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The wind is roaring and the lights are out 🌬️

I’m still going to ride my bike to work as I’m crazy, lol. I may not be in my wilder years, but I like riding and I wish I had that off grid property about now that I was searching for yesterday about now. Hopefully my shaving in the dark wasn’t that bad. Probably be doing that more when I own that land, lol.

Good morning! Monday’s come back around again. And it’s dark with the time change and no electricity. Mostly cloudy and 34 degrees in Delmar, the land without power, says the boy researching property for an off grid homestead. ☁ Breezy, ️25 mph breeze from the northwest 🌬 with gusts up to 46 mph 💨💨💨. The current wind chill is 21. Temperatures will drop below freezing at around 8 am. ☃️

I was up at 5 AM which was good because the power was out at 6:45 AM. 🔌 Fiber-rich carrot and oatmeal pancakes for breakfast today. 🥞 My breakfast was done and I was getting ready to shower, 🚿 when the power went out, so I ended up showering and shaving 🪒 in the dark. Fun times!

So yes, definately riding in this morning. 🚲 It’s windy as all get out, and probably will be cool riding alng Erie Boulevard, but surprisingly much of the commute isn’t bad as the deep gorge helps protect it the trail from cross winds. 🌬 Heck, I might even ride home, but it depends on how windy things are come the evening. Going to be sunny later on, and now with the time change, we have sunlight until 7:30 PM, well at least some daylight. Won’t be rushing against darkness tonight, which is great. 😀

Today will be mostly cloudy, then gradually becoming sunny ☁, with a high of 40 degrees at 3pm. Three degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around March 2nd. Windy, with a northwest wind 25 to 30 mph, with gusts as high as 49 mph. A year ago, we had light snow in the morning, remaining cloudy in the afternoon. The high last year was 41 degrees. The record high of 70 was set in 1977. 4.1 inches of snow fell back in 1941.❄

Yesterday was nice seeing the folks, 👪 and cruising the back roads looking at property, 🛻 though some of the roads were quite muddy and one of the properties I wanted to check out is up a “currently” seasonal use only road, and was impassible as there was a few inches of snow in Berne, and with the mud I wasn’t going to get stuck. 🐐 I am most interested in imperfect property, as it’s likely more affordable and with the good ol’ boy neighbors 👩‍🌾 which I think would be most compatible with my way of living. I kind of really like the idea of living on a dirt road, though maybe in the winter and mud season I’ll have second thoughts, lol.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 1:06 pm with sun having an altitude of 43.9° from the due south horizon (-26.9° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 6.2 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 6:20 pm with the sun in the west (260°). 📸 The sunset is in the west (266°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 6:58 pm after setting for 2 minutes and 54 seconds with dusk around 7:25 pm, which is one minute and 11 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the Waxing Crescent 🌒 Moon in the west (263°) at an altitude of 15° from the horizon, 227,362 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 7:59 pm. At sunset, look for mostly clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around 39 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 28. ☃️Blustery, 🌬 with a stiff breeze at 26 mph the northwest with gusts up to 44mph. Today will have 11 hours and 47 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 54 seconds over yesterday.

It will be nice having daylight in the evening. 🏞 Probably too cold to go to the park after work but if the wind isn’t that bad I’ll try to ride home. But it will be nice having daylight in the evening, for a walk or even just doing some reading. 📚 Sure, it’s not truly spring time yet, and 7:30 PM dusk is still pretty early but you have to work with what you have.

Tonight will be mostly clear 🌃, with a low of 32 degrees at 6am. Seven degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around April 2nd. Breezy, with a northwest wind 16 to 23 mph, with gusts as high as 40 mph. In 2023, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 21 degrees. The record low of -12 occurred back in 1948.

Today in 1993, Janet Reno is confirmed by the United States Senate and sworn in the next day, becoming the first female Attorney General of the United States. ⚖ She was kind of a jerk but many people who get appointed to that job kind of are, even though Ramsey Clark was awesome in his later years.

Right now, a split verdict on the weekend. 😕 Saturday, partly sunny, with a high near 54. Sunday, a chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 52. Chance of precipitation is 50%. Typical average high for the weekend is 45 degrees. Maybe I can finally get out camping this weekend. I guess it depends. If not, I do want to either poke around Coeymans and New Baltimore in search of land and properties, or maybe Rensslear County. It would be fun to do some hiking and camping with such an adventure. 🏃‍♀️ 🏕 🛻

Looking ahead, there are 3 weeks until April Fools Day 🤡 when the sun will be setting at 7:23 pm with dusk at 7:50 pm. Trout season opener. 🎣 On that day in 2023, we had rain and temperatures between 74 and 41 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 52 degrees. We hit a record high of 77 back in 1986.

Warm City

Washington Avenue at Night.

The Low Pressure Sodium Lights make the image very yellow (our eyes normally color correct for that). This picture was underexposed, creating all the noise that makes for a soft but pretty image.

Taken on Wednesday December 27, 2006 at Albany, NY.

Cool City

Washington Avenue at Night near the SEIU building.

Used a monochromatic blue color to create a cool 'city'-like emotion and to overcome those ugly yellow (but energy efficent) low pressure vapor-sodium lights that keep the city bright all night.

Taken on Wednesday December 27, 2006 at Albany, NY.

Why I Like Using Christmas Lights at Camp

Several years ago, I got a set of LED Christmas lights that I bring almost every time I am roadside camping. I actually have several of the strings now, plus a LED rope light string that I bought this summer, that I don’t like as much although I still use it, because I paid for it, and does put out a bit of bright light.

LED Christmas light strings are great, because they put out a fair amount of direct light, yet consume minimal power. A typical string of LED Christmas lights consumes 4.5 watts, so you can pear together several strings, yet have minimal consumption of electricity — which is a big deal if your camping in woods, using a battery.

LED Christmas lights are just bright enough to keep one from tripping on various things in on the campsite, but not to take away from the campfire or darkness of woods. They give just the right light. One does not necessarily want their campsite lit up brighter then bright all evening long, while sitting next to campfire, enjoying a cold beer.

The Lights of the City from Wakely Dam

The other night around quarter to midnight, I walked out across Wakely Dam at the Cedar River Flow in the Moose River Plains of Adirondack Mountains. With a new moon, I expected to see very dark skies with good views of the stars, and little light pollution in the distance.

While the stars were clear compared to any place around Albany, their was in the distance, across the Moose River Plains and mountains of the West Canada Wilderness, a very distinct warm color light, from the street lights along the hamlets that dot the Fulton Chain of Lakes — Old Forge, Eagle Bay, Inlet, etc. All of these hamlets are 30 to 50 miles away, and due to Wilderness and Forest Preserve, it’s unlikely to be from any source nearer.

Most of the light I saw in the sky probably was from street lights, parking lot lights, exterior building lights on lodges and businesses alike along the Fulton Chain of Lakes. It probably would not have been noticable in a more urbanized area, but due to the fact I was in wilderness and almost complete darkness, it shown brightly across the sky.

It’s unfortunate that it disturbs the views of the stars, despite my remoteness. It is much more unfortunate to think of the energy waste it represents. All those lights are supposed to be lighting a section of street, parking lots, deck, or some specific other purpose. They are not intended to be lighting sky or sending light 50 miles away to an observer standing on the Wakely Dam.

That light did not come from some free source. It came from a power plant that fed electricity in our state-wide electrical grid and sent a small fraction all the way up to the hamelts along the Fulton Chain of Lakes.

While some will argue that their is excess electricity in grid at night or that most of the power locally is generated by hydropower, the reality is electricity on the grid is fungiable, and one unit of hydropower here could be used elsewheres to offset the use of coal or natural gas. Even in low energy use times, the grid still relies on a lot of dirty and polluting fossil fuels.

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So I ask myself, why is a hamlet 50 miles away, sending energy in the form of light into wilderness? A lot has to do with technological inefficency that wastes energy, even more has to do with energy being so cheap, that it’s affordable to light up lands 50 miles away with wasted energy. Yet, it seems like such a waste.

Why I Like Truck Camping

Notes on the Re-Run for Saturday, June 9th.

— Andy

I have camped out plenty of times in the past in lean-tos and in tents in the wilderness. Yet, it’s not a regular thing, but more of an occasional thing. I much prefer camping out in my truck for the simple fact: I like having electricity.

As I’ve noted in the past, my truck has a 800-watt inverter hooked up to the battery, which provides electricity for my clock radio and lighting. I usually bring a string of LED Christmas lights for charm, but then also have a desk lamp with a 9-watt florescent light (equivalent to a 40 watt incandescent), along with two other 26-watt florescent lamps (each equivalent to a 100 watt lights).

It turns out that those lamps put out a lot of light. When I hear a bump in the night, or just need to run outside, I can turn on the lamps, and instantly have a lot of light. While a florescent lamp the size of 100-watt incandescent bulb might not seem that bright, as in a large well-lit room, in a darkly lit woods, they are very bright.

I usually use just a well focused 40-watt equivalent florescent bulb in my desk lamp for reading in the woods. I find it hard to read with a flicker of my white gas lantern, which also tends to be dimmer then the electric light, especially after white gas lamp starts to run lower on fuel, and needs to be pumped up again.

Indeed, one my favorite things to do when camping is reading. It one of few places I can enjoy the quiet without the distractions that are normally around. I find to read at night for hours, I need a good source of light to do it without eye strain I get with a lantern.

Electricity also powers my truck’s radio, along with a clock radio, chargers, and even a portable fan. It’s nice having music at night, and a fan to cool you. I like listening to the radio throughout the night, as it proves to be a good companion. You can get some of the strangest radio programs — right-wing christian talk shows — when your up in the woods.

Some people will say camping in the back of a pickup truck, with half a dozen things plugged is not real camping. Yet, it provides enjoyment, and a chance to get away from it all, and still provide the light and power I need or at least want to have a night.

Week four done as Director of Data Services

How fast the time flies.

It’s not going to be long until the 40-year veteran that had been overseeing the department retires and the reins of the agency will be in my hands. Not the biggest department ever, but still it’s one that is much different the what I’m used to. It’s a big step up on career ladder, but in real world experience it will bring, not to mention how the Data Services title sounds impressive on the resume, along with real-world experience using SQL, Unix text utilities like awk, grep, sed, vim — and also a R programming language. In many ways I’m a natural in position, as the tech skills are not my weakness.

It’s been tough moving to a large suburban corporate office building, the massive cubicle farms, the lack of natural light and views, compared to my bright corner office in the Alfred E Smith Building. Once the current director retires at the end of the month, I’ll have her old office overlooking the old city dump on north side of the building with some natural light, which will be a step up from the cubicle.

I already have ambitious plans for decorating a boring drab corporate office space, with some of my plants, some photos and aerial imagery I’m going to have printed and framed. And I’m going to get some kind of a task lighting for the desk — either find in the closet a lamp or buy a used lamp at a tag sale or thrift shop — and hang some Christmas lights in the office. Maybe the colorful dancing string of Christmas lights I had in my old office or maybe some simple warm white lights. I could take some from my camping supplies or buy anew.

Truth is I’ve been so focused on a soul-crushing nature of the suburban corporate office, after a decade and a half working downtown ignoring all the benefits of my new position — somewhat better pay, mostly 9-to-5 work shift, more casual dress, easier bike ride in without having to do that climb up the State Street Hill. Or that with my new position I’m really getting to put my technical skills to the test. I run dozens of SQL queries each day, carefully crafted to get out the data I need from databases. I know the essentials of Unix scripting — bash scripts I can do to automate database updates and extract data I need to deliver to my clients. I installed R Studio on my work computer and use it to process Microsoft Excel documents from database dumps in ways much easier then doing it by hand.

I do like the technical nature of the work, though at times I feel like much of the agency has been trapped in old ways of doing things. Careful and methodological, but in some ways not fully taking advantage of what can be done with even my admittedly basic knowledge of Unix, SQL, and the R Statistical Language. I’m not a programmer — nobody will let me near any of the source code and I don’t trust myself allocating memory in C, but I do what can do be done in code for automation. That said, I am too willing to ship shit, with data being used in a professional environment, I have to embrace the careful, methodological methods of the agency, that keep mistakes from being propagated by shortcuts I’d be more then willing to adopt, as I’m lazy. In the professional world, unlike my blog, “if it fits, it ships” doesn’t really cut it.

Riding my bike to work four days last week, seemed to make the experience so much nicer. As did the freedom to escape the office during the lunch hour, ride around the Corning Preserve, some of the back streets of Menands and North Albany, head up to the Albany Rural Cemetery. On a bike, it doesn’t seem so isolated and suburban up there. Plus I’m getting to know the faces and people, learning their stories, building connections. It doesn’t seem quite as isolating, and strange, the new face on block after 4 weeks.

Truth is, I hated the new position at first. It was something the company asked me to do, something I was told I would be good at, but it was so foreign and such a change. I resist change. I knew it was in both my own best interest, and that of my company to take the position with my technical skills and knowledge, but it was not an easy adjustment to the more corporate lifestyle. But I do like being away from the craziness of downtown and all the politics. Politics may be in my blood, but it’s unhealthy, and it’s kind of nice to be away from all the issues and debates, some that if you take quite personally can make you angry. In the new job, it’s all about SQL and the bash shell, mail encoding software and updating records in the database. Not politics! And that’s a refreshing change.

Andy Arthur.org

Search Results for: photo city lights