November 28, 2016 Morning

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Good morning! Monday’s come back around again. Mostly sunny and 23 degrees in Delmar. Calm wind. Temperatures really dropped with those clear skies, although honestly its not that cold for the last week of November when the average low is 28. No wind helps. 

Today will be sunny, with a high of 47 degrees at 2pm. Two degrees above normal. Light and variable wind becoming southeast around 5 mph in the afternoon. Should be a pretty nice day. Maybe not record breaking or as warm as last year but the sun will feel good. A year ago, we had rain and a high of 58 degrees. The record high of 68 was set in 1990. 6 inches of snow fell back in 1985.

November 27, 2016 Night

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Good evening! Partly clear and 35 degrees in Delmar. There is a northwest breeze at 7 mph.

Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low of 31 degrees at 4am. One degree above normal. Northwest wind 3 to 7 mph. In 2015, it got down to 35 degrees with periods of rain. The record low of 6 occurred back in 1951.

Waning Crescent Moon tonight with 8% illuminated. The moon will rise around 4:44 am. The New Moon is on Tuesday night with slight chance of showers expected. The Full “Cold” Moon is on Wednesday, December 14th.

Tomorrow will be mostly sunny, with a high of 42 degrees at 1pm. Typical for tomorrow. Calm wind becoming southeast around 5 mph in the afternoon. A year ago, we had rain and a high of 58 degrees. The record high of 68 was set in 1990. 6 inches of snow fell back in 1985. The sun will rise at 7:02 am with the first light at 6:31 am, which is 1 minutes and 8 seconds later then yesterday.

The rest of the week looks to be quite cloudy and seasonable cool. Not really bad weather but hardly bright and sunny weather. Then again, clouds are common in late autumn in the Albany area. 

Looking ahead on the calendar, Christmas is in 4 weeks, New Years Day is in 5 weeks, My 34th Birthday is in 9 weeks, Daylight Savings Time is in 15 weeks, Palm Sunday is in 19 weeks, Easter is in 20 weeks, Mother’s Day is in 24 weeks and Father’s Day is in 29 weeks. Lots of Sunday holidays to look forward to in the coming weeks. 

Gave up on restoring my old PostGIS database. I’m just going to create a new one. No need to waste my time on this old data, I’ll freshen it up with new data from the respective sources. It will take the machine a while to update things but I can either leave it working during night or just nice the process. Hopefully I’ll be back in the map business by tomorrow evening. 

Big Red finally got his bath. He is mostly free of rain and mud now. It was fine at the car wash, now I’m sure they’ll start applying road salt like there is no tomorrow. 

Well stocked up on groceries. I shouldn’t have to go shopping until at least Sunday. That’s good as I don’t like to drive during the weekdays. Tons and tons of waffles now in my freezer. 

November 27, 2016 Morning

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Good afternoon! Happy Sunday. Four weeks until Christmas. Mostly cloudy and 40 degrees in Delmar. There is a northwest breeze at 7 mph. The skies will clear around 3 pm.

Today will be mostly cloudy, with a high of 42 degrees at 1pm. Some clearing later. One degrees below normal. Northwest wind 7 to 11 mph. Last year, mostly cloudy with a high around 64. The record high of 66 was set in 1896. There was 4.8 inches of snow back in 1940.

The sun will set at 4:24 pm with dusk around 4:55 pm, which is 27 seconds earlier than yesterday. Today will have 9 hours and 21 minutes of daylight, a decrease of 1 minutes and 35 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low of 27 degrees at 6am. One degrees below normal. Northwest wind 5 to 8 mph becoming calm after midnight. One year ago, cloudy with a low around 35. The record low of 6 occurred back in 1951.

There are 4 weeks until Christmas when the sun will be setting at 4:28 pm with dusk at 5:00 pm. The average high temperature is 33 degrees, with a record high of 66 in 1889. 

Today in 1978 in San Francisco, city mayor George Moscone and openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk are assassinated by former Board of Supervisors members  and police officer Dan White who resigned in protest over a juvenile facility for violent criminals being built in his neighborhood. People make this out to be a big gay rights or gun control story, when the truth is it’s more an overheated angry political debate that turned violent. It’s not clear that Harvey Milk was even shot because he was gay. Moreover,  you aren’t going to be able to take guns away from previously law-abiding retited cops and elected officials. 

Yesterday my sister brought her young daughter over to my parents house. We sung Christmas songs and she was cute. It was a fun afternoon. Spinach casserole for dinner. Yum. 

Continuing to make progress on getting my new laptop setup. Everything is fully restored except for the PostGIS database. I have the database files and I believe they will work fine once I get the backported version of Postgresql 9.4 installed on my laptop and converted to Postgresql 9.6. Once that is done I’ll be back in the map making business. I also have left to install the photo management app that I like but have forgotten the name of the program. 

I finally removed the old registration sticker from my truck and got the new one on. I was hoping for a nice sunny and warm morning so the sticker would remain firmly affixed but that was not to be. Pocket knife, and steel scrubbing pad, warm water, wet towel got it done. I do need to buy or find in my man cave  yet another glass scraper and lock it in the truck. Now with the new registration sticker Donald Trump and his gestapo can’t call me an illegal. I registered with his government.  The old one was going to expire on on Wednesday.  Topped off the windshield washer fluid this morning. 

Made an omlet this morning. I use the mixer and the frying pan on low. That’s one of nice things about being home, although I actually eat more eggs when I’m camping. That said when I was living in North Syracuse, I never had eggs because I didn’t really have a place to cook them. Eggs make a good breakfast especially when mixed with lots of healthy veggies. I try to eat more veggies every day. 

I also bought a bunch more breakfast stuff, including the mega box of 60 frozen toaster waffles they sell at Shoprite. Nearly half of my freezer is waffles – I had pull out a gallon of ice. Going forward I don’t expect I’ll need much ice as it’s winter. It pretty full with left overs, and part of a squirrel I chopped up a while back. 

I like waffles topped with tons of frozen fruit, skipping syrup and butter. It makes it fairly healthy, although I do also have breakfast sausage. Easy to make, just toss it all in the oven and continue to get ready for work. 

It’s such a gray day. I was originally thinking about going to Kaaterskill Falls and the rail trail but it was removed from the agenda. I might walk the local rail trail this afternoon, if we ever see the sun again in Delmar. Forecast says maybe. 

Probably going down to the library for a bit, so I can try to get the back ported postgresql up and running. I also have some minor blog updates to upload. We will see. I need to run to Walmart to get sandwich meat (I find that the fresh cut from the local grocery stores don’t last) and wash the truck in Glenmont. 

Oiled the shotgun this morning. It needed it, I spotted some rust on the barrel. I’ll probably be back out in the field once big game season is over. Thinking about camping in the Adirondacks in two weeks. 

Need to run to Sears this week to get more Oxford shirts. I also need to get a new winter coat and a sportscoat for work. I guess if I have to take some money from savings so be it. Things eventually wear out no matter how careful you are. I tend to fully maximize the life of things that I own. 

November 26, 2016 Afternoon

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Good afternoon! Happy Saturday. Five Saturdays from now it will be New Years Eve. Four weeks to Christmas. Rain is falling and 44 degrees in Delmar. Too warm here to impact the roads. Calm wind.The skies will clear somewhat tomorrow around 5 pm but the bulk of the week will be quite gray.

Today will rain and snow likely, becoming all rain after 9am. Areas of fog before 9am. Otherwise, cloudy, with a high of 44 degrees at 1pm. Typical for today. Northwest wind 3 to 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. Little or no snow accumulation expected. Last year, partly cloudy with a high around 53. The record high of 67 was set in 1979. There was 9.6 inches of snow back in 2014. I mocked how little snow we got that year but it really was a pretty snowy winter, a bit one that did kick the bucket by early April the following year as is expected.

The sun will set at 4:24 pm with dusk around 4:55 pm, which is 29 seconds earlier than yesterday. That’s almost the earliest sunset of the year. Today will have 9 hours and 23 minutes of daylight, a decrease of 1 minutes and 37 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly cloudy, with a low of 32 degrees at 5am. Four degrees above normal. Northwest wind 6 to 8 mph. One year ago, mostly cloudy with a low around 47. The record low of 8 occurred back in 1957.

There are 5 weeks until New Years Eve when the sun will be setting at 4:32 pm with dusk at 5:04 pm. The average high temperature is 32 degrees, with a record high of 61 in 1895.

Back today in 1970, 1.5 inches of rain fall in a minute in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in the world’s history. I can’t imagine it. 1.5 inches is a lot of rain to recieve in a day, much less a minute.

While I didn’t do a lot yesterday besides pick up my new laptop and configure the settings, I did walk about 3 1/2 miles between going to the library and my evening walk. Less than my 7 miles I did on Wednesday but still a good healthy and walk. Monday assuming that the weather is reasonable, I’ll walk down to the Park and Ride, then walk my whole lunch hour, than walk down to the library and then my evening walk which should get me in the 7 miles range again.

Got my new laptop mostly up and running with most of the files copied on over. I discovered that I am missing a few libraries I need for GIS work, most notably the PostGIS server and the GeoTIFF tools library. Also need jhead for image processing. I have PHP 7 and the dbase extension working. I should have everything up and running for the LAMP setup for coding and debugging the blog but I haven’t fully set up the configuration files.

I like my new laptop, especially the high resolution 1920×1080 screen. My last laptop was a really inexpensive budget model and it had a 1366×768 screen. If your not a techy, that means the old screen was very cramped and made it no fun for making maps or even surfing the web without my big monitor hooked up to it. As I don’t have Internet at home, it meant a lot of times u was using that cramped screen and it really wasn’t fun. Paying a little extra for the higher resolution screen was definitely worth it as I use the laptop a lot. Plus it came with a faster processor, bigger hard drive and more memory than I’ll ever use. It’s ready to be upgraded to an SSD which will further boost its performance when booting and loading apps.

The WiFi was somewhat problematic to get working properly, but now it seems to be working great. I ended up having to compile a newer version of the RealTek kernel module (driver), and then playing with the antenna settings. I’m not sure if it’s playing nicely with bluetooth enabled, but I don’t really care as I rarely use bluetooth for anything, except occasionally syncing files slowly with my phone. I am sure support will only get better with future versions of Linux.