Good morning! Happy Repeal of Prohibition Day 🍺 !

Drinking was kind of fun when I was young. But the by the time your pushing forty, that 18 pack lasted over a week when I camping in West Virginia. And when I went to that retirement party for a colleague on Thursday, I barely polished off a glass of wine. Drinking just isn’t the same when you get old.

Mostly cloudy and 32 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ Calm wind. Yesterday was cloudy, and so will be today and tomorrow, with rain coming. But once the rain is done, the skies will clear tomorrow around 9 pm.

Another kind of cold, cloudy day, ☁️ after a fairly cold one last night. I turned the heat up a few degrees last night and it’s much more comfortable in my apartment then it was yesterday, when everything was just so cold. ❄️ I could turn up the heat, as I make good money, but I hate to throw away money 💸 that I could be saving and investing for a better tomorrow. Today is going to be gone before you know it, better to focus on the future.

Yesterday, I spent much of the day experimenting with the plotly library, 📈 learning more about how to create inactive maps using plotly and d3js. I also did some projects with criminal justice data and experimenting with a new dark colored map, to change things up. I really like the compressed SVG output that I can get out of ggplot2 — it looks nice and is very tiny. Many of the SVG graphs I make up when compressed are under 15 KB which means they load super fast even over my metered connection.

I also went to the real library, 📚 although I didn’t get any books out — just went down there to hop on the internet for a while to work on the blog and some other things, and also to down load some videos to watch, although I really didn’t get much past the plotly beginners video before retiring to bed last night. 🛌 While I have a limited amount of bandwidth I can use over my phone hotspot or my phone itself, it’s kind of nice to not be having to watch the meter all of the time. 🤖 I could get internet at home, but not only is their the cost of the wired connection, there is the cost of electricity to run the cable modem, the route and to have the computer on all of the time. 🤳 Most of the things I need can be done with my $20 smartphone. I don’t need the fancy technology.

I am continuing to have issues with my computer occasionally trying to run updates over the phone hotspot, 📶 despite telling Network Manager that’s it’s a metered connection. I made a change to my slowing down script that will cause the internet to disconnect if the x11 server is idling more then 20 seconds, which should hopefully keep it from trying to updating when I’m down in the kitchen or bathroom. 🚽 I guess the metered connection option in Network Manager doesn’t work as well on Linux. 😠 I don’t think it’s apt-get that is updating though in the background — it’s Firefox acting badly. 🦁 Or maybe the CIA and the government workers. While the bandwidth wasted is less then 100 MB, I don’t like to waste any my bandwidth.

At least I won’t have to deal with grocery shopping or any fuel expenses for a while ⛽ having stocked my pantry up earlier in the week and because I’m not driving anywhere until I get the new tires on Wednesday installed on the truck and inspected hopefully on the Thursday or Friday. Only a week, but I will be glad when this long disaster is over.