My ballot has finally arrived, and now the decision time is underway. People say I’m not a good Democrat because I’m seriously considering Trump, not so much on principal but because I think the world needs more rodeo cowboys waving the red flag to distract and entertain them, plus he would be awesome for Democratic Party to run against, and I’m not sure the President or for that matter any politician has nearly the power to change things that he’s often given credit to do.

Did you ever have to make up your mind? Give up on one, and leave the other one behind. That’s the words sung so well by John Sebastian especially while I was high as duck during summer vacation in the National Forest. Good song with all that reverb and melodies. Truth is I usually just throw up my hands when it comes to the Presidential Election and vote third party — usually for the libertarian or green party candidate. Even though I probably burn more plastic then the greenies would like, but at least it’s not going to the landfill after a quick side trip to the recycling center.

Still I’m annoyed how long I had to wait to vote. I got my ballot on October 2nd. It was mailed on September 23rd. I am pretty sure they delivered it by strapping it on the back of a giant turtle, which they sent walking up the bike path to my mail box. I mean it’s a 30 minute bike ride from County of Board of Elections to my house. There is no reason it took nine days to get to my mailbox. I think I just want it done so I can put the election out of mind, and focus more on my data work. I don’t own a color television, so the election doesn’t matter that much too me, though I admit I’m a bit of a political junkie 💉 even though I don’t get indigestion by whomever is pontificating from the White House.

DIdn’t get a real early start this morning, so I’m not going to be in the office early. Oh, well I’m trying to get my hours in before heading downtown to the dugenon in the afternoon.   I did get some moo juice — half off my gallon of milk, expiring on October 14th on Columbus Day — good and fresh though I doubt the plastic milk bottle or it’s contents will last much beyond that weekend when I’m hoping to be riding trail at Charles Baker if the weather is decent enough. Who knows though. Made some carrot pancakes up with lots of chopped apples — had to buy some the other day at Hannaford as the ones I picked with dad a few weeks back are all used up now. But still quite good. When making pancakes, not only do I use a lot of carrots for a fibrous filler but also include an egg for some protein. And I do add some salt to the mix, as it really adds a lot of flavor. I used to resist including salt in my meals, because I know how unhealthy salt is but without eating processed foods, I am actually pretty close to at or below required recommendations for daily salt consumption. And it really improves with flavor.

You can tell autumn has arrived from riding home on the bike and smell they’re out manuring the fields again. Hay and silage is chopped,  and now is the time for spreading the cow shit in Upstate New York. That smell of cows! Even in the suburbs. Got to get the manure out on the land, so the crops grow strong and well come next year, and that cover crops protect the land over the long hard winter to come. Fortunately though, it hasn’t gotten very cold yet.

I’ve really gotten interested in the rust programming language. For a couple of reasons, mainly because I’m getting tired of R and I would like to learn a programming language that is good, easy to use and fast for data processing, and it less obsecure then R — which while popular in the data science community and academia — isn’t exactly a mainstream language you can emphasis on your resume. If I could be as good at Rust as R, that would be seriously good skill to have. I’ve thought about going back to Python but I’ve never really liked Python, though it has some advantages — it’s a much more solid language thne R and is faster — but the syntax is kind of ugly and lacking, and I had the spaced indents without brackets. I feel like I’ve pretty much mastered C and I can work with C++ but neither have wonderful data libaries like Polars, which is my main attraction to Rust. Plus Rust has interesting and much easier and safer to use memory management then C does, where it can get bit harry with all the pointers and manual allocation and deallocation of memory.