[sdiy] Rare Moment of Claret.

[Batz Goodfortune]

Y-ellow all.
         I just wanted to apologize in advance to anyone I haven't gotten 
back to. It doesn't mean I don't still love you or anything. :) I haven't 
had to deal with this much mail in a long time and I've forgotten how I use 
to cope.

Re: ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) (also see ADHD where "H" = Hyperactive)
         It wouldn't surprise me if half the people on this list had some 
degree of ADD/ADHD. From the sounds of everyone's work benches at least. 
And the other half probably have it too but they just don't realize it.

I'm yet to see the photos but I'm assured that Terry Bowman wins first 
prise in the "most untidy bench" competition. There'll be a banana winging 
it's way to you shortly. Whilst most of us talk about not being able to 
find anything on our benches, Terry talks about not being able to find his 
bench. But if we're talking accumulated junk then I'm probably still out in 
front. We're talking sheds full. All the garden rakes and stuff don't live 
in the garden shed. There's no room. They have become known as Plant 1, 2 & 
3 over the years. This one is plant 1 and the garden shed is plant 3. Plant 
2 was supposed to be the lite engineering shed but this is now done under 
the carport. Of which has been fenced off and endowed with lighting and 
power. I guess that should be referred to as plant 4. I'm reluctant to 
venture into any of the latter to take pictures but if you really want to 
see, I'll try.

I've actually slowed my junk collecting activities over the past few years. 
Mainly because it's now a lot harder for me to get down to "Robbies". A 
place of ledendary wonderment for us ADD types. Robbie, AKA Horace 
Robinson, is an 80 year old ham who has been salvaging electronics and 
related junk for more than 45 years. He lives on a property which is 
estimated to be worth 5 million bux AUD and at one "Port" of this property 
is a kind of shop entrance. Twice a week he opens the doors and all us 
crazy people flock to see what's new.

Last time I was there I took some photos and when I get time, I'll make a 
web page dedicated to this place. I'm told that this place is unique in the 
world. There are other salvage operators and surplus dealers but nothing 
like Robbies. The shop it self is a huge winding rabbit warren but like an 
iceberg, this is only 3 10ths of the whole story. If you're lucky enough to 
ever have been invited out the back, It is staggering and overwhelming. 
Should Robbie ever enter the "World's most disorganized anything" 
Competition, there would be NO COMPETITION. Not so much a junk yard but a 
"Junk Farm" Where useful and interesting junk seems to grow from every 
crack. If you ever wanted to know what paradise looks like, this is it.

Just going there is heavenly inspiration. But even if you don't intend to, 
it's pretty well guaranteed you'll walk out with at least an arm full of 
stuff. If not a truck load. Robbie doesn't know what prices to put on 
things. Sometimes he puts prices on that are outrageous because he thinks 
it's something it's not. Like the board I saw with a couple of 78xx 
regulators on it that he was asking 5 bux for. See, back in his day, they 
never had 78xx regulators so he thought these were some amazing new 
technology. But mostly you can pick up some amazing things for 50cents. In 
fact I picked up an old Commodore C64 for 50 cents last time I was over 
there. I just wanted the SID chip. What a bargain. I threw the rest away 
rather than trying to salvage anything else from it.

Motors, transformers, valves (recent and ancient) meters, computers and 
terminals. There was even an old 48 channel vision switcher in there last 
time. It was in bits though. For anyone who's interested, the video chroma 
synthesizer I had once mentioned, is actually still there. After all these 
years. I think he wants a bit much for it though and you still need 
external sync. But I remember seeing this very box in use once and at the 
time, I drooled. Totally analog of course. It splits a mono or colour 
signal into 3 (I think) grey levels and then adds an RGB value to each. 
quite simple really but before the days of quantels and squeezboxes, these 
things were ominous. I've heard where they can be voltage controlled and 
used with audio synths but I've never actually seen this done.

But anyway. unless you've been doing this full time for 45 years like 
Robbie has, no-one is going to even come close. But we can always try. :)

I don't know what it is but I cannot see a piece of old electronic junk or 
related junk without seeing it's future potential. Other than as landfill. 
Although I've seriously been curbing my natural instincts to hoard lately. 
I don't know if that's an ADD thing exactly but it seems to go hand in hand 
with it.

ADD is sweet and sour. I don't know about everyone else here but I've had a 
terrible life trying to cope with it. But as some kind of compensation, I'm 
endowed with a vast imagination. We ADD people rarely weigh up the costs 
and consequences of our actions, but that also means that we're the people 
who manage to do things that everyone else thinks can't be done. We don't 
even ask why? And if we subsequently do find that something can't be done, 
at least we know why and may inadvertently discover 10 other things that 
no-one else realized. Because no-one else was prepared to go down a dead 
end street just to see what was down there.

For anyone who thinks they might be ADD or ADHD after reading this I can 
highly recommend reading a book called "Driven To Distraction". The ISBN of 
which I can't remember off hand but it is the definitive work. Covering 
both childhood AD(H)D and adult AD(H)D. The title it self kinda sums up ADD 
nicely. On one had we are driven people, on the other we are easily 
distracted and tend to try to follow too many leads at once.

And credit where credit is due. Were it not for Terry Bowman, I would still 
be stumbling round in the dark about this stuff. And all the positive 
things that have happened to me as a result would never have come about.

So. Be crazy. Do crazy things and astound everyone who comes in contact 
with you. As they say in the Church of the SubGenius. A SubGenius doesn't 
just make mistakes. We take our pants off and roll around in them.

Be absolutely Icebox.





At 05:43 PM 4/26/02 +0200, Leif wrote:
>Put them all up on  (Since I'm no good at sorting bookmarks...):
>http://hekta.iet.hist.no/~leifcr/books/
>
>
>also found a lot of papers from music-dsp mailinglist. (asked same 
>question there...)
>
>http://www.iua.upf.es/dafx98/papers/
>http://www.tele.ntnu.no/akustikk/meetings/DAFx99/papers.html
>http://profs.sci.univr.it/~dafx/DAFx-final-papers.html
>http://www.csis.ul.ie/dafx01/proceedings/navig/toc.htm
>http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/~vpv/publications/vesa_phd.html
>http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/~vpv/publications/icmc00.htm
>http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/sitemap.html
>
>
>>Would you be so kind as to mention where you've found those?
>
>  _ __        _       ____Happiness is a warm penguin____
>| "_ \      | |
>| |_)/  __ _| |_ ____       ALL ELECTRIC KITCHEN
>|  _ \ / _` | __|___ |  Geek music by geeks for geeks
>| |_) | (_| | |_  / /
>|_,__/ \__,_|\__|/ /    Bullshit --> http://all-electric.com
>                 / ,__   Music -----> http://mp3.com/electrickitchen
>Goodfortune    |_____|