I guess I will be busing it in both ways, as it will certainly be wet by evening, and I don’t want to drive my F-350 SuperDuty to work especially with gas well over $4.50 a gallon. And I got wet riding home last night.
So yeah, today it will be the yokel local bus, it’s so local 🚍 as they like to advertise. I mean I shouldn’t complain so much about the local bus, it doesn’t use $4.50 a gallon gas, just a $1.30 purchase using the SmartyPants Phone 📱 and you can watch a video or read a bus as the bus works it’s way downtown. If the rain holds off, I can walk over from Delaware to Plaza outside, and then in the evening do the walkway to SUNY World Headquarters bus stop for some exercise. 🚶♂️ Tomorrow I’ll be back to riding. I don’t really like driving, and figure the days I still live in the city I’d much rather just take the bike or if I have to in the rain, ☔ take the yokel local bus to work as they canceled the express, thanks Trumpster. And then take the shuttle over to the office. I think both Ray and Mike is back driving the shuttle bus, so the chances of dying from an aborted lift-off 🚀 or bad merge into traffic are somewhat less.
No rain yet, 🌧️ and I thought somehow in my mind that I could make it home on my bike last night without getting soaked, 🚴 but about the time I made it to Rockefeller Road on Albany County Rail Trail, I had to pull over and put on my rain coat. And my jeans were still soaked by the time I got home. Fried up some eggs 🥚 with veggies and some cornmeal, along with the hot pickles 🥒 mom gave me as they were too hot for them, and that was dinner before bed. 🛏️ I don’t love glass jars that don’t burn and easily break, but I can find a recycling bin 🚮 along the way as I’ve learned this winter.
Yesterday was busy at work, 🖥️ with some code I had to write 🧑💻 to process a rather complicated data structure 📀 somebody sent to me, but it got done with some 400 lines of code, and the clients were happy with the results. Indeed, the programming aspect of my job is one of the more fun parts of the job, even though I’m not a professional programmer I know enough bash scripting and R statistical language to get myself in trouble. I do think I should do more Python, but I do like working in R Studio and the pipes in R. And that’s what I am most familiar with these days.
I was looking outside the other day, noticing that fewer and fewer of the street lights are the old-fashioned high-pressure sodium lights once so common in urban streets from the 1980s onwards. The finally replaced that failing bulb on the street outside of my apartment – not with a new high pressure sodium bulb but with an LED.
It seems like only yesterday that the legislature passed a law that allowed municipalities to buy into LED streetlights. The idea at the time was that energy savings of LED technology would come only after a significant upfront payment of purchasing and installing the new units.
The electric utility companies were in no rush to switch to LED streetlight technology, as they collected rent payments from municipalities regardless of the technology they used. Plus the higher cost of operating the high-pressure sodium lamps could just be passed on to the municipalities. Then in 2019, manufacture of high-pressure sodium and mercury vapor lamps stopped, and utilities eventually used up their old stock, and everything started to be coverted over to LED.
Locally, the change over happened first in small towns when even more inefficient mercury vapor bulbs, installed prior to the 1980s, reached the end of their lives. Fixtures that had stood for 50 plus years, finally were retired in favor of much greater energy savings of LED. Happened three or four years ago. But the more recently, I noticed more and more of high-pressure sodium lights disappearing in my own neighborhood, until one day I looked out and the street light in front of my apartment is now LED.
