Cannon fodder
If you see yourself in this post it was meant for you. However, you see it.
The great thing about not caring about the results is I can throw shit together and get results and look at them and determine if I want them.
This is a ramble. I've tossed a whole bunch of pictures at the end. Hopefully it makes the ramble worthwhile and you have a better understanding of what you're reading.
I'll start with. This is my solution for my whatever scale I'm on/ ADHD visual issues and identification of things that I want to see.
Mark things with symbols that glow under black light. Make them unique for the device or the pair of glasses or whatever you want to find. Turn off the lights and turn the black light on and you know what is where at all times. No matter how messy. If you ever see a photograph that you think is messy, it's not. I can see what I need to see. You can't. At least not with the default shot as I'm just taking the pictures. More pictures at the end.
Okay if I haven't answered:
Goals
Cost
Safety
Personality defects.
Reason for methods of posting.
Can we move on to actually talking about the plant?
Or be very specific in the questions and not go for a personal attack. I don't mind them, they just waste time. I have it for a while but I need to focus.
Tag
You're it
Hehehe. Speaking of the genius. Anyone out here could be a genius. That's the point of these types of posts. Occasionally I find them.
I spent my life building teams of programmers and training them. I never hired someone as smart as me. I only hired people smarter than me. They get shit done. Or they figure out the shit that does not need to be done and they bypass the whole step.
I was whining to someone many years ago. I get a bunch of fucking morons who lie on their resumes and then I have to discard them. Sometimes I throw them to the other development manager because he's happy to have them. He's not very bright and the shit he builds is atrocious but he's not getting fired this week. It took me a year to get him fired. He's happy to pick up the people I wouldn't consider.
He used them as political tools. I didn't know it at the time. He didn't care if they actually accomplished stuff. There were bodies on a spreadsheet that he got numbers for.
So I was explaining this to the most brilliant Perl programmer in the world, I took two trains and traveled 3 hours to meet this guy, God damn that guy made me feel stupid and I loved it, and he simply said:
‘A’s want to work with ‘A’s and ‘B’s want to work with ‘C’s.
He explained to me that I am an ‘A’.
I wonder what you are?
My brother easily had 10 points over me. He made me feel stupid occasionally. My son has 20 but he crosses into the inability to speak to people sometimes. He made me feel stupid all the time. He's thinking many times faster than the rest of us, not just speed but the manner in which he sees things and makes connections, but in order for him to communicate he has to slow down to our level.
My first wife could memorize VIN numbers and shuffle through documentation at the car dealership and pick them up in a blink to match the cars that she glanced at in the parking lot. She had perfect spatial perception. She was also exceptionally annoying and I'm so happy to not be married to her anymore. I got to text her we were divorced when the judge banged his gavel because she didn't bother showing up. It was awesome.
Moving on.
This is r&d. People have paid me to do r&d my entire life. I enjoy it. I can afford it. It produces what I want while still being r&j. This is win win.
Financially it makes sense. You real growers have no idea what cannabis costs medical users. To you, it seeds and Sun and light and nutrition and work. When you're done you get your calculation. It might have cost you $2 for that. Ounce. And might have cost you $20.
The previously mentioned Stan was happy he got an ounce and a half for 4 months worth of work on a plant and he's really hoping the other plant that doesn't look as good as that plant that he just harvested might get 2 oz.
What the fuck?
Am I going to tell Stan his plants sucks? Of course not. Stan is a brilliant, retired nuclear engineer. Stan just blew what I consider an enormous amount of time and effort on a crappy amount of crappy weed. Stan doesn't mind throwing $400 at an ounce when he buys it, and this is a nice little side project.
Stan is your target audience. Stan is not my target audience. You want to make money selling weed to Stan and Stan is happy to pay you. I'm happy with that.
My neighbor down the street who's crippled and can't get out of bed for more than a couple minutes a day gets oil rubbed on them and an hour later they're moving around the house and enjoying their life.
If that oil is bought at the store it would have been about $100 to $200 for that single dose. That person needs three doses a day. That oil lasts about 6 hours. Sometimes you need more. Depends on the pain.
So minimum of $300 a day times 30 is a minimum monthly bill of $9,000. That's before any smoking and getting high. That's strictly pain relief that has no effect on their head. Let's see nine times 12 equals $108,000 a year.
This single plant will give me an absolute minimum of 3 years of oil. Probably many more but I like to estimate low.
This plant is worth $300,000 to me.
This plant is worth nothing else to anyone else because it was grown in cat shit and is diseased, just like me, we share our parasites, and therefore I don't worry about anyone seeing this plant and going holy shit. Let's go steal that plant. That would be a very bad idea.
Now let's add in the fact that I had already bought all the lights and all the gear for all the grows I've done over 15 years. I didn't give you the piles and piles of pot porn shots of all the other plants I ran through there and harvested. I couldn't give a shit about showing that stuff off. It's in jars aside and very tasty and I'm very happy.
My next door neighbor gave me the wood and a hundred times more. I have all the tools and I love playing with them. God damn it. I love hot gluing stuff. And my cats really love it. I like sitting there and just watching it sway in the vortex. I get dopamine when the lights hit me.
I really hated all the fans and the various visual blocks and how the cords block the visual paths. I will tighten that up. I'm really happy with the air flow. I'm really happy that the lights are now a door that I swing open to access it.
I hate tents. I had an 8x8 inside a 14x24 shed with total control and I still hated it. I shudder over the thought of the number of tents I've gone through in my life. And the associated wide frisbee disc air movers. And the rolling AC units. Really? Man, you lectured me as if.
The only thing I don't like is unrolling because it's really tedious fucking physical effort. But that's okay, I've situated it where I can put a comfy bunch of pillows or chair right there and spin the plant. So I haven't whined about that lately. Have I?
As mentioned before, the kitchen was built by licensed contractors and electricians and plumbers and they installed everything required and it was inspected for legality and safety. And wow that happened two additional high amp breakers were put in on separate sets of four plug outlets on the wall. It was put in specifically for growing and are easy to trip. The electrician knew it was going to be for growing. License and inspected by the township. Legal in every way. With the little license on the wall that says the plants allowed to be there.
Any extension cords I use are really fat. I bought them for running the generator from the middle of my yard when I ran a generator. They are the safest highest amp highest quality extension cords that exist.
Anytime there's the slightest wiggle I between connections I put a line of fluorescent gaffers tape on it. Incredibly strong and incredibly flexible at the same time. And really bright visually.
I mark things I want to see with different colored fluorescent gaffers tape and then I just turned the black light on. Each tool or set of glasses has different colors and different x's or circles or tiny little arrows that I can see in the distance. At that point. I know exactly what I'm looking at. My tools and specific glasses that I'm looking for shine at that moment. Just a quick ADHD aside. We see the world differently. Mitigate.
I never run more than 50% of any circuit. Usually far far less.
The various power strips are solidly hot glued in and I will construct boxes and guides and lock in those cables. All power strips are UL listed.
Current electrical usage is a hundred bucks a month for that room and all associated gear. A hundred bucks a month. How many times do I have to say this to people. Total run is about a thousand bucks for electricity so far. And that was for the 15 plants. I already pushed through the room as well. I would have paid for that in weed a couple times already for what I smoke and I wouldn't have been able to make any oil.
By making the first batch of oil I was able to get physically active and I lost 50 lb. I went from 200 to 150 and I run around the house and jump around the stacks of metal like a monkey.
How much would you pay for that transformation?
R&d includes figuring out what you don't know and finding the people who do. Figuring out what they might cost or if they'll volunteer their information. Or their time.
R&d used to mean going through thousands of resumes.
Now r&d means going to the web and posting shit to trigger people. Get responses. Figure out who knows what at what level, if I'm even capable of judging at the barest minimum, and then figuring out how to gather them.
They want to be gathered. Showing what an asshole I can be and also showing that I'm not usually one. I'm usually the asshole to protect them from management. Asshole works in so many different ways.
You've walked by a meeting. You're screaming at the door. You might actually be invited in the door or the door might be shut. The people on the other side of the door don't give a shit. But you're screaming at the door.
The lurkers are the most important people here. You never know who they are and what connections they have and what they are doing with their lives and they glance at this and then they get the pros and cons. You never know the contacts I get out of it.
This plant is ridiculously overpowered.
Of course I should be able to do it with a tenth of the amount of light and power. Even better, I should stack them close in a row for the density.
Find the best middle point. Figure the balance.
Those lights are not wasted. They're fully absorbed.
Think about it. 90% of your plant is airspace. 90% of everybody's plant is airspace. That's just how they grow.
Not this plant. The light is fully utilized. Or as much as physically possible because when it hits the plant it disappears as it hits a solid plant.
Of course I should have a better controlled industrial environment.
That should take about 3 months from decision to implement and financial commitment once genetics is prepared. I should be able to do a stack of them side by side.
You start with finding out what's possible.
Then you optimize. Early optimization is the root of all programming evil. And life in general as well.
Besides gathering programmers I had to gather subject matter experts. I'm not one. I know nothing. I just gathered.
I interview subject matter experts. Sometimes it was their job to give me information. Sometimes the mere act of me talking to them gets them fired because they're transferring their job responsibilities to me.
I then automate it out of existence and move on to the next step in my life. Sorry about that. Thank God I got out of that gig before AI showed up.
Sometimes I had to find teams of subject matter experts. I wasn't automating an individual job, we were figuring out how to just move the factory around or add equipment or whatever.
I knew nothing about anything and I have no education and I'm not an engineer and I'm not a farmer or a city block sized print shop expert, largest on the goddamn East Coast, we had our own ZIP code and about 20 tractor trailers leaving on a continuous basis basis out of those bays, junk mail is big, and I'm not anything other than someone who sees webs of stuff and relationships.
So people paid me to look at stuff and think about stuff and code occasionally but mostly just gather and then regurgitate what I saw.
Those subject matter experts are a hostile bunch. They don't like to talk to people who don't know shit about their stuff.
Walk into a room of Cobalt programmers. Monster mainframe behind me behind the glass. Six guys running around and pushing tapes with the Rose and Rose of tapes in the distance. Fucking enormous.
The room next to it is tiny. I stole some of their raised floor space and put my own wall in in my own locks in and drop my little Unix box in and my stack of discs and I said give me a couple of tasks and let's see what we can do.
A year later 20 mainframe programmers were being given a lesson. This is how this system works. Yours is way different than this one. You don't have to learn it. You can if you want to. The asteroid is coming. But you don't have to.
You do a whole bunch of stuff over there and it takes you 4 weeks to do it and it takes 20 minutes over here.
Do you want to learn it? Do you want to transfer all your knowledge about the industry in the process?
Do you want to take 99% of what you do and automate it to 10% while simultaneously being given the option of possibly getting more work or possibly being fired depending on how well you learn the new stuff?
Being told all this by someone half their age with zero responsibility or abilities in their industry a year before.
And they'd have to be working closely with me for the next 3 or 4 years before it all transfers completely.
Along with the team of people who worked for me already. Because we already made many millions of dollars for the company and had proved ourselves with the technology, now it was a matter of taking all that old crap and moving it forward.
Subject matter experts can be a hostile bunch.
That's okay. We all got a job to do. You can take your time. You can vent. I got a hotel room around the corner and a company credit card and they said go spend some money and kick back for a few weeks.
You'll get your brain around the fact that the world's changing and you're going to give it voluntarily or I'll go in there and I'll figure it all out as I rip apart the code. Anyway, I'm not going to trust anything you say. You'll be lying to me 99% of the time because you want to see me fail and get me fired. So I'll be kind and gentle and I take whatever time it's required and I move on.
When I first met Stan I was a tag along little kid
He was my brother's best friend. Stan is your target audience. Stan will give you 400 bucks an ounce for pretty weed.
Stan handed me a Yamaha 125 in patch of woods and mud and logs and high grass and long bouncy dry run to get up to speed to let that thing wide open when I was 12. Oh my God I had fun on that bike before I smashed my knee. It was worth it. Thank you Stan.
Stan was driving my brother's wife on some other bigger bike on the streets a bunch of years back and I think they hit a bus. I'm not really sure but it wasn't pretty and they had some serious hospital and body rebuild time. My brother was annoyed with Stan for that, she was broken for quite a while.
The one who's still alive.
The one with the dual Masters in counseling and human resources but has been running the world as far as designing tech engineering shit forever.
My parents considered him the stupid one.
That brother memorized encyclopedic Britannica somewhere into the letter M. He was crippled in bed for a few months. He was really bored. Bad hips, family issue. He also memorized all possible baseball stats. Over the course of a few weeks.
He wanted to fit in with the jocks. So he did. That guy's a fucking chameleon. He is so smart. He knows not to look smart because it's too dangerous. He is way smarter than me.
Then imagine a stereotypical librarian. Woman. Now elder. Short. 5'2. Severe look at all times. The perfect squint. Knows everything. Now imagine her teaching the other librarians because she's a professor of the college and she's got a web presence and a footprint that's just mind-boggling and she is so goddamn brilliant.
Librarians know everything. They had to. That's what they did. They knew. Then they told other people.
When I was writing code to automate library book transfer tracking and public access catalogs for Monmouth county library 40 years ago, I didn't know shit about libraries but I did a hell a lot of library automation in a few months.
Those librarians did not like me. They thought I was going to automate them.
That's my older sister. I don't know what level of education she had to achieve to get where she is but it took a long time. And then she had to climb that career peer ladder. Publish or perish. I saw many thousands of books and stacks in her apartment because she was an editor for some journal and people just sent books to her again and again because they wanted her review. If she mentioned it they sold lots of copies. Stacks and stacks everywhere. The most incredible hoarder's fire hazard yet was her job. Holy shit. The time and effort to get to that point.
I am definitely the dumbest of the bunch. And the laziest. I will always find the laziest way if possible. Thank you, Larry Wall.
And then add in I had a major LSD meth brain fry that kept me crisped for 3 months and unable to speak at age 16. I'm sure there's damage in there from that. I was dehydrated at age 22 and had a seizure on the toilet and fell sideways and slammed my head in the tub and woke up in the ambulance. That was a hell of a concussion. Baseball hit my head when I was age 10 at camp. I woke up with a circle of faces hovering over me. Had a seizure of some sort, they claimed I had a heart attack but there were no follow-ups in jail and passed out while standing in front of the toilet and hit my face. Hard on the way down. Woke up with guards and prisoners in a circle above me.
How many brain cells have been killed by how much nitrous oxide in my life? I can make it. Ammonium nitrate boils at a certain temperature and then you filter through a couple of baths and poof. You got two garbage bags an hour.
And I only need a tiny little bit, not that crazy amount that people buy to blow shit up. A couple of cold bags from a drugstore quantity.
Yeah. I'm sure there's brain damage.
I am the baby brother. I am the antagonistic bounce around God damn look at me look at me look at me little guy. That's 62 fucking years old yes, but I understand how I got here.
I find it useful sometimes.
My wife too. Damn it. In third grade she knew. Shut the fuck up and act dumb and they make you work less. More better results equals more work. It is the stupidest thing.
But I was trained like a gerbil. Reward reward reward. Run that wheel. More work equals more work and it's okay because it's more money and then I can do more things but then I have to do more work and I thought I was done but there's more work?
Fuck they got me. Not anymore.
Stan was one of his friends and I was the tag along little brother. Stan is a brilliant nuclear engineer. I'm the little kid who never graduated anything.
Oh Stan, stroke stroke, that's such a pretty little plant.
You can be helpful and address the individual issue of the plant.
Or you could scream at the door, that brings eyeballs. Eyeballs bring ad revenue. Eyeballs brings search engine engagement and drives it up.
That in turn brings the rare person who actually has done this specific thing. The thing that everyone says is an impossible thing and is destined for failure yet I know what I'm looking at. So everything else is silly.
The guy screaming at the door is always good because he can be ignored. It's entertaining. And he occasionally might scream something that is actually useful. I never know.
Part of screaming at the door is being a useful tool which means being manipulated into it. I'm sorry about that. Your unhappiness is collateral damage as part of this process.
I said within the first several posts that this is part of manipulation for some type of campaign to get eyeballs. I said I was going to piss a few people off.
I'm honest. This that's a personality defect. I had too much MDMA. So I'll tell you when I'm manipulating you before I do it. You didn't bother reading.
Thanks for triggering the trip down memory lane. When I glanced at the pictures I could lose way too much time just flicking by those on the TV. But I got to do a quick scan and grab some stuff and toss it out so you know I'm not bullshitting. I have my world going on.
And remember, none of this is for you. It's for the lurkers. I'm not changing your mind. You are cannon fodder.
Tag
And let's see if I can put some pictures in and with the limitation is..
Okay it says 20. Let's see how many I can get now since I put one above. Maybe that was the upload limit....
Okay cool got one. Let's just slam a whole bunch in not any particular order because that's just how they are.
Anybody want pictures of baby deer and cats? The cats are cuddling each other but the baby deer are grazing. I got lots of tool shots. I could ramble on all kinds of shit forever.
I've actually enjoyed this ramble. Thank you very much for reading this for her.
Hopefully it was entertaining
Take care
