To the OP
Don't be discouraged by some of the assholes that post here. They have a totally different view on learning. Az is a great resource with many people that will give you a straight answer if you ask. You just have to weed through all the BS. If everyone helped themselves out there would be no AZ. There are no stupid questions . So ask away, I will share everything I know because I learned it for free, I did not buy books and DVD. Would the books and DVD"s help , yes of course , but there are other way of learning too.
Hope this forum did not turn you away already. This whole "help yourself" mantra bs is getting old. No man is a island.
As I stated before, Being in the computer industry for as long as I have I have gotten used to people being too lazy to answer a simple question, and just putting "Google it" as an answer. Had he typed the url to the site he found it would have been less work than typing his whole "its amazing how fast google works..." comment. And it would have been even shorter if he just would have put "Its tighter".
Instead these people would rather ridicule people by acting like they are better than them. Teach a man to fish. Yeah right, I bet they would also like to teach a person with no arms or legs to swim too right? Instead of just helping a person, they automatically assumes they are stupid and treats them like idiots. I dont apreciate being treated like an idiot, so i have been playing thier game with them. Honestly this is kind of entertaining at this point. Honestly it doesnt bother me that they said it, What bothers me is that they still think I am stupid.
I have said multiple times that it is not coming up and still they think it is me that is doing something wrong. They have stated that I may not have used a zero and instead put in a capital letter "o" even though the original post clearly has a 0 instead of a O. Now why would I use an O in my search but change it to a 0 in my post. Dont they think if i figured it out twice in my original post that it was a zero that I would have said to myself "wait a second, maybe if i put zero in the search engine it will come up". Instead treating people like idiots is easier than sharing what ever knowledge they have. Or maybe that was it. Maybe they just didnt know the answer themselves. I dont know.
Do I think ill of them? Naa its all in fun and im not hurt by it. Do i think they are idiots? No. Why would i go through all this then? Because all to often people who have some knowledge automatically assume that people that ask questions are in some way inferior to themselves if they already know the answer, and assume it is due to laziness on the part of the asker on why they dont know.
They use the phrase teach a man to fish like its a montra, but then say heres a pole fend for yourself and figure it out yourself. I myself know quite a bit about cue repair from reading hightowers book, but what is the difference between reeding his book and asking him personally. Nothing in my book, you are still being spoon fed the answer. The only difference is how much work the spoon feeder had to do to give you that knowledge.
There is not one thing in life you learn on your own. Everything you know is because someone else taught you and if you really think otherwise you are sorely mistaken. You take a child that does not know how to read and give him a book on how to read and he wont have any idea how to read afterward. Could any one of us do anything on a cue without the knowledge from others? No.
First off can anyoner here build a lathe using no knowledge from anyone else? If I drop you off naked in a forest could you come out with a working metal lathe using nothing but your own knowledge to do it. Could you haverst the metal, copper, magnets and everything else to even make the motor. No and it would be assinign to try to have someone do it. But it just goes to show you that we all are idiots using tools and knowledge that smarted people than us have made. And since people love quotes about fish so much around here, here is a quote for you. "Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will go its whole life thinking its stupid" Albert Einstein
I am extremely proficient at reading binary code. You know the "00100100" stuff you see in computer programming. but I would be willing to bet money maybe only 3 percent of the people that come here to this site could say the same. Could very many of the people that come here tell me the that 00000010 represents the number 2 or why? Yet that is computer 101. That is so basic it would be like saying most cue sticks are made of wood. To someone that doesnt understand it, they may say "that stuff is way over my head, how does he do it so easy".
But if i was to explait that :
1) There are 8 spots in a number
2) Starting from the right hand side you have 1 then the second spot would be two then each each spot after that represents a square of 2. So it looks like this (128) (64) (32) (16) (8) (4) (2) (1) (((((Hence the name binary, from the latin binarius "consisting of two")))))
3) Each spot is represented by either a 0 or a 1. 0 represents off and 1 represents on.
4) If it is a zero that means that spot is not present in the number. If it is a 1 it is present.
5) you start with the number you want to encode to binary then subtract the largest spot you can from the number. So if the number was 23 the first three numbers would be left blank because they are large than 23 then 16 can be subtracted from the number so you would put a 1 in the 16 spot and go to the next number since 23-16 is 7 you canot subtract 8 from seven so the fifth didgit would be a zero again then since 4+2+1 equal seven the last three would be 111 so the full binary representation of 23 would be 00010111.
Second example: the number 173 would be represented by 10101101 because 128+32+8+4+1=173
Now how can I tie this in so that it is pool related? If you look at the power switch on your lathe, router, drill press, and many more electronic devices, you will more than likely see that there is a zero for the rocker switch that if you push it will turn the machine off and there is a 1 for the rocker switch that if pushed will turn it on. 0=off 1=on just like in binary code. The printing on the switch is coded in binary is why. But most people think it represts o for the first letter in off. Now you know the truth and every time you see that for the rest of your life you will know that is what it represents.
So maybe next time peoiple should think twice about acting better than the other person because he has some knowledge they dont, and instead of belittling that person, he will just give them a straight answer.
But i Doubt it.............................................