Good evening! The weekend comes to a close 🖐️

Time goes by so quickly these days it seems. I’m trying to learn and make good use my time for I know it’s not going to be around forever.

Rain and 61 degrees in Delmar. ☔ There is a south breeze at 10 mph. 🍃. The dew point is 56 degrees. The skies will clear tomorrow around 6 am.

Somehow I was reading 📖 and listening to Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Autumn album 🎶 and was devastated to learn he died at age 47 from a massive heart ♥ attack with basically no warning. Makes you think a lot about time. ⏳ It really is something you think about more, especially when your pushing forty and time goes by so quickly.

Yesterday, though was a enjoyable day. 👪 I spent it with Mom and Dad on the gondola ride up to the top of Bellayare. I haven’t ridden a gondola since I was a little kid. 🚠 We drove through the Western Catskills then up to through the Northern Catskills. It was a very clear, blue sky day but not a lot of color except a few of trees along the north-facing slope towards the top of Bellayare. 🌄 Maybe not the greatest views ever, but it was a nice trip. I enjoy spending time with my parents, as I’m well aware it won’t be forever. The days are going by so quickly.

I really should get down to the Catskills more ⛰ but with my big jacked up truck, it’s kind of a pain to park and uses a lot of fuel. I more prefer these days to go places where I can set up camp, park for several days and hike and do activities from my base camp. Plus I keep hearing how popular hiking and the trails are these days 🚵‍♀️ compared to days of yore when you could hike, especially on weekdays, and never see another person.

I also hiked up Bennett Hill in the afternoon yesterday. 🚶‍♀️ It was remarkably crowded but then again Bennett Hill is always popular. 🏙 Remarkably clear though today, you could see the Adirondacks and Green Mountains and the city like it was next door. Much nicer then today which is quite gloomy to say the least.

Today I’ve been doing a lot of study of algorithms to classify map data, 🗺 into roughly equal population sections. I don’t know what fascinates me about this, often trying to do this forces data into ways it shouldn’t be. I’ve tried both the GAN approach by the redist library and the SKATER algorithm. I don’t love the results either produces. Maybe it’s silly to try to aggregate and group together diverse populations, like this but I always find those maps you see on Reddit and other sites where they show how a small portion of the land represents most of the people to be so interesting. 👨‍💻 Lately, I’ve grown much more into the analysis side of GIS since I’ve been doing more R work.

Next weekend I might go up to the Adirondacks 🏕 which was my original plan for this weekend, but I am not sure with a hurricane heading up this way. Initial forecasts look good for the weekend but I’m not convinced of that being the fact. Plus I am thinking I want to get the suspension looked over on my truck — I’ve noticed that is wandering a lot on the curves and I think lower ball joints may be ready to kick the bucket.