Delmar is a hamlet in the Town of Bethlehem, in Albany County, New York, United States. It is a suburb of the neighboring city of Albany. The community is bisected by NY Route 443 (Delaware Avenue), a major thoroughfare, main street, and route to Albany.
A census-designated place (CDP) has been established since 1980 by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating the population of what the census has defined as the boundaries of the urbanized area in and around Delmar. The population was 8,292 at the 2000 census, but it was not included as a CDP in the 2010 census.
In 2005, CNN/Money Magazine named the Delmar ZIP Code (an area larger than the Delmar hamlet or CDP) as one of the “Best Places to Live” in America, rating it the 22nd best place to live among what it called “Great American Towns.
I decided to walk down to the library on this very cold day to upload some maps, as I don’t have internet at home. I was going to go for a walk around town earlier but changed my mind when I heard the wind whipping around. Still might be enough light though to go to Swift Preserve for a walk after the library close though.
"In the course of genomic analyses of the fungus behind white-nose-syndrome, a devastating disease that has killed millions of bats in North America, US Forest Service scientists discovered something very surprising: brief exposure to UV-light kills Pseudogymnoascus destructans."
This year I hope to improve my skills at the python programming language. While no means a novice at python as I’ve written several plug-ins for QGIS that I use for my generation of maps, the truth is that PHP is still my go to language for when I have to write stuff for command line processing and not just the web. PHP-cli has a lot of built-in functions but anybody will tell you that python is a vastly superior scripting language, even if it does require a lot more additional classes than PHP-cli has built in.
Python code is clear and relatively simple. It uses most of the standard ways of doing things as an object oriented language, so most concepts using python aren’t unfamiliar. I’m not sure what to say about indent based control structures over brackets, as a misplaced space can mess things up, but so be it. It’s a lot less convoluted than perl, which for the first decade of the century was my go to language. The virtual disappearance of perl in favor of python probably was a major step forward for us programmers.
While there is nothing wrong with using PHP for command line processing, using python just seems like a better tool and is more future compatible and easier to bind to QGIS and many Linux desktop apps. DBF format, essential for using and manipulating shapefiles seems to have stronger, more up to date libraries in python than PHP, the later seems to be moving away from this very old format only kept alive by shapefiles. Although with GeoPackage becoming the future, Sqlite seems to be more important and I don’t even know if php has a library for that.
I’ve been reading about Micropython for microcontroller coding and while on paper it seems like a really elegant solution with easily read code and none of those things that make C# a somewhat nasty language to work with, it has limited hardware support compared to the many Arduino C# libraries that support a wide variety of sensors and components. It’s cool that you can change the code in real-time with Micropython but that comes at the cost of memory, which often is very limited on microcontrollers.
I feel like resolving to use more python in my desktop projects this year will make me a better programmer in that language and more future compatible. Python isn’t the go to for everything but it has a lot of benefits over the perl and PHP especially on the command line.
Good evening! Mostly cloudy and 33 degrees in Delmar. ☁ There is a west-northwest breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. The skies will clear tomorrow around 4 am.
Another long day, busy but still its good to be back in the Albany area, able to take the bus home after a long day. 🚌 I can complain but I enjoy the routine and I think I do good work. Making a lot of progress on the report, I don’t plan to stay late tomorrow, which is Friday. I heard we should have some really nice weather come tomorrow than cooler for the weekend. But then again it’s January, and relatively speaking it’s been quite mild.
Tonight will be mostly cloudy 🌥, with a low of 27 degrees at 6am. 12 degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical night around March 19th. West wind around 6 mph becoming light and variable. Should be a quite pleasant evening. In 2018, we had with more clouds in the early hours of the next day. It got down to 14 degrees. The record low of -15 occurred back in 1904.
Tonight will have a Waning Crescent Moon 🌘 with 3% illuminated. The moon will rise at 6:05 am. The New Moon will be tomorrow with mostly cloudy skies. The Wolf Moon 🌝 is on Sunday, January 20th. The sun will rise at 7:25 am with the first light at 6:53 am, which is earlier than yesterday. 🌄 Tonight will have 14 hours and 50 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 58 seconds over last night.
Tomorrow will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 43 degrees at 2pm. 12 degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical day around March 12th. South wind 5 to 10 mph. A year ago, we had . The high last year was 22 degrees. The record high of 64 was set in 1950. 8.8 inches of snow fell back in 2003.❄
OnceI get home I’ll cook up some dinner then go for my evening walk. 🏃I successfully renewed my library books so I can finish them up without having to worry about getting them back. I could read for a while after I get back from my walk but I probably will just retire early to bed or maybe jot down my thoughts on a few things.
Mild but wet for the first half of the weekend. :? Saturday, a chance of rain or freezing rain before 10am, then rain likely. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 38. Calm wind becoming north around 5 mph in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New precipitation amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch possible. Sunday, partly sunny, with a high near 39. Typical average high for the weekend is 31 degrees. I have a family event on Sunday to attend to, and I think I’ll enjoy Saturday at home working on some projects. The budget has gotten tight again for me so I need to continue to find ways to cut expenses and spend more time doing things closer to home. I’ll travel more come the spring time.
In four weeks on January 31 the sun will be setting at 5:08 pm,🌄 which is 33 minutes and 8 seconds later then tonight. In 2018 on that day, we had partly cloudy, snow showers and temperatures between 30 and 15 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 32 and 15 degrees. The record high of 58 degrees was set back in 1913.
Looking ahead, Valentines Day ❤️ is in 6 weeks, Spring 🌷 is in 11 weeks, Average High is 50 🌸 is in 12 weeks, Average High is 60 🌼 is in 15 weeks, Average High is 70 🐮 is in 19 weeks, Independence Day 🇺🇸 is in 26 weeks, August 🌻 is in 30 weeks and Election Day 2020 🗳️ is in 22 months.
