Day: September 7, 2024

No rain yet, but it’s coming midday. Looking at the radar it’s almost a certainty.

I think I will ride out to Voorheeesville in a bit this morning, then catch the Nature Bus to Thacher Park. They’ve already started working on the unit next door, they were working until late into last night, though not making too much noise and I was down at the Town Park before going down to the library with my laptop.

Pancakes with blueberries this morning. Up at around 5 AM though after breakfast, taking it slow, as it’s a while before the Nature Bus comes. Thacher Park will be nice, even though I expect rain and won’t stay there very long. But it’s free and a chance to get for the morning. And the thing is the bus is running regardless if I board it, and there is no charge for the service. I just sleep so much better when I get up early.

I do want to get wireless earbuds to replace the broken headphones tomorrow, so I can listen to tunes at work and when I’m around. I like listening to music a lot, keeps my mind in a good place in the office, when I’m struggling to make data work or other things that are utterly challenging and obnoxious.

Been reading and thinking a lot about homelessness and how to be prepared should such things happen. It’s kind of silly, as I make good money and I have quite a bit of money saved up but you know with the current housing market and my indecision, it’s something to consider. Sure, I could probably fall back and camp in somebody’s backyard like my parents if push came to shove, or buy some land and camp there but it’s good to be informed at what it’s like to live on street, because nobody can know what there luck is going to be like, even if I do work incredibly hard, usually pulling 9 or 10 hour days these days.

Noticed now at home I have 5G and 5G Ultra Wide Service. That’s nice for getting on the internet fast with my phone, especially for uploading YouTube videos. 5G UW is pretty sweet for uploads, though I’ve not noticed any difference between 5G and 4G LTE for normal web browsing and YouTube watching. Still it’s amazing how much you can do with your phone these days. I’ve thought about installing R on my phone too, so I can even do my data work right from my phone. If I had the VPN on my phone, I’m sure I could ssh into the server for things I can only do over the server without booting my laptop. Neat.

I’ve been doing more reading about Unix and Java programming, as I think that’s a useful skill to master. I feel like I’m pretty confident with R and I am decently good at C and Python. I would be even better at those languages if I used them every day, but I tend to use primarily R as it’s often best for what I do at work managing and processing data, especially working with a spatial component. Geopandas is fine, but I think R / sf is much better for Geospatial analysis especially backed by tidycensus.

I’ve been toying with the idea of taking off from Friday through Monday to go to the Green Mountains to camp. I guess I could even leave on Thursday night after work, though I usually have meetings then that go late into the evening, and I would want to avoid driving up in the dark. Deer are going to be running soon. Otherwise I might do Rensselearville State Forest. Some remote work, some just enjoying the woods, especially now that at least state work should die down a bit, though I’ll still be very busy with the campaign committee, and I’m sure I’ll still have some state data processing to do. But I have my laptop, the VPN and the ssh client to get onto the Buddha server so I should be able to work remote, which will be fine.