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A variety of maps, writings, and photos on a various topics that can’t easily be categorized into a county or place.

I got thinking about how Harmon Hill became a tradition for Labor Day Weekend 🏕

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It all started by accident in 2017 when I was running late on my way up to Moose River Plains and it was getting dark and I was tired. Decided to do a quick overnight on Hartwood Hill but I awoke the next morning discovering the beauty of the site and discovered how nice it was to have good cell reception from camp.

Usually this is the start of campaign season at work and after 2020 this became the premiere campsite to remote work. With cell sharing you can connect your laptop like any ordinary Wi-Fi. While it can be hot at times, especially in the summer months on a hot and sunny day it also has awesome sun exposure for solar, and it sloped almost due East so when the batteries are lowest in the morning they are quickly topped off – I’ve gotten upwards of 85 watts from my flat mounted solar panel on my truck.

I’ve also tired of the bumpy and long roads at Moose River Plains. Not only is it remote but everything is so far apart you end up burning a ton of expensive gas, especially in my big jacked up truck and sitting in the truck instead of enjoying outdoor adventures. Plus as my truck got old, I worried more about breaking shit in the remote country with my anxiety problems. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

And there are some nice views from the campsite, especially in the autumn months.

Seems like always one day during Labor Day Weekend is Rainy ⛈

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So it would seem every year we have one day that’s cloudy with showers but not a wash out. It’s almost a tradition camping up here in Perkins Clearing.

I guess such weather should not surprise me at this point. ⛈ Just a few rain drops earlier but hardly what I would describe as a real nice day, cloudy and cool. Tomorrow is shaping up to much warmer and sunnier, I think I’m glad I brought the tube now seeing the latest forecast. 😎 Might float for a while on the Jessup River before riding out on Jessup River Road. 🗼 I haven’t decided if I am going to go to Speculator or drive around on Sunday evening to try to see some of the lit up fire towers. It might be fun to watch the sunset from Watch Hill and definitely have a good view of Snowy from there, but I don’t know if Snowy will be lit up. I should check!

Assuming the rain holds off, I am probably going to do a bit of riding this afternoon, 🚴‍♂️ but I also want to spend some time reading. 🪓 I found some firewood around, not sure if it will be nice enough to have a fire this evening, 🔥 but only time will tell. It was a nice evening last night but a bit buggy at time. 🦟 Mosquitoes were biting, but some DEET on the face helped with that. I actually went to bed fairly early, but then I woke up during the middle of the night and early in the morning though I didn’t get up too early, as it’s pretty dark this morning. Pancakes for breakfast this morning. 🥞

I discovered I could turn off notifications for the Bluetooth disabled in the Drive Safe and Save app 📱, so now I’m quite good with it. Maybe it’s bad but I don’t care much about the privacy 🔏 of my trips because at this point with cellphones always pinging, cops cars all with license plate readers and the cops 👮 installing stationary license plate reader’s privacy is dead at this point at any rate. I’m not getting dinged for having Waze on my phone or having the screen on, nor even reading text messages. Of course it kept pinging the sensor on my truck telling me it was Ready and Waiting to Record ⏺ at Trip last night when I was stoned out of my mind by the campfire. No not a good idea to drive then. Lol. Dr😂

It was already a year past since I was camping here on Labor Day Weekend 🏕

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The days go by too quickly it seems.

I can’t believe tomorrow is the last day of August and that Sunday is September. I’m following my traditional of ending my summer on Hartwood Hill in the Perkins Clearing, chewing over a summer ended too quickly. It’s been a cloudy day but one when I was swamped most of the day with work. And it’s already getting dark out.

Already some of the leaves along the road are showing just the first hints of autumn. The woods just feels like summer has reached its final maturity, that it’s ready for its inevitable change to fall. Maybe it is, indeed peak colors in much of the Adirondacks is only 3-4 weeks away. After all, September is Sunday, Labor Day is Monday.

I can bemoan the missed opportunity that was the summer passed but I did do and explore a lot. There is no going back, only autumn and winter ahead.

Off to the Adirondacks to work and relax ☺

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Up bright and early, before 5 AM. And I was running early before I was about to leave and I couldn’t remember where I left the pot. Yeah, so I spent a fair amount of time looking through my bags and then where I stored it before I remembered where it was secured. Then I had to stop and get olive oil and scrubbing pads at Price Chopper but they had some good strawberries cheap. Then I had to visit Samdill’s which is a bit out of the way on my way to the Adirondacks.

Early start to the day,😴but I’m here. At lunch time I’ll set up camp and assuming the internet works well enough over my phone, and I don’t have anything too data intensive, 📶 I’ll work from camp. Maybe I’ll make up some coffee later, this morning I did a caffine shot with shredded oatmeal and bananas to avoid having too many piss breaks on the drive up north. ☕

Forget to get olive oil and need deodorant 🛒 so I started my morning at Price Chopper. Those strawberries look good, I also got blueberries and kefir at Walmart last night. Stopping at Samdills’ got me some corn 🌽 and summer squash 🍆 both which should be good — I already had some zucchini and with eggs and cornmeal 🥚 I should have a lot of good eats.

Fixed the bike kickstand 🚲 so that should be good this weekend. I will oil chain up well, and plan to do a lot of riding, especially on Sunday into Labor Day. 🇺🇸 Next week I will probably replace chain, I just got to make sure the one I have will fit the bike. This should help maintain reliability, as the chain is a wear part, and I don’t want to destroy the gears. ⚙ That is this time.

Saturday is going to be rainy, but hopefully it won’t be an all day rain out.☔ But I have several E-Books and audio books to read and enjoy. And I plan a working weekend, I’ll have my laptop to work on and maybe once work is done for the day, have a puff or two in the truck cap. Sunday looks much nicer, with lots of sun. 😎 I will do a lot of riding and hiking that day, I might go down to Speculator to see the firetower lighting on Sunday. Labor Day, I will probably ride the Speculator Small Loop. And stop by the Kunjamunk Cave. ⛰

Drive Safe and Save. 🚦 So far I’m pretty happy and not annoying as I feared. I was dinged once for excessive braking. No interference or ding for smartphone screen being on and Waze running — it displays an icon when it’s running but no messages pop up on the screen. 📱 The icon disappears shortly after you park the truck, 🅿 and they don’t charge you for touching the phone when your not moving. Doesn’t seem to drain the phone battery much while charging in my truck. Ultimately though, it’s only pennies a day. 👛➕ Adds up but not much.

Brought the tube ⭕ and paddle but no kayak 🛶. The kayak is heavy, and I’m going to be so busy this weekend that I don’t want to mess with it. Plus cool and windy on Labor Day. I’ve done a fair bit of paddling the previous week. When I come up here in late September 🍂 — maybe that last week or Columbus Day Weekend — I will probably bring the kayak. Also thinking of a remote work trip to Rensselearville State Forest in a few weeks.

Blog has done well over the past year, 💰 and the first year of advertising will likely have brought in close to $1,000 by the time one year of advertising is done late September. That said, we need to start withholding more money 💵 from my paycheck to cover blog taxes. Already been doing $200 a month extra withheld for state and federal taxes, but between interest, and dividends, and blog income, I probably need to boost that further.

Been so busy with work. 💻 I keep volunteering for new projects.🪜I am good at what I do but I keep stepping things up. But it’s good, I’m learning new skills and becoming more efficient one everything I do.

Discussing smoking 🚬 cannabis on Facebook. Talk about people being opinionated. But it such a complicated topic with such strong opinions. A lot is a value judgement, and I’m be careful and having a lot of fun in the wilderness on my days off.

Being a geek 🤓

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When I was young, being a computer geek or a nerd was spending countless hours in front of a computer screen eating hot pockets for endless hours, being super brilliant writing the next great code that would somehow change the world. That’s what the movies and popular culture said.

I was told there was basically three paths one could take with computers – become a system administrator providing tech support, write the next Microsoft Word, or maybe become a game developer. I guess you could throw in web designer too. Chances were that as a boy from the sticks probably the best hope was to become a system administrator, baby sit servers and provide tech support for Microsoft Windows and reset passwords when people got locked out of their computers.

Being a geek in those days was a lonely miserable life, or so we were regularly told in popular culture. It was a life locked inside a windowless server room or a cubicle bull pen, a life working in a large suburb, driving from one’s tacky suburban home through a web of dead end streets in a Honda Civic to a massive parking lot in a suburban office campus of UniCorp Global to spend another day running job control lists from the List of Lists books. I actually had a job like that in college. I understand why people go postal.

Computer geeks weren’t allowed to have friends or go outside. They’re wasn’t time for playing in the woods, go hunting or fishing, you couldn’t live out in the country, have livestock or guns. Computer geeks were only allowed to have computers and live in the suburbs and work for UniCorp. Don’t you know the rules.

Computer science was about math and more abstract math. Calculus and endless integrals and imaginary numbers. Writing complicated and tedious code, spending endless hours debugging thinking about complicated code, impossible for mere mortals could understand. Written all by hand, by typing endless meaningless sentences that made no sense except to computers. No APIs or libraries to assist you, everything had to be done by hand.

Of course, things start to look different when you think about computers not as all encompassing but just as a tool. Not an ends, but something you use to better accomplish other parts of your life or business. Very rarely with computers do you use Assembly language or machine code anymore, and there are rich libraries, APIs and even drag and drop interface designers that do much of the hard work behind the scenes. Unless you are writing a compiler or a device driver, it’s rare to write low level, tedious pages and pages of code.

For some of the stuff I do I will do basic trigonometry although most of the knowledge I gleen is from examples on the internet. For things like understanding electricity and alternating current, some calculus is required but it’s not an everyday thing with programming. The precalcus and chemistry classes I flunked my way through really had no bearing on skills needed for writing code.

But I’ve also learned that being able to program and be fluent in many computer languages doesn’t mean giving up your friends, your hobbies and interests. And in most businesses, computers aren’t programmed for the sake of programming but to serve a business interest. You write code to support a farm’s record keeping, an insurance business claims or understanding a politicians election results. You don’t have to live in a big suburb to be a coder.

I’ve learned that learning technology and how to code actually saves time in the long run and makes you more effective in what you do. But technology is just a tool, it doesn’t have to be self consuming or dominate who you are. You can utilize technology to save time and learn without it dominating your life. You can have a life beyond programming.