May 1, 2018 Morning

Good morning! Happy May! Going to finally feel like spring time. 🐥 Lots of green interest up finally starting in the suburbs. 🌷Good luck at finding that big Tom this morning. Gobble. Gobble.🦃🦃 You’re blessed to have this beautiful morning off from work to spend out in the field in search of the bearded ones. Five weeks to 8:30 PM Sunset ️⛱️. Partly sunny and 53 degrees in Delmar, NY. β›… Calm wind. Warming up fast! 😸

Today will be mostly sunny 🌞 , with a high of 69 degrees at 3pm. Five degrees above normal. Light and variable wind becoming west 6 to 11 mph in the afternoon. Hello spring! 🌼 A year ago, we had mostly cloudy skies. The high last year was 74 degrees. The record high of 86 was set in 2001. There was a dusting of snow in 1978.❄

The sun will set at 7:56 pm with dusk around 8:26 pm, which is one minute and 8 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies β›… and 64 degrees. There will be a southwest breeze at 8 mph. No complaints about that department. Today will have 14 hours and 7 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 29 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy ☁, with a low of 56 degrees at 4am. 11 degrees above normal. Southwest wind 7 to 10 mph. Tailgate drinking weather! 🍺In 2017, we had cloudy skies. It got down to 49 degrees. The record low of 29 occurred back in 1974.

Today is going to be a nice day. At least for looking out the window at the work. I should be able to leave the lights off in the office.😎 Bus was running late due to the continuing construction on Delaware Avenue but at least it was a nice day waiting outside.🚏

Still chewing over taking off Friday.🐮 The forecast still looks like crap so in reality I should wait until Saturday morning to go north.💦 I don’t know. I would like to spend two nights in the wilderness as it’s a long trip to the Adirondacks and gas ain’t cheap for my big jacked up truckβ›½ but I’m not crazy about camping in the pouring rain the first night😧 like happened last year.

Should be a great weekend up in the Adirondacks. 🗻Even if I do go up on Saturday. Might try to get a nice early start, maybe do some hiking and fishing. 🎣Yeah, I probably should try to fill my turkey tag but I don’t know. I don’t know why I get a turkey tag every year. 🎫 I’m thinking about hiking back to Pine Orchard or one of the trails in the Southern Adirondacks.

Probably have to work fairly late at work tonight. Which sucks with the first nice day of spring but so it pays the bills. 🌻I’d much rather go down to the park with a book. 📖 Summer ain’t over yet and tomorrow should be much nicer and I’m hoping to get out by five tomorrow.

Maybe go shopping after work to pick up a few extra groceries and top off the batteries. There are just a few foods that I would like to get to enjoy with the warmer weather like burgers later in the week. 🍔 Maybe then do the evening walk.

Today is pay day. That’s good because the bank account is almost empty again💰 and I will probably want to buy a few more things like a replacement lantern globe before my weekend adventure camping.

Rebuilding the connections on my variable message display sign. I had to pull off a few wires to replace the loose wire on the I2C bus to the real-time clock chip⏳ and then I decided to replace the crappy wire i got from a broken USB cables 🔌with better quality 28 gauge wire. I’m hoping that will eliminate some of the occasional artifacts on my big display module I’ve built.

Ordered more leaded solder. 🔬 With all the soldering projects I’ve been working on the solder goes quickly. As I noted earlier, I tried going lead free with just awful results. I get why commercial factories have gone lead free but for the hobbyist it just doesn’t work well.

Looking ahead, there are 5 weeks until 8:30 PM Sunset ️⛱️ when the sun will be setting at 8:29 pm with dusk at 9:04 pm. On that day in 2017, we had thunderstorm, rain, mist, cloudy skies and temperatures between 66 and 55 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 75 degrees. We hit a record high of 97 back in 1925.

Pratical Engineering – Why Bridges Move…

With warmer weather coming up the next few days, you might notice bridge expansion joints are spread out making for a bumpy ride. This video explains the various components of the bridges that allow for the natural expansion and contraction of the steel bridge beams.

More Thoughts on Lead

Bought a bunch more rolls of inexpensive 63-37 tin-lead solder as I am almost out of the roll that I bought in December. 🗞 I’ve tried to work with the 96.5% tin, 3% silver, and 0.5% copper lead-free solder that is but it’s really difficult to get the temperature right for soldering it, to say nothing of making it stick properly to lower-grade aluminum wire and pins.

I kind of wish I could make the non-lead stuff work well, but it’s not easy.🚬 The flux that burns off of lead-solder is much less noxious then the flux that is in core of most lead-free solder, which is a big deal in the winter for me when I do most of my soldering in my bedroom, especially with the drafty windows in my apartment forcing me to use a fan to blow the smoke from the flux in the opposite direction.

I get that lead is nasty stuff when people ingest leaded material. 👏 Lead causes all kinds of health problems, it literally causes mental retardation in human brains, especially when they are developing. Lead and lead dust is something you want to wash off your hands after you have been handling it — whether it’s the large batteries people use for storing electric energy in automobiles and solar installations, after shooting leaded ammunition at the range or hunting, using as lead sinkers for fishing — and so forth.🎣

There are lots of materials out there that replace lead. Unfortunately, most of them are inferior — and not just for cost. As I’ve noted before, non-lead ammunition preforms worse as it’s lighter, damages firearms, and is heck of lot more expensive.🔫 Soldering electronics, as I noted before is difficult with non-lead. Fortunately, for manufacturing purposes in temperature controlled environments, non-lead soldering works fairly well, 🎮 although non-lead solder doesn’t last as long as leaded material, but with most electronics ending up in landfill, incinerator, or burn barrel a few years after being manufactured — I guess it’s a good thing they’ve moved to lead-free for industrially manufactured products. Not to mention lead-free solder is much better for the environment for the few electronic products which do actually get chopped up and melted down to be recycled, especially in the institutional environment.