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car project Ham Radio

Other half spark

[Today’s run: 3.2 miles]

I finished the Aerostar spark plugs on Sunday afternoon. I also found another vacuum line that was disconnected. After fixing that stuff I took it for a ride and it still shifts funny. I have a few more things to check out.


I’ve been thinking about my home-built WWV clock and some improvements I could make.

Each minute has some fixed waypoints. So what I’m thinking is I could accumulate some number of minutes of data in a 60 second histogram. The data is in the form of low/mid/high, so I would probably use 0,1,2 for the values. The minutes would layer on top of each other. Then I would look for the expected pattern of waypoints and try to find the start/finish of the minute pattern.

The next step would be to attempt to read some of the informational data, like month/day/year, stuff that doesn’t change very often. And slowly accumulate the actual information. When I get the quicker-changing data I would probably have a complete set.

After “lock” I could possibly incorporate knowledge of the incrementing values to set some expectation of what values are coming next.

I need to think about a way to recognize the waypoints patterns and the expected values so I can score a given data and then maximize the score.


Still been listening to Paul VanderKlay on Youtube along with Judge Middleton in Michigan. There is an informal group of people around Vanderklay and I’m not sure that I fit in, or want to try. I’m finding it interesting. Hard to know if I could bring anything useful to the conversation. A lot of people in the group seem to be 12-step folks, which is fine but not really my area of experience. He did talk a bit about his ministry to the homeless around his church and dealing with people who have mental illness. I don’t do that a lot, but I have had reason to think about the unreliable nature of our senses and the need for trust.

Because of that thinking, I find my tolerance for people who are “just joking” in a not obvious or in a harmful way has gone down. I despise “prank” video channels and things like the old Candid Camera show. Trying to catch people doing bad or embarrassing things… it is maybe useful in a law enforcement “sting” sense, but I don’t see it as healthy entertainment. Our connection with reality is tenuous enough that eroding the trust we share just for yuks is evil, in my opinion.

I watched a video of Tom Hanks at a speech at Oxford (or Cambridge?) in the UK. He talked about acting and used words like “truth” to describe a good depiction of a made up scene. I have a hard time with that. In fact I seriously wonder whether acting is much more than learning how to lie really well. I’m not sure. I watch plenty of shows, and I enjoy them. So it doesn’t keep me from doing that. But I wonder if it is good for the people participating and I tend to think it isn’t.