Last Monday of March

|

Good Morning, Happy Monday. Please be aware of long delays heading downtown today, as there is bridge construction on Southern Boulevard (NY 9W) heading into the city along with delays on South Pearl Street. Also, a lot of police activity down there — possible car crashes from the traffic delays.

Light snow expected today, but later on it will warm up, with temperatures expected to reach 47 degrees by late afternoon. Sun returns tomorrow, but it will be cold, around 40 or 41 degrees both mid-week days. Good Friday will be 58 degrees, but rain showers in the evening.

Might head out camping and fishing for Easter Weekend in Central NY. I’m leaning against it if it looks like rain for Friday night, but plans might change. Being spring, a lot of seasonal use roads are either gated or impassable until the snow melts and the roads dry out. I could also go up to NY 8 in the Adirondacks, but there is still a lot of snow up there — it could be really sloppy and wet with the warmer temperatures and snow.

Good morning, Happy Friday

|

Good morning, Happy Friday. Kind of a muddy, wet Friday morning, even if it’s not actually raining out. Another frigid weekend is on tap, but at least Sunday will be sunny and a high of 44 degrees.

Didn’t want to walk down to the Park and Ride in the slop so I ended up taking the local to work. Which is fine, because it gets me to work about the same time.

Still looking to something fun on Sunday including getting out of town. I don’t know what it will be but it should be fun. Maybe I’ll just fill up my tank and just drive somewhere. We will see. I’m just tired after this week.

Rolling Out the New Blog

|

Started to roll out the new blog …

My goal with the next batch of changes is to cut the number of lines of codes to a minimal and use the WordPress and PHP APIs to a greatest extent possible, so I can adopt new features without modifying my existing code. More code means more bugs and more issues to work out.

I mentioned last week that the Twitter Round-up pages will be disappearing. These pages were very data intensive and required a lot of code and processing to work correctly. They originally were created before Twitter let you download your tweets, mostly so I would have a personal copy of all the tweets I’ve done over the years. The Twitter API changes a lot, and it’s a lot of work to keep my own archive working. That’s why they are “disappearing”.

Photo albums are also “disappearing”. That does not mean photos are disappearing. In contrast, photos will be promoted to the front page, rather than the 10-photo albums. This will reduce the amount of clicking required, and because I am doing fewer photos — preventing it from clogging up the home page. It also will work better with social media sites. This feature will roll out over time.

Weather is disappearing. Well sort of. I am going to eliminate the automatic weather updates that appear on Twitter and Facebook. But instead, I will be sharing more weather graphics and customized efforts. You’ll like it. It will be less annoying, I promise you. Automated weather updates suck on many fronts.

The appearance will be freshened up. Not right away, but that’s coming soon.

Don’t fear the changes. Just because some things are disappearing temporarily or changing around, doesn’t mean it’s all bad. And this is a slow roll out — new features will appear in the next month, at a slower rate then old ones disappeared.

I expect to be fully up to steam by mid-April on the new, improved blog. You’ll like it, I promise !

Good morning, Happy Thursday

|

Good morning, Happy Thursday. Dark and cloudy but warm enough that I shut the heat off and opened the windows to let some fresh air in.

The Thursday bus situation was a cluster like usual. I started to walk down to the Park and Ride but turned around when I saw there was no estimated time for arrival for the bus. Started to drive down to the Park and Ride but before got out of the driveway turned around and decided I would end up driving to work, so I ended up walking down to the local bus stop. The local in turn was running 7-8 minutes late. I guess you can’t win these days

Realize I priced out the wrong type of spare tire for my truck. At least I didn’t spend any money and the change will end up costing less. I’m kind of interested in figuring out the spare before I get stranded too far in the backcountry.

I also want to build the shelf that will store the spare tire. The current shelf wasn’t properly rebuilt after the crash last summer and I want to add room for the spare tire, add a light for the shelf, and wire up USB power ports so I can charge my cellphone without necessarily using the inverter. There are plenty of inexpensive LED lights and 12 volt powered USB plugs at Walmart these days.

But none of that will hold up camping. I only take a few trips in April and May and these things aren’t essential. It won’t be like last year with the fried inverter, which delayed camping trips for a few weeks.

Good Evening, Happy Hump Day

|

Good Evening, Happy Hump Day. Weather-wise it feels like we are on the hump, with this morning the sun shinning and weather forecast to reach the highest temperatures of the week at least before the afternoon’s rain and sleet showers got underway. We made it almost to 50 degrees, but now it’s back down to 37.

Maybe we are done with road salt season or so one can hope. I probably will give Big Red a bath this weekend — after I get him all muddy. That would be fun, because I really haven’t had much of a chance to play with the lift kit recently. Got to make sure though that I have enough change, as those car wash places require quarters in most cases, and the dollar things don’t always work.

Sunday’s forecast looks exceptionally nice. Might be fun to go out of town and do something fun. The warmer weather is much needed, although with the snow I could still get out snowshoeing or skiing somewhere in the mountains. I kind of want to go out to Middleburgh, but maybe if I wait a few weeks, I can go out camping there.  I am just hoping to get out and go out to the wild and back-country on some muddy dirt roads. I miss being up in woods, spending so much time in the city.

Hopefully I will get the new version of the blog up live this weekend. Honestly, most of the changes are invisible, although the new blog won’t have the twitter archive or the weather functions. But the important thing is that things will be faster and work better. Or so is the hope.

Started to look at getting a spare tire for my truck. Been pricing it out at a few different online places. I am going to get a full-size spare, on XD Rockstar 1 rims and tires identical the four others I have on my truck. I want to get a full-size spare prior to June, just so I have it. The plan is to rotate the spare onto the truck and take one of the other tires off each time I rotate things. This way, I won’t have a tire rotting away, and I can hopefully coax more life out of those expensive 35 inch tires, then if I justed rotated the four tires.

I will use a 4″ wooden block to raise the factory pump jack in emergencies. The spare tire will be stored vertically on the front-right corner of the bed of the truck, somehow held into place using a revised shelf and the bed bolts. Not 100% how this will work, but I’m waiting for nicer weather to decide. Not going to have the money to spend on the spare until at least mid-May, but I wanted to start to figure these things out.