Living In The Newest Level In Hell

Dante Didn't Envision PLC Programming Or He Would Have Warned Me...


Dang it Ladies and Gentlemen, but this morning finds me frustrated to the point of wanting to pull the remaining hair out of my ever greying, ever balding head.

I swear that if there is a mistake which can be made or a hardware/software error which can be tripped over, I believe that I have managed to do so with my size 13 feet in the past fourteen months since I endeavored to start a company and build custom PLC based control panels.

Hey...It's not like I didn't TRY to avoid disaster.

After all, the first thing I did was go to the factory up in Indianapolis before I cut a single hole in a NEMA 12 cabinet, and I took their introductory controller class before I stripped the first wire and stuck it into a DIN rail mounted terminal strip, but to no good end yet because today no matter what...

I keep finding a way to delay my progress.

And I'm so hard headed and proud and afraid that it's something silly I'm doing wrong that I always wait before asking for help until I'm not only LATE on delivery...

but now I'm REAL LATE on the modification of a panel I built early last year.

So any way, past laments aside, about 1 AM this morning I was cruising along happy as a clam.

Everything was working like it was supposed to in the shop.  The whistles were whistling and the bells were ringing and all of the high priced thing-a-ma-jigs were singing the same song in the correct key...Z minor.

I had it under control I thought, then when I added the last rung on the new PLC ladder program and made a couple of modifications to the touch screen apperances...

...I was ready to print everything out and modify the owners manual...

...I was just hours away from taping up a big box with everything in it Saturday afternoon and running to FedEX...

...and then WHAM...

...when I downloaded the last few revisions to the PLC controller everything went to HELL.



I mean, now stuff which I didn't even change on the last revision stopped working.

Now I can't even get the PLC to move past the first intro screen which only has our company name and a button that says "CONTINUE" on it.

I've since spent another  FOUR HOURS fiddling around, doing incantations and Voodoo chants and threatening the machine with my biggest hammer and still...

NOTHING.

I've re-booted every computer in the house in the process, reprogrammed the  Heat Pump Thermostat, went out and rotated the tires on both cars, and still I can't get this stupid box to work.

It won't work even with software which I wrote a year ago and I know worked at the time and hasn't been changed.

Therefore I must have a bad PLC unit, else there is some other stupid thing I don't know about and managed to trip over and now I have to wait until Monday to ask the technical support people a question.

I'm so damn smart I've out smarted myself...

A G A I N...

It's 23 degrees F and It Snowed Again Here Last Night

Picture Me Going Further Insane Like Jack Nicholson in "The Shining"...






Heerrre's Johnny  Virgil ...


(OK, maybe not, but you get my point with this weather I think...)

BurrrrrppppP!

You Don't Want To Hear The Other Sound Option....





(Which would be FarRRRRRtttttttTTTTTT.)


OK I'm having one of "those" days so Sue me....

These Same People Are Driving Around In The World

And This Silly Woman Can't WALK and "Text" and Want's To Sue The Mall...

Who Hu Are You?

Speaking Chinese With A British Accent...


&^&$#%^&*?

(that would be the sound of me foaming at the mouth...)

I'm sitting here watching the joint news conference being conducted by our African born President Obama and the Chinese leader Hu.

I'm sorry...but I don't trust the Chinese for five minutes, and giving the little F**ker a translator with a British accent doesn't do a darn thing for me when it comes to making me believe anything he says regarding financial, business, economic, or military security efforts between the US and China.

Interestingly enough the translator for Obama sounds Chinese or at least Japanese or otherwise generically Asian...

China sits on a bunch of councils at the United Nations and when and if the Soviets or the Iranians or the North Koreans want to poop into an ice cream machine and then try to sell it to the rest of the world as an expensive chocolate au latte flavored desert the Chinese are always right there with them printing the packaging and making the US taxpayers foot the bill for the tamper proof seals on the cartons.

If I'm going to have to pay to eat shit I'd rather it be my own shit or the shit of my voluntary choosing, and President Obama and President Bush and President Clinton and the President Bush before and the US Congress (house and Senate) for the past 50 years have sold our souls to the Chinese and one day pretty soon the bill is going to come due and if we are not careful the payment is going to be in the form of some sort of weapon landing on our doorsteps, bought and financed by the good old US of A.

Is it just me?  Dammit...

Apparently Alabama Has Elected A New Stupid Shithead To Run The State

"We Can't Seem To Keep The Most Ignorant Among US Out Of Government Or Off The TV..."


As all of my regular readers know, I grew up in "Lower Alabama", or LA for short, back in the late 1950's, 1960's, and mid 1970's.

Then I got the hell out just because the jobs were in places like Atlanta and George Wallace was doing his best to embarrass everyone beyond what Big Jim Folsom and Folsom Junior later did  in the state with stuff like standing in the doors of the University of Alabama trying to block the black students being paid to make a racial statement from entering the college.

Of course Georgia and Tennessee and South Carolina and Mississippi weren't that much better in those days but still I'm just sayin'...

Today I've learned that no matter what the underlying truths and concepts--right or wrong--that you have to pick your battles carefully...particularly when they are to be conducted on a public stage, and apparently that message hasn't made it through the grapevine or across the Internet to this new dude named Robert Bentley that was elected back in November 2010 to be the new governor of Alabama.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley told a church crowd just moments into his new administration that those who have not accepted Jesus as their savior are not his brothers and sisters, shocking some critics who questioned Tuesday whether he can be fair to non-Christians.


"Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother," Bentley said Monday, his inauguration
day, according to The Birmingham News.


Here's the link...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_alabama_governor_christians

Just in case you didn't know it by now, I'm making plans to move back from the Turbopup Compound here on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River to the farm or at least the little town near the farm in Lower Alabama in the next year or two, and believe me it bothers me when idiots like this Gubernatorial moron are still being elected to office in the State of Alabama nearly 35 years after I left the area to go to college and pursue my fortune...such as it is...

What I want to know is...Who the heck is this guy and how the hell can people in Alabama still be so stupid as to elect someone like him to office?

I don't mind his Re-Born Christian leanings, but hasn't he learned to keep his stupid yap closed depending on the audience and live the life of a Christian without alienating everyone else and giving the media fodder to attack people of faith?

Just dammit...as I wrote earlier...we can't keep the most stupid among us off the TV and out of the Newspaper Headlines...

Please Return Your Tray Table & Seat Back To The Upright And Locked Position

Place Your Head Between Your Knees And Prepare For Impact...


As I've mentioned here earlier on this blog, I don't fly that much anymore...commercial or private or otherwise...

Besides the risk of  my arms getting really tired while flapping furiously...

the FAA, in their infinite wisdom, cut my career as a Licensed Private Pilot short when they found out that I had a blood disorder which caused me to take an anticoagulant drug called Coumadin to prevent blood clots in my legs, and I guess they were afraid that when and IF I ever managed to crash a Piper or Cessna fixed wing aircraft they wouldn't want to have to come out and explain in the news article why all of the blood rushed out of my body when the propeller cut my head off in the "uncontrolled contact with terrain event."

The FAA, being a Government Agency, and always looking for something and someone to regulate (because that is what Government Agencies are in charge of doing), thinks a guy that is usually slightly insane administratively uses, instead of my insanity, my hyper-coagulative blood as a reason to stop me from doing something I infinitely enjoyed doing just BECAUSE...

Thus I haven't been in a cockpit at the controls of an airplane solo since the early 1990's (if you've never accomplished that feat let me tell you it exceeds anything else any human can ever accomplish in my opinion.)

Long before my days taking flight lessons, my Father was also an avid Aviator.

He rented an airplane and took me up on my first intro flight for my 8th birthday.  We enjoyed a love of aviation together although most of his working career he couldn't tell me and the rest of his own family what he was doing because the work out at Cairns Army Airfield at Ft. Rucker, Alabama was either SECRET or TOP SECRET.

At least CLASSIFIED.

Once he grew up and stopped limiting himself to just doing things like building and flying control line and free flight and radio controlled MODEL airplanes, he graduated from the University of Kentucky in the Army ROTC program and joined the US Army Signal Corps in the mid 1950's and immediately went to flight school.

By the time his career was over he had logged thousands of hours in the air and he held private pilot, instrument, multi-engine, air transport, and helicopter licenses. 

As a Army Test Pilot, he never once crashed an airplane (or a car for that matter although a cow once ran into the side of our 1968 Chevy Nomad Station Wagon...but that's another entirely different blog posting I need to write sometime.)

Any way...One thing that he could talk about, which is the subject of my posting this morning, is the public's mis-understanding of the reason why we are asked to turn off all electronic devices on commercial air liners while in flight or at least during the take off and landing portion of any given journey.

You see, much of my Dad's career was spent testing the interaction of electronics in the cockpit of aircraft as technology rapidly advanced in the 1960's and early 1970's. 

All of the "doo-dads" and gauges and bells and whistles which we take for granted in the cockpit really don't like to get along with each other.  Thus today smart people designing Airplanes and Helicopters know that every single possible configuration of "avionics" has to be tested and re-tested in order to verify that everyone can get along well when the pilot(s) are depending on the readings and information they are delivering.

Imagine the complexity added when you have an airplane which not only has it's own "suite" of fancy radios and GPS and airspeed indicators, but then you add 250 passengers each wielding a cell phone and laptop computer and I-pad and God knows what else?

That said, articles like this one drive me a little crazy because just like people who insist on driving and texting, we live in a population of self important assholes people that somehow believe that they can't live for a couple of hours without their ADD disorder being distracted by something besides reading the Delta SkyMall magazine.

CD player...

DVD Player...

Laptop Computer with Solitaire Card Game...

I-Pod...

I-Phone...

I-Pad...

CAN'T YOU GIVE THIS CRAP A REST...FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS...PEOPLE???

Why not get on an airliner, sit down, close your eyes, and not make a single noise for two hours?

Give the rest of us a freaking break, won't you?

Let me not have to listen to your inane cell phone conversation with whoever telling them crap that you could tell them once we're safely back at the jet way awaiting the cabin doors to be re-opened.

And while you are at it, why not stay in your seat rather than leaping up as soon as the plane parks and standing with your ass in my face for five minutes while all of the other people in front of you rush to get off of the plane?

Are you actually that IMPORTANT?

I swear that one of the places I'm most likely to get arrested between now and the end of my life is somewhere inside or around a Commercial Airliner. 

Not for being a terrorist...

For being a VIGILANTE.

For kicking someone's stupid ass...

(And the crowd will applaud me as they lead me away in handcuffs...)

...taking a big breath here...

I guess that that will be all...For Now...

Another Raymond Gone

Only The Good Die Young...


OK...I've been silent here on the blog for a couple of reasons this weekend.

First of all, I'm busy as Heck and don't need to be spending time on the Internet but I do anyway because I'm addicted.

Second of all,  in my insanity I started another home improvement project this week, aimed at finishing in the stairwell to our partially finished basement and as is usual...

The project has now exploded out of proportions and way beyond "hey honey let's spend a hundred bucks on some wood and paint..."

If things keep going like they are I'll have what amounts to a small Irish Pub--complete with leprechauns and about 12' x 12' square feet of wood and stone at the bottom of my stairs by next Friday.

And finally, and you know me...I generally don't worship celebrities and didn't fly to England to lay flowers at the tomb of Lady Dianna and stuff like that...BUT...

A wonderful man I never got to meet in person but with whom I had talked several times on the telephone in his position as producer of The Neal Boortz Show on AM 750 out of Atlanta died suddenly early Saturday morning. 

Just dropped dead out of the blue. 

He was only 43 years old.

And I have to tell you Ladies and Gentlemen...this event shook me to my very foundations having been where I have been in the past in the Hospital.

So any way...His name was Raymond Royal Marshall.

And even though we never met in person I feel like I knew him by listening to him on the radio for the past 15 years and after speaking to him when I would call in to rant with Neal...particularly in the old days before the show's syndication made it almost impossible to get anything but a busy signal when you dialed. 

As far as I know he was a perfect gentleman, and an example of what a man should aspire to be (and he was a black man for all of you out there that think that I'm some sort of bigot or racist.)

He waited until he was almost 40 to get married and then he produced two little daughters who are now going to have to grow up without their Daddy.

And of course he left behind a wife and grieving family, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of people like me that want to know good people like Raymond Royal Marshal are out there rather than just the self consumed trash that fills the headlines and radio and TV broadcasts.

Goodby Mr. Marshall...Rest In Peace....