R is good with using forward slashes in Windows, actually you kind of have to do that or escape backslashes which R treats as escape characters.
This is not actually a feature of R, it’s actually a side effect of how the Windows API works, as internally it can take either forward or back slashes, even though many programs still insist on dumb backslashes and kick back out backslashes. The same is true with Python programs and C programs calling the Windows API.
But most other programs in Windows don’t appreciate forward slashes. Any OS derived from Unix has used forward slashes, since well 1970 … and the internet too. Multics in 1960s used > but Unix uses that for redirecton, so forward slashes were chosen in 1970.
I think the world would appreciate the president mandating the use of forward slashes in directory paths. Plus let’s get rid of letter named drives, that’s just stupid and old fashioned when I think by at least 1970, more intelligent operating systems like Unix derivatives, could mount a drive in any path that is a subset of root.
Moments of clarity through the haze 🌫️
Getting up early with the Teat Strippers once again around 5 AM not that I should be up so early but I set my alarm early last Friday for the LASIK evaluation and I like the moments of cool and clarity in the early hours of the day as I navigate between the roadside garbage heaps and McDonald’s in the traffic.
Driving out Washington Avenue Extension last night after escaping the hellish traffic of the Interstate 90, 🏪 I was reminded I’m not wrong about those signs that blink at you along the highway saying, Buy! Buy! Buy! As that soon closed to new garbage heap on Rapp Road looms larger over the highway. 🗑️ It’s not like anybody recycles any more, not that such things weren’t mostly a scam to get people to believe in buying more shit. 🛒 Somehow it’s better on my mind, that plastic milk jug will get burnt into carbon dioxide with the rest of burnables the next time I have a fire then pretending to recycle and buying more woke shit. 🔥 They scream about dioxin and climate change, as I sit bumper to bumper in traffic as people haul their plastic crap in carts out to their cars. 🧸
I keep playing that Grateful Dead record with Uncle Johns Band on it over and over again, 🏖️ with visions of summer vacation. I know a week from Friday I’ll be leaving for the Finger Lakes and it will be good regardless of my anxious mind. Memories of that black truck tube floating on Seneca Lake and listening to the cows chew their cud 🐮 up in the National Forest. The truck is fine but every time I slam the door more rust falls off and I find one noise or another to fixate on though none are new, most have done it for half a decade or even a decade at this point. 🛻 I totally know wanting a new truck for next year is the ultimate in consumerism but I also don’t want to have so many worries when I drive out to Michigan and Wisconsin come a year form now. I just don’t know if I can do make Wisconsin at 75 or 80 mph driving for hours in Red without a visit to a repair shop on the way, assuming it’s even fixable at this point. Nothing is wrong now but I see the future. Just like the inevitable growth of garbage heaps along all the roads it seems as people fill their carts at Walmart and Woke-mart alike. Landfill operators don’t care if it’s a paper or plastic bag, it goes the same place. Wokeness is such a scam, but it seems easier then actually making real change.
Today I’m busing it in so I can meet Lynne and go back to the Guilderland Town Hall 🏞️ regarding the Comphrensive Plan. We need to preserve more of the Albany Pine Bush. It’s great what there is but if nobody speaks up the remaining area will not be saved. 🦋 I was working on analysis for Save the Pine Bush’s comments but I was having trouble as I upgraded my computer to Fedora 42 and that bumped up the R language to 4.5 which meant I had to reinstall all the packages I previously had installed. That happened and then was work projects and calls to take 📞 and it just kind of got put aside. Hopefully I’ll have something together for tonight, I just need to pull together a few things. It doesn’t help that MLRC keeps changing the paths where they store the TIFFs containing the land cover dataset. 🗺️
72 days more of wearing contacts. 👀 Do I want summer to be over so quickly, the nights long and dark? Do I want the pain of welders blindness for a couple of days when they cut open my cornea in hope of permanently fixing my horrible vision without glasses. Labor Day is super early this year, and once summer vacation is done, 🌇 the sun will be setting earlier and earlier, and it will disappear quickly and cold will set back in. Last night was certainly refreshing for sleeping, 🛏️ but I’m not looking forward to the ice and salt of winter, or the cold and paying for heat in my draft old apartment. True it’s probably cheaper then heating a big house unless of course you know I have a wood stove or outdoor wood furnace, but still. 🪓 I’m just ready for summer vacation and listening to cows chew their cud.
I was listening to Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World 🌍 driving home from the Pine Bush after dark last night. I just find these days to be so confusing, 🧠 a note that the advertisers have now discovered as I see ads for brain boosting pills and old-timers disease. And of course, Better Help! It’s the kind of confusion that I think set in many Americans minds during the 1970s, it’s really a haze of plastic and endless junk that is supposed to make life better. Some of things like building materials, tractors, solar equipment and portable sawmills are quite interesting though usually it’s the unknown labels brings that are advertising. Not the businesses that have an established reputation. 🚜 I can’t complain that much about advertisers, they have brought in $70 so far this month for the blog, so there might be an August blog check after all. But soon enough – September 2026 – the blog hosting company will want another $500 or probably more these days with inflation. That said, I just can’t believe the direction the Trump administration is taking our country, it’s so confusing. It’s a haze of plastic smoke and cow shit. After all, all my heros burn their trash and smell a little like cow shit. 🐄 🛢️
Muggy evening walk in the Pine Bush 🦋
Muggy evening walk after attending an absolutely packed Guilderland Conservation Committee meeting… Nine board members and I was the only member of the public in attendance or for that matter giving testimony! Opposition was universal in other words to bulldozing the Pine Bush.
Breeze and dropping sun helps a lot with the muggiest of it all. Kind of brilliant sunset after a rather gray evening that was threatening rain. A bit buggy in places in the Pine Bush but it’s worth it. Won’t be long – really after summer vacation – when evenings aren’t nearly as bright with the decrease of daylight come August. Always happens so fast…. Summer is done before it begins.
Driving today was driving. A dump truck had rear ended a short school bus at a traffic light on the Delmar bypass. While cops were letting cars by it was slow. Interstate 90 also was congested and backed up – I ended up getting off at the State Office Campus and doing a bunch of loops to get back on Washington Avenue. Whatever I survived, maybe I got an insurance ding for braking too hard. At least they gave me a refund after returning those boys under shirts at Walmart. It’s fine. I’m just glad I don’t regularly have to commute by car. It’s what I avoid by living in the city and riding my mountain bike or taking the bus to work.
Being a Monday and Town Justice Court being open in Guilderland, there was an endless parade of beat up old cars and colored people going too and from court, learning their sentences in front of judge. Really cops enjoy picking on the poor and colored people, because they know they can extract the most wealth out of them. Black Lives Matter is such a woke slogan, because liberals are all for helping the blacks unless of course they move next door. Sit and watch town court, and you’ll understand how bigoted and awful government is. While the court was busy, I was only one at the Conservation Committee meeting, the only voice against yet another development in the Pine Bush, more houses covered with vinyl soon to be carted off to the growing mound of plastic next door in every city. The smell of methane from the garbage dump and roar of cars as the shift gears and move people quickly to their destination. My truck is getting a bit throaty, but it’s not that and it’s a good reason to haul it dumping grounds next year and get new. Because I’m not poor and I don’t want to be a target for the cops. It was bad enough that yesterday I rolled through a yellow light, and had a cop up my ass the last mile driving home. That or just he got the luck of getting behind me, and he was trying to hurry to get back to cop station, lest he pee his pants. Yes, I know that life well.
Driving was a bummer, the meeting a bust. But I got my thoughts on the record and I didn’t say anything to crazy or controversial. It’s been a beautiful walk this evening, I was so happy to finally gorge on wild blackberries. I’m not at all worried about eating up wildlife food even in an urban preserve like this because they are so numerous. Thousands live within a few miles of the preserve, yet few ever visit. Maybe that’s a good thing like so much of the wild country that I love.
Final summer vacation in the Finger Lakes
This year I am planning my final summer vacation in the Finger Lakes, starting early a week from Friday. As I like to say, “it’s fine”. I guess it’s better then staying home but I am also incredibly tired and bored with the Finger Lakes and so many of the trips I take lately, as in recent years I could basically just cover up the years on calendar and not know the difference, a rinse and repeat of every year.
Next summer, I am planning a vacation out to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Northern Wisconsin. I need to find some green pastures, I am so incredibly bored so many things in my life but I am not ready to take a 14-year old increasingly creaky truck on an eight hour drive for multiple days, loaded down with gear, merging in an out of heavy traffic. Then hours and hours of pounding the rusty old suspension and worn out ball joints on remote rural dirt roads in forests of Michigan seem. Plus I am only just starting to study maps, consider potential destinations and places to camp in the back country.
But in the mean-time what to do this summer vacation? Just because base camp will be in the National Forest – most likely either Potomac Road or Chicken Co-op, doesn’t predisposed me to any one vacation plan. Even if the base camp is same as the past 15 years – for one last time – I still want to find something of value beyond laying around at the Watkins Glen Pool reading about off-grid solar and cabins and pig raising. Or laying back in the hammock, listening to cows moo and rip the grass. There has to be views I’ve not explored, I do want to poke around Elmira and maybe Corning. I want to hit destinations not done before, so the trip is memorable even if it is similar to many before.
I’m ready though for bigger and better places. I hate New York, I want to get out and further and further away as I know there are other places in this world that much more share my values, are interesting and not so overwhelmed by the love of plastic and wokeness.
Extreme Confusion 🧠
I find this year to be the most confusing. Maybe it’s because we are regularly being gaslighted by the president and his conservative allies. Up seems to be down, down seems to be up. But I want to understand, as I agree a lot is broken but maybe not as the President makes it to be.
Lately so much of the world looks like to me as just blobs of color like oil floating in psychedelic liquid light show. Or maybe the flashing of images and colors as sometimes the films of that era once represented the violent changes that were unway in that era.
Everything these days seems to be about vinyl siding, asphalt roofs and plastic in suburbia. Everything wrapped in white plastic, so sterile. Even too many rural houses and properties seem to want to model suburbia with their perfectly trimmed lawns even if they do still smell like cow and hog shit.
Endless days of advertising for Amazon and Better Help and those Jack-off Battery Boxes. Woke grid-tied solar and roof replacements. ED Medications and hair loss treatments. Why don’t you want suburbia? Don’t you know you have a box of more garbage delivered to your door and pay to have it hauled away the next day to the growing mounds next to your office of garbage?
I’m just really confused by society these days, and that’s even before I open the New York Times each morning with my library account…
It’s the same story the crow told me 🪶
Welcome to the land of Monday after another meaningless weekend. 72 more days of wearing contact lens I note to myself. Rain today.
Started the morning out with coffee ☕ and carrot 🥕 pancakes 🥞 around 5 AM this morning when the alarm ⏰ went off. I set the alarm on my phone on Friday so I would be up early for the eye doctor and it just kind of stayed on my phone. It’s good I’ve been trying to get up earlier. A good fiber boost is good though all day I’ve been huffing down frozen fruit as it’s been hot.
After showering it’s off to work, 🏢 I am driving in as promised Lynne I would go to the Guilderland Conservation Committee meeting reviewing yet another development in the Albany Pine Bush. 🌲 I just need to speak about why that’s problematic without throwing some conservative memes into my comments that cause a newspaper 🗞️ sensation, because let’s be honest I’m fairly conservative and I do agree with some of the things they say, even if I don’t agree with their policies. Then maybe go for a nice evening hike after the meeting. By then hopefully it will be cooling down and the sun will be back out.
I bought some undershirts to wear but when I tried one on I realized it was for kids not adults in the XL size. 👚 I opened the package but I have the receipt so I’ll go to Walmart this morning and return it. I think they’ll take it back, give me back my $10 and then promptly throw it in the garbage. That’s what in most cases they do with returns. It’s fine, at least I get my ten dollars back – I wish I had read the label more clearly before opening it up.
Just another five day week, 🖥️ hopefully without a lot of drama like last week. I’d like to go to Schoharie come Friday but we’ll see what the weather is like. 🌽 Some pool time, sweet corn and fresh zucchuni could really hit the spot. Maybe do some riding along NY 30 and floating into he Schoharie Creek by Towpath Mountain. Like was planned for this past weekend until of course I had to have my eyes dilated and then it rained all weekend. 👀 ☔
A week from Friday is vacation in the boring old Finger Lakes. 🌼 🐮 🏕️ 🏊 I still need to take those days off and get coverage for the robo sign-offs at work but one of the other directors can do that. I’m sure somebody will be there that week to do it. It will be fine, a nice relaxing vacation, if it rains a lot I’ll probably spend lots of time reading and relaxing, maybe drive down to the Corning Museum of Glass one day. 🍷 I should check out one of those shops in Ithaca – I bet they have good grass there. Northern Lights in Menands is good but I know different parts of state will have different brands.
Maybe I will need to stop at For the Love of Bacon 🥓 on the way out to Ithaca as I was noticing the Piggery is now closed in Ithaca. I will also want to stop at the farm stand near Lisle on the way for produce, you know lots of sweet corn and summer squash to get the trip started. 🌽 I also need to get that front derailuer adjusted on my bike – probably replace the cable, grease and tighten that up 🚲 so I can easily and reliably switch between the mountain-bike crawl gears and those for riding on dirt roads. ⚙️ Should also replace that back tire and get an extra tube and either find and make sure the hand pump is working or get another one so I have it in my bike for emergencies along with a set of hex keys.
This autumn – maybe the first week of October 🍁 I’m thinking of heading up to the St. Regis Canoe Area and maybe Horseshoe Pond. I want to do some paddling and riding the new Adirondack Rail Trail. 🛶 🚲 I know I won’t be able to swim after getting LASIK at that point, but the water is too cold. I am definately looking forward to not having to deal with irritated eyes 👀 up at camp, and just waking up without fumbling around for my glasses 👓 and having perfect vision. Maybe later in October I’m thinking of a trip down to Long Pond State Forest in Central NY and then doing a day trip down to Pennsylvania to visit one of the parks with waterfalls in Endless Mountain Country. 🚜
