucks, delivered, on Amazon. There is a newer version which has something called “headless mode” (?), and it’s more expensive. The original is supposedly better.

The CX-10 is supposed to be very good for indoor flight, due to its yaw rate, whatever that is.

I ordered TWO Cheersons. I mean, come on. Twelve bucks. That’s lunch money. And I got orange ones because they show up well when you drop them in foliage.

The CX-10’s colors are pretty bad, but you can’t have everything. Not for twelve bucks.

I ordered one from China for twelve dollars, and I ordered one from the US for a few dollars more. The Chinese one will take forever to get here. I figured I would get one fast so I could use it and then have the other as a backup/relief drone when it arrives.

Too cool.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get a full-size drone. They cost hundreds, and I have nowhere to fly it.

While I wait for the Cheerson, I am practicing with the M200 at very low altitude, like under three feet. I don’t want it to bang itself to death.

I can’t believe I got here starting from an argument about cordless tools. What’s next? My own nuclear sub?

I will now post a couple of videos, and I’m sure someone who sees them will be just as immature as I am. Someone will buy a Cheerson.

Keep it away from your pets. They do not like drones, and the props can injure their eyeballs.

For the Next Five Minutes, I Own the Skies

Everyone knows I’m nuts, so I suppose it will do no harm to provide further evidence. I bought a drone.

I hate drones. The whole point of drones, for most people, is to take naked pictures of women through their bathroom windows, and they are also useful for violating the sanctity of your neighbors’ yards and generally making an intolerable ass of yourself. But I don’t plan to involve myself in the primary uses of drones, so I felt like it was okay to get one. I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

I got myself a Sky Viper Nano, which is about the smallest drone you can buy unless you’re the CIA. It’s literally the size of two Hot Wheels cars side-by-side. I knew it was small when I saw it online, but when I bought it and opened the box, it still gave me a jolt. In my yard there are grasshoppers bigger than this thing. No exaggeration. Look up “lubber.”

It was nearly charged when I bought it, so I barely had time to read the totally patronizing and unneeded instructions.

Okay, I did read them. I just hate instructions, on general principles.

When you buy this drone, you get the drone itself, a video-game-style controller, and a USB charging cord. That’s about it. You charge it until the LED on the cord turns green, and off you go.

The controller is pretty cool. It takes AAA batteries. It has two joysticks, four trim buttons, and a “stunt” button. One joystick controls the direction in which the drone is turned; it can spin it while the drone hovers in place. It also controls the speed of the props, making the drone go up and down. The other joystick tells the drone to move in whatever compass direction you choose, at whatever speed you choose. The trim buttons adjust it so doesn’t run off or spin when the joysticks are in their home positions. For example, if you lift off and the drone spins, you push a trim button until it stops.

The stunt button makes the drone turn over once. If you’re going forward, it does a barrel roll.

I figured I would destroy it if I took it outside, so I tried it indoors. It was impossible. I could get it off the floor, but then it really liked to scuttle sideways or backward. Then it would go under furniture and sulk, or it would simply bang into things and stop.

With effort, I got it to where I could make three-foot trips that were not very uneventful. At that point I got brave and took it outside. About ten minutes later, it went straight up about sixty feet and disappeared behind me, over the roof.

I probably had something to do with that.

I looked all over the neighborhood. This drone is tiny, but it will fly 200 feet before losing the signal and stopping. I no way of locating it. They don’t beep when they’re lost.

If you’re shy and you want to meet your neighbors, buy a drone. Sooner or later, you will have to knock on their doors and ask if they’ve seen it.

I finally got a ladder and got on the roof, where I saw that a new herd of bees had moved into my soffit. Great. Time to call the bee people again. Oh well. Free honey.

I found the drone and took it back indoors. I had to go somewhere earlier, so I stopped playing with it, but now I’m back, and I’m determined to get it under control.

A few things surprised me.

1. It goes a very long way. Theoretically, you can fly this thing throughout an imaginary 400-foot hemisphere, with you at the center. That’s bigger than a football field, with a ceiling that reaches 200 feet when you go straight up.

2. It really moves. It seems like it goes about 30 miles per hour horizontally. That’s probably an illusion related to its small size. But there is no way a human being could run and keep up with it. And it flies straight up in a big hurry. When it went over the house, I had about a second to react, and clearly, that was not enough.

One reason I picked this drone is that I saw people talking about 7-minute and 10-minute flights. That may not seem like a lot, but its competitors are said to check in at 3-4 minutes, and I knew that would drive me nuts. Every time it stops, you have to charge it for maybe 20 minutes. How much can you learn in 4 minutes? Not a whole lot.

I had some problems with the drone quitting suddenly. I think that was because the props were pushed on too far. They’re held on by friction, so it’s up to you how far onto the shafts they go. I think they were rubbing. It stops automatically when it thinks it’s obstructed.

I wanted to give this thing a try so I would have some tiny acquaintance with the technology. I’m not a fan of drone users; they’re like the creepy people who get thrown out of restaurants for filming people with Google glass. But drones are not going away, so I might as well learn a little bit about them. It’s even conceivable (barely) that I might one day have a use for one.

Also, I wanted one because it was cool, and hey…30 bucks.

If I get comfortable with it, I may blow $80 on a bigger drone with a built-in camera. I found a model with a phone mount on the controller. You put the phone on the mount, and you watch the camera video while the drone flies. Hilarious. I’ll bet all sorts of punks have used that rig to watch startled women reaching for their tops beside their swimming pools.

It looks like you need a big field and a calm day to really enjoy a drone, and you definitely don’t want to be near a swimming pool. One more reason to find a piece of land far from other human beings.

Under current law, you can fly your drone all around your neighbor’s house and look in the windows, and there is nothing she (it’s always a she) can do about it. That’s unfortunate. I think you should be allowed to shoot down anything below, say, 300 feet. Anything a shotgun can reach. Maybe the law will change. On the other hand, you don’t want to be the drone equivalent of the grumpy old man who won’t give the basketball back because it rolled onto his grass.

Technology is fun and dreadful, all at the same time. It has stolen our privacy and our power, but it has given us all sorts of crazy abilities we enjoy but don’t need.

It may be a long time before I get a new toy this interesting. If you have nothing better to do, run down to Toys R Us and get one for yourself. If you can’t shoot your neighbor’s drones down, at least you can go on the offensive. Maybe he’ll back down after you Youtube a few videos of him sitting on the toilet.

Soap Scum and Ancient History

I have all sorts of fascinating wisdom and knowledge to impart, so gather around.

I know all five of my readers are wondering how things went with my homemade daily shower spray. I am finally ready to pronounce it a success.

I probably should have told you to sit down before reading that.

The recipe is dishwasher rinse agent, dishwashing liquid, scrub-free bath and shower cleaner, and water. I already posted it, but anyway:

INGREDIENTS

6 ounces no-scrub shower and tub cleaner
1 tbsp. dishwashing liquid
1 tbsp. dishwasher rinse agent, like Jet-Dry (exactly like Jet-Dry, since that’s what I use)

Put it in a 1-quart spray bottle, fill with water, and use. If you start with a Tilex Daily Shower spray bottle, you will be glad you did, because they suck from the bottom of the bottle, so you won’t have a spray that quits when you still have a pint of stuff left. Tilex molds a suction tube into the bottle itself, and it goes all the way down.

The shower is magnificent. Even the Florida-limestone scale is coming off of things over time. I use the spray on even-numbered days, and it lasts maybe ten days. Cheap and effective.

The bathroom is now a cinch to maintain. I never, ever scrub the shower now, so three-fourths of the work of cleaning the bathroom is gone. A couple of times a week I mop the floor and toilet with water, bleach, and dishwashing liquid, I use toilet cleaner inside the toilet, and I clean the counter with various things. I wipe everything down so I don’t get water spots and so on, and I’m done.

Except for the hairs. I seem to shed about a pound a day. I got a stick vacuum. It helps, but I never get ahead of the game.

Note to self: in future, buy flooring materials the same color as my hair.

Another major improvement: I finally got decent bathroom rugs.

I guess that will not impress female readers, but I am a man, so I don’t think in terms of luxury all that much. To me, it’s a big change. If the bathroom floor is clean, I’m happy. I had a crummy old cotton rug, and I thought it was swell, but it started to give out, so I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond and got some fluffy synthetic rugs that look and feel like sheepskins. You can bleach them, because the fuzz is basically plastic.

Now whenever I go in the bathroom with bare feet, the pleasure of the sensation of the rug against my soles reminds me how stupid I was all my life. I should have gotten these rugs sooner.

Thank God for blogs. Without them, the world would be deprived of paradigm-changing posts like this one.

I finished The Odyssey. I’m very happy about that. It was a lot shorter than The Iliad, but it still took a long time. I read much faster than most people, and I still took days to get it done. It makes me wonder how college students survive, with their relatively tight deadlines.

More than ever, I feel certain I didn’t read it in college. Mr. Cliff, you are a foul temptress. You stole my education. Like glancing-eyed Circe, you drugged me and robbed me of my ambition, and I found myself dwelling among the lotus-eaters.

My verdict: The Odyssey is much, much better than The Iliad, and not just because it’s shorter, although that would suffice. The Odyssey has a plot. It has a limited number of characters. It has structure. It’s like a real book, whereas The Iliad is like a dull blogger live-blogging a dull war.

I still say every character in both books is a jerk. Odysseus is a murderer, pirate, thief, human trafficker, and Zeus knows what else. He deserves to suffer and die, and he deserves to lose his wife and his kingdom. But Homer is so full of utterly vile characters, you find yourself rooting for the merely despicable, so it works.

I don’t have a lot of boring deep insights about the book. Odysseus takes twenty years to come home from Troy, and on the way he kills all sorts of people, and then he gets home and kills even more people. That about sums it up.

It’s a lot like a Steven Seagal movie, now that I think about it. Steven Seagal is an enlightened semi-Buddhist pacifist cop who has also dedicated his life to learning how to murder and maim people. He has a partner/wife/dad/war buddy who gets killed, or someone puts him in a coma, or someone kidnaps his family or something. He spends roughly 80 minutes plotting against the people who wronged him, and then he exacts his unbelievably vicious, sadistic, gory Buddhist pacifist revenge.

I can see the trailer now. “Odysseus IS…MARKED for DEATH.”

I guess scholars will fume and fuss if they read this. Yes, okay, Homer is important. I read it, so leave me alone.

Today I started the next reading, which is the first 140 pages of Herodotus.

The book started out with a surprise. I probably knew this already, but I tend to forget boring things: Paris and Helen were real people, and so was Priam. The sacking of Troy actually happened. If Herodotus and his sources are right.

Reading Homer sets you up to read about the Persian Wars by telling the story of the woman-stealing that started them. Paris (AKA Alexander) was part of it. A bunch of Arabs stole a Greek princess, and the Greeks reciprocated, and eventually things got so bad, Alexander figured wife-stealing was acceptable behavior, so he stole Helen.

There is a certain amount of dispute as to whether “stealing” is the right term, since it is not unheard of for women to be sluts. It may be that some of the women actually ran off (one may have done so in order to cover her pregnancy) and then blamed their “abductors.”

No, that could never happen. A woman would never sleaze around and then claim she was forced. Women never blame men for their sexual indiscretions. Oh, no. Impossible!

Maybe Tawana Brawley or a Duke Lacrosse player will leave a comment here.

The funny thing about Herodotus is that he says the Persians, who were caught up in this mess, would not have started the wars themselves. It had to be the Greeks. The reason? The Persians didn’t think it was a big deal if a woman was stolen. Apparently they felt it was like having your dog kidnapped. Annoying, but you don’t go to war over it. You buy a new dog.

Don’t get mad at me. This is the Persians talking.

I guess the profs at Columbia University thought about all this when they put the Lit. Hum. syllabus together. They thought about the way Homer connected with Herodotus. In their off time from burning American flags, blaming Islamic aggression on Israel, and vilifying capitalism while occupying chairs endowed by capitalists.

For a few brief moments I thought about this stuff today, and I thought about the Hellenizing influence of reading all this Greek nonsense. I thought about the tension between Hellenism and the followers of Yahweh. It seemed to me that even today, the Western world is fundamentally Greek and Jewish.

If you walk down any street in any American city, what do you see? Roman architecture and Roman letters. Modern people use eagles as the symbols of their nation, just as the Romans did. Roman culture is all around us.

If we’re surrounded by Roman culture, why mention the Greeks? Because Roman culture is Greek culture (which may be Egyptian culture). The Romans stole Greek ideas. Roman temples look like Greek temples, and all over the US, we have buildings with ridiculous bits of Roman temple architecture tacked onto them. Ayn Rand made fun of it in The Fountainhead.

We have republics, just like the Romans. We have civil rights codified in law, just like the Romans. We have a moronic, idolatrous obsession with sports, just like the Romans. We even have their dangerous welfare system!

Opposing all this, we have Jewish religion. Jews don’t like to hear it, but Christianity is fundamentally Jewish. It’s not the same, and we have filled it with pagan ideas, but the God of our religion is Jewish. Our Messiah is Jewish. The underlying concepts are Jewish. We believe the Jewish Bible is true. Jews don’t like Christianity, but let’s face it. It entered the world as an entirely Jewish sect, founded by a Jew and spread by Jews, and centuries later, the connection can’t be erased.

Christianity is more Jewish than Islam. Jews think otherwise, but it’s true. Islam is cruel and silly. It’s carnal and juvenile. It denies the truth of the Jewish Tanakh. The Jewish and Christian notions of the afterlife are much more alike than the Jewish and Islamic notions.

So many centuries after the deaths of Jesus and Homer, westerners still have tension between Jewish thought and Greek thought. We are like the Jews of Greek-occupied Israel, who renounced the dietary laws and tried to undo their circumcisions. The Greek-influenced world pulls at us all the time, and we give in. Every day we cede more territory. This is why America is lost. We ceded too much.

Interesting stuff. But Homer is still boring.

I feel another Steven Seagal trailer coming on. “Paul IS…ABOVE the LAW.”

That’s all I have time for today. I have to go to Toys R Us and buy a drone. I’m going to my godson’s birthday party later.

Okay, I am trying to con you. My godson is two, so he can’t use a drone. I want one for myself.

As part of my online scuffling about the worthlessness of cordless tools, I Googled around and learned about drone batteries, and somehow I found out that you can get drones for thirty bucks. I didn’t know they were that cheap. I would like to get one and see what all the fuss is about.

I don’t plan to use it to film my neighbors naked, however. This is where I part company with most drone users. I just want to fiddle around with it and learn a bit about RC technology. “RC” means “radio-controlled,” although it also means a fine brand of cola which Pepsi and Coke have destroyed through predatory marketing practices.

Here’s how I see it. I know I’m going to spend the rest of my life shaking my cane at young punks and criticizing them and their technology. That’s a given. So I might as well learn a little bit about their technology, if only to insult them in a more insightful and scathing way.

Enjoy your Saturday. Even if it is named after Saturn.