October 3, 2020 Night

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Good evening! Clear and 47 degrees in Delmar, NY. Calm wind. 🌕 Still close to the full moon and lots of moonlight out there tonight. Nice evening for a walk under the moonlight but I decided to come inside and take out my contacts 👀 as my eyes were itching and retire to bed 🛏.

While today was kind of a stay home day, 🏡 I did walk out to Five Rivers this afternoon for a while and it was nice after the crowds thinned out. 🐸 Lots of Blue Jays 🐦 around and some does 🦌 and a bit of color – you saw the pictures 🖼 I posted earlier but if not, scroll 📜 down.

Tonight will have patchy fog after 5am. Patchy frost after 5am. Otherwise, mostly clear 🌃, with a low of 37 degrees at 6am. Seven degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around October 23rd. Light and variable wind. Yeah, I should close the windows but I’ll burrow under the covers and it’s not like it’s cold enough to freeze the pipes. ❄ I like the fresh air. In 2019, we had light rain in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 41 degrees. The record low of 26 occurred back in 1948.

Tonight will have a Waining Gibbous 🌖 Moon with 95% illuminated. At 10 PM, the moon was in the east (100°) at an altitude of 25° from the horizon, some 252,136 miles away from where you are looking up from the earth. 🚀 At the state speed limit of 55 mph, you’ll make it there by April 13th. Buckle up for safety! 💺 The New Moon is on Monday, October 19. The darkest hour is at 12:45 am, followed by dawn at 6:28 am, and sun starting to rise at 6:56 am in the east (95°) and last for 2 minutes and 55 seconds. Sunrise is one minute and 7 seconds later than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 7:33 am with sun in the east-southeast (101°). Tonight will have 12 hours and 23 minutes of darkness, an increase of 2 minutes and 52 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will have patchy fog before 8am. Patchy frost before 9am. Otherwise, mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 63 degrees at 2pm. Two degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around October 7th. Calm wind becoming south around 6 mph in the afternoon. A year ago, we had cloudy skies in the morning, which became light rain by afternoon. The high last year was 59 degrees. The record high of 86 was set in 1891. 6.5 inches of snow fell back in 1987.❄

Tomorrow I want to get up fairly early and go for a hike at Partridge Run. 🚶🏻 I think I have a nice autumn hike planned and I’ll bring my camera 📸 for more nice autumn pictures. 🍂 Then it’s out to the folks house for Sunday dinner. 🍲I didn’t get to see them last week as I was tardy getting back from the Adirondacks as I ended up hiking farther than I had originally planned in the West Canada Lakes Wilderness. 🍁 Next weekend I’m thinking 💭 about hiking one day at Beebe Hill and Harvey Mountain.

Ran out of space for more podcasts on my phone 🎧 so I couldn’t download any more so I deleted the old ones I had on my phone and resync so I have more to listen to 👂🏻 over the next few days. I’ll get even more when I go to the library on Monday for my Zoom Meeting. ⬇️ I also need to upgrade my laptop to the latest version of stable Ubuntu as 18.04 is finally reaching its end of life. 🐞 I only run the stable version of Ubuntu and I usually wait for a few minor bug patches to come out before upgrading the distribution.

I was annoyed that they left a phone book 📙 on my door step now that they’ve ended free paper recycling ♻. I’ll shred the book and I might end up burning it 🔥 but it’s still obnoxious. I think I might just have to plan more frequent trips to the transfer station. 🛢 I can’t wait until I eventually move out to the country.

In four weeks on October 31 the sun will be setting in the west-southwest (251°) at 5:49 pm,🌄 which is 43 minutes and 40 seconds earlier then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had rain and temperatures between 75 and 60 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 54 and 35 degrees. The record high of 75 degrees was set back in 2019.

Looking ahead, Northern Zone Regular Season 🦌 is in 2 weeks, Halloween 🦇 and the Blue Moon 🌕 is in 4 weeks, Election Day 2019 🗳️ is a month away, Small Business Saturday 🛍️ is in 8 weeks, Repeal of Prohibition Day 🍺 is in 9 weeks, Boxing Day 🥊 is in 12 weeks, Latest Sunrise of the Winter 🌄️ is in 3 months, Static Electric Shock Day 🧼 is in 14 weeks, National Cheese Lovers Day 🧀 is in 16 weeks, Save the Pine Bush Turns 43 🦋 is in 18 weeks, 5:30 PM Sunset 🌆 is in 20 weeks, and Snow Moon 🌕 is in 21 weeks.

Between The Hills

ASCII – Wikipedia

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ASCII – Wikipedia

ASCII was developed from telegraph code. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) (now the American National Standards Institute or ANSI) X3.2 subcommittee.

The first edition of the standard was published in 1963, underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters.

NPR

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Pete Buttigieg Says There’s A ‘Crisis In Trust’ : NPR

Months after dropping out of the Democratic presidential primaries, Pete Buttigieg is back with a warning: America, he says, is facing a crisis of trust. And he says building that trust, in both American institutions and fellow citizens, is the only way to address the other challenges facing the country.

Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., called trust one of his "rules of the road" during his presidential campaign.

Trump Tests Positive For COVID-19

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Emergency Podcast: Trump Tests Positive For COVID-19

10/2/20 by FiveThirtyEight, 538, ABC News, Nate Silver

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/113282105
Episode: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/ESP1349278143.mp3

The podcast team reacts to the news that President Trump tested positive for COVID-19.

This quite an October surprise 🎃 😲. It will be interesting to watch and see how this all plays out – its quite possible that the president succumbs to the Coronavirus, it’s not a nice thing to catch.

Talking politics in Coal Country

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Everybody is talking politics in coal country…

I thought I could finally get away from politics for a few days by leaving Albany far behind and making New York State just a distant memory. But I was wrong. Everywhere I went folks were talking politics, but it was fascinating to hear 🙉 what people were thinking in the conservative coal country.

There was no surprises 😲 on what I heard from others.

  1. People everywhere know that politics make for uncomfortable discussions around the dinner table, especially visiting relatives. They would say, “I’m an unabashed conservative, I like Trump and my guns.” But I don’t talk politics when I’m with my aunt back east.
  2. 430,000 babies a year are dying from abortion. Or something like that. They see a lot of human suffering from abortion, a practice they feel should be abolished or at least further curtailed. I can see that abortion is a pretty brutal procedure but then again the women seeking the procedure are often in pretty desperate situations. That said, I’m not so quick to dismiss people who care about our society’s often aggressive promotion of casual sex. They’re not dumb hicks or fundamentalist extremists, they have legitimate concerns about the creation and destruction of life for no purpose.
  3. Illegals are taking all the jobs. I heard that too and that the wall was necessary to build. I’m skeptical about that point, I haven’t seen many Hispanics in these parts. I bet you would find them in milking parlors and barnyards, or in chicken plants butchering the meat produced on local farms, but it’s not Long Island and I doubt there are many illegals working in construction, coal mining, factories, or contracting. There just isn’t the housing and migrants lack the skills and certification to be working in those fields. But the skills to be a farm hand or butcher animals is something a lot of the locals don’t have.
  4. Folks seem to like the bull in the china factory. They say things have to change, they need to be shaken up, because so many people are desperate, struggling to get by with so few jobs. Trump may not be fixing things immediately but he’s an affront to the establishment, doing things that traditional players say break all the rules. Granted, I give that to Trump, although he’s more than just breaking the rules, it’s obvious he’s pretty corrupt.
  5. Didn’t hear anybody talking about guns. Too controversial? But I’m sure that’s on people’s minds who hunt, have handguns for personal protection, enjoy practicing at the range. People would be pissed if they lost that right or had to go through even more hoops.
  6. They are like we should enjoy it now before it’s gone tomorrow. I’m not that concerned as one man can’t change a system that much. State and federal parks aren’t going away, water and air will be protected regardless. People don’t like regulatory overreach but they’re not willing to give up the land they hunt and fish, that they farm and take in the scenic vista or camp with their children.

I was a bit surprised how ordinary the political discussions were out here and even in conservative country, folks shared many of the same concerns as in liberal Albany.