The Sorcerer's Progress (Page 13 of 62)

You were the guy who sat on the dorm porch with a slingshot, lighing firecrackers off your cigar before you let them fly ....

Dirk, you're cool. I'm glad you survived to adulthood.

Kids do stupid things!  Their guardian angels work overtime, otherwise humans would have been extinct before the dinosaurs ...

Dirk, you reminded me of a similar "experiment" I was involved in when growing up.  My brother and I carefully took out some tobacco from one of my dad's smokes, and placed one of those really tiny firecrackers (they were red and green, not sure if it was around where/when you grew up) inside and carefully put the tobacco back.  We kept an eye on him the whole day.  It was funny as hell when that thing went off - pieces of ash were hanging from his eyebrows.  He was less impressed and very lucky not to have gotten his eyes injured.  Our backsides were not so lucky though.

He looked very much like the unlucky kid in our electronics class at school who inserted a capacitor the wrong way around into his circuit.  His face was covered in ash and pieces of paper when that tiny thing exploded.  We laughed, but most of us was just lucky he did it first - a few of us had to fix our circuits accordingly when the teacher explained what just happened!  <---- and njc, that's also when I knew I'll be doomed in any career to do with electronics, so I went for chemistry - much safer! 

I just remembered what a physicist once told me: the difference between a physicist and a chemist is that a chemist washes his hands before he goes to the bathroom.

Brings new meaning to the Big Bang

Hey!!!  We give you alcohol and gasoline and heaps of other super useful (and safe-ish) stuff that you use everyday, you know, like that keyboard that you're typing on!  I'm sure K will be more appreciative ... *thinks a bit about that last one, starts search for a new group*

speaking of workshopping, I've got some free time coming up.  Which of you bunch are looking for me to review something?  What chapters?

Speaking of which, The Computer Museum would probably like to take you to task for rubber feet, and worse, rubber capstans, that turn to sticky goo after twenty years or so.  I just donated an old CRT terminal to them because I need to get stuff out, and the keyboard feet were brown sticky plastiglop.

(That donation hurt.  It was a Heathkit that I assembled myself and used for several years.)

20 years is actually pretty good njc?  But it must hurt, that's a classic!

I took time to do a very little of my work, revising Chapter 54 of Book 1.  There's a new version out there with some different shadings.  I'd be grateful for any thoughts you have on it.

A modest rewrite, with some shading I want for later.

Don't get too excited.  I'm trying to figure out what to do next in the apartment, and I've got to get on with my life.

Actually, the things I'm mourning are large-format, well-illustrated  glossy books, the sort of things that e-readers cannot represent.  Five of them, laying flat, took nearly two feet of shelf space, but still ... .

I've got lots of other cleaning.  I've also got books that I may have to chuck, including about twelve shelf-feet of Star Trek novel.  There are twenty or so I might like to keep; the rest have little commercial value and I probably can't find anyone to take them.

I'm willing to get my possibly-complete set of Ngaio Marsh go, keeping only three duplicates so I can study her technique.  Likewise mysteries by a number of lesser authors.  Marsh's are good technically but I don't really enjoy them.

One book I thought I'd have to give away got me a dollar from a mid-range but selective store (a boutique store, if you like).  It was an odd-format (maybe ten by maybe 4+1/2) hardcover with a title something like "(Images of) Asia", four or five hundred pages of well-executed pen-and-ink drawings of art and architecture from central, east, and south (east-west-central) Asia, with text.  Not quite scholarly, not eye-catching and pretty, but maybe of interest to architects and scholars.

I have that near-mint turntable, but I'm not going to find a buyer who'll pay what it's really worth.  (The cartridge has less than five hours of playing on it, and a replacement for that cartridge starts at $300.)  BUT it's a moving-magnet cartridge, so I need a head amp ... anyway, I've got the original type transistors and they work a little better than the ones I have.  The thing is quite sensitive to the battery voltage, not in the main circuit but in the bias network, and I want to put pilot LEDs in series with the circuit.  This may mean a tiny bit more noise, but it means that the ratio of fresh-battery voltage to worn-battery voltage will be greater.  (I have some nice red LED's that light adequately on 140 microamps--These, I think.)  This means that I'll need to stabilize the bias voltages, requiring another transistor and two resistors, and splitting the outer bias resistors (1MOhm in the original design.)  And, in the hope of reducing any shot noise I introduce, another 47 trillionths of a Farad of capacitance in just the right place.

I've got a layout that is, like all the others, too damn tight.  I'll try it when I get home.

I suppose the right test for the noise introduced is The Dark Side of the Moon: "I've been mad for ++++ing years, absolutlely ... .", which is audible in vinyl with a good-enough turntable.

Now to reviewing.  Amy's story first.