Good Evening – August 10, 2021

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Good evening! Seeing a lot of bat’s out and about tonight. 🦇

I think the bat’s have nests along the Phillipin Kill in the Town Park. 🏞 It’s good because the bat’s have suffered so much lately between rabies and white nose disease but I had to have counted ten of them out and about scooping up bugs in the Town Park.

Mostly clear and 78 degrees in Delmar, NY. ✨ There is a south breeze at 14 mph. 🍃. The dew point is 71 degrees. The muggy weather ends Saturday around 11 pm. 😓

Truth be told with the breeze it doesn’t feel that hot and muggy 💦 although you get moving and the breeze dies down it gets hot. The air is thick and probably loaded with pollution but that breeze really helps. Maybe it’s just because it’s a bit cooler than yesterday due to the breeze.

I thought about getting ice cream 🍧 when I got milk 🥛 at Stewart’s but I decided against it as money 💵 is always tight and ice cream is pretty unhealthy and if I had it at home I’m sure I would eat way too much.

I am back to wearing a mask 😷 more places when I go indoors just for safety. I know they aren’t really mandating it outside of common places at work and the vaccine 💉 is very effective but I occasionally have a bit of tightness in my throat and I have to wonder. Better safe than sorry I guess.

Tomorrow I am again working in the office downtown 🏢 after which I will go to the Emperor’s Vision and pick up my contact lens 👀 and some food and supplies for camping 🏕, return beer cans ♻, then walk down to the library 📚 and get books to read for camp. I will leave probably around 8 am or so Thursday for camping up off Piseco-Powley Road for three nights. I plan to do a lot of reading and just staying cool in the East Canada Creek.

Still thinking about beer boiled clams 🦪 for up at camp – I was thinking I could bring that bag of charcoal and I bet finished off on charcoal would be amazing along with grilled sweet corn 🌽. Especially if I camp somewhere I don’t need to drive anywhere all weekend. But it would be nice to also camp somewhere with a good view of the stars ✨. Percid meteor showers this weekend. 🌠

Been building a collection of geopackages from counties containing current election districts 🗺

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Been building a collection of geopackages from counties containing current election districts 🗺

Most counties nowadays post their election districts nowadays on their interactive mappers which are backed by ArcGIS REST/services. So you can either Google the REST/services or watch them in the network debugger in the browser to get the URL and then connect to them in QGIS to download the file. Some counties – Allegany and Rensselaer along with New York City and Westchester post shapefiles on their website.

Come redistricting I’m afraid the old election districts will disappear from public view on the servers and won’t be able to obtained easily. But having the old district lines is valuable as you can plot old elections on maps such as the 2018 or 2020 elections than port them over to the new district. Or create cross walk documents that show old versus new election districts. To a certain extent you can use the Voter Tabulation District file put out by the Census Bureau but the problem is that the Census Bureau often collapses small election districts, making it difficult to merge against past local election races.

The state’s LATFOR commission will late this year release election results for recent elections tallied by Voter Tabulation District, that they purchased from a vendor for redistricting purposes. That data will be fairly valuable, especially once they are joined against the new, well updated, election districts created or updated by county boards of elections next year. There is quite a bit of math involved in making the calculations – working with percentages of the old election districts – but I expect I can do a lot of that with PANDAS fairly easy. This might make some pretty maps and interesting analysis of local races.

Kayak in Site on Cedar River Flow

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This is one of the beautiful kayak-in sites that the DEC is proposing to close to appease the environmental extermists who believe the public should have no access to public lands.

Taken on Wednesday August 11, 2010 at Moose River Plains.