Good morning! How is your day before Thanksgiving going? Pretty quiet, eh? Partly cloudy and 30 degrees in Delmar. There is a northwest breeze at 11 mph. It is warming up slowly and indeed while we will have a lot of sun for a while, it will still be pretty cold. Spider plant will certainly enjoy the sun.

Today will be mostly sunny, with a high of 38 degrees at 1pm. Seven degrees below normal. Northwest wind 7 to 11 mph. Last year, mostly sunny with a high around 40. The record high of 72 was set in 1931. There was 5 inches of snow back in 1943.

The sun will set at 4:26 pm with dusk around 4:57 pm, which is 36 seconds earlier than yesterday. Today will have 9 hours and 28 minutes of daylight, a decrease of 1 minutes and 47 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a chance of snow, mainly after 4am. Mostly cloudy, with a low of 28 degrees at 3am. Two degrees below normal. Northwest wind around 5 mph becoming calm in the evening. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. One year ago, partly cloudy with a low around 20. The record low of 7 occurred back in 2000.

There are 1 weeks until First Day with Temperatures Recorded Below Zero when the sun will be setting at 4:23 pm with dusk at 4:54 pm. Earliest sunset time of the year if you ignore the few seconds you continue to loose heading into early December. The average high temperature is 42 degrees, with a record high of 67 in 1933.

It was a nice walk down to the Park and Ride. I didn’t get down to the library last night so I ended up retiring to bed early and waking up early. That early start meant I was early to the bus stop. But it was a pretty morning with green grass at lower elevations and snow in the Heldebergs.

Some minor traffic delays on Southern Boulevard heading into the city, but we seem to still be making progress downtown. I’ll still be one earlier people in the office but that gives me a jump start on the day.

I am probably going to get the HP Pavilion laptop I was looking at. I will take advantage of that Black Friday sale by ordering on Thanksgiving and picking it up mid afternoon, probably in Glenmont or maybe Colonie. There might be traffic delays but in my experience most Black Friday shoppers prefer the morning. And if I’m only picking it up, I shouldn’t have major delays.

Things that sold me on it was it had a DVD drive — which is increasingly rare these day for laptops — which is good because I being able to get a movie out of the library every once and a while. Movies are nice on cold winter days, especially because I lack internet at home. It’s only a 1/4 lb heavier and an 1 1/2 inch wider then the Lenovo 2-in-1, and has a quarter more ram (8 GB vs 12 GB), more disk space (alas a slower conventional drive). That said the more I think of it, I think QGIS performance will be better maximized by the faster processor and more ram, rather then the SSD drive.

Things won’t open quite as fast, but most of the GIS files I work with really aren’t that large in the grand scheme of things. SSD drives are only going to get less expensive and more common, so I can always upgrade in future years. It can be done on this laptop, it’s just a pain because you have to remove both the bottom case and the top, then the keyboard to get to the hard drive. I much prefer the ease of hard drive removal on previous laptops I’ve owned.

Now it’s starting to cloud up. Well, I’m almost to work, so get I better finish up this post. Have a great day!