Handwriting Day 2016 Night

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Good evening. Currently partly cloudy and 15 degrees in Delmar. Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low around 12. North wind 7 to 9 mph.

Tonight is January’s Full Wolf Moon. Definitely a big beautiful moon tonight. Tomorrow’s sunrise will be at 7:16 am with first light at 6:46 am, which is one minute and 48 seconds earlier then today.

Tonight I taught myself how to program in Python and write Quantum GIS plug-ins to further automate things in QGIS. Python is a fairly straightforward language, it’s kind of nice how free form and simple it really is. Read an ebook for about it for two hours and I already feel fairly competent in the basics. QGIS scripting is remarkably easy to automate loading layers, apply styles, and so forth. QtGui turned out to be fairly straightforward for creating dialogs too. I’m not a real programmer but I know a thing or two about data structures and programming logic. Great skill to learn, I figure.

Other than that, a pretty quite Saturday. Didn’t do much besides walk down to the library. I haven’t started Big Red up since I went to Walmart on Thursday. He’ll be fine though. Gas is down to $2.02 locally which is shockingly cheap, especially by New York high tax standards. Oh, well.

I hope you had a Saturday. Sleep well!

Handwriting Day 2016 Afternoon

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Good afternoon on this Handwriting Day. Currently mostly cloudy and 25 degrees in Delmar. A few breaks of blue sky on and off. You’ll probably be able to see the Wolf Moon at times tonight through the clouds. Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low around 13. North wind 7 to 10 mph. Cold but good for looking at the moon.

Sunset will be at 4:57 pm with twilight at 5:27 pm which is one minute and 16 seconds later then yesterday. Tonight is January’s Full Wolf Moon.

Sunday will be mostly sunny, with a high near 29. Northwest wind around 8 mph. Should be great weather for the Save the Pine Bush hike which is meeting by the water tower at 1 PM on Sunday. We are going to be exploring some of the backwoods by the Kiakout Kill including the 40 Karner Road parcel that the county is acquiring. More about it can be found on the Save the Pine Bush website

The days are getting longer. Even though today was cloudy, the increase in daylight is noticeable. In two weeks the sun will be setting at 5:15 pm, which is 18 minutes later then today. The sunset in four weeks on Feb. 20 is at 5:33 pm. Daylight Savings Time begins on Sunday, March 13 is 1 month, 21 days away. Sunset on that day is at 7:00 pm. I sure look forward to going to the park after work, once we have enough daylight to make that a reasonable possibility — and warm enough too.

And, no I didn’t do the oil change today. It kind of was a lazy Saturday. Too cold to do the oil change. I might do it tomorrow or sometime in the future. I got to get the oil, after all. I might go out the mall tonight to do some walking, as it’s kind of cold to be walking outside, especially as I still don’t own a functional, true winter coat. We’ll see. It was kind of fun walking in the mall last weekend, and it might be fun to look at Dick’s Sporting Goods for more toys that can’t afford because I’m broke. Someday I’ll have enough money in my checking account to buy a stupid winter coat. That or it will get very cold out and I’ll freeze to death, which is the more likely thing to happen.

Moon Cycle Function

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function moon_cycle($time) {
    // calcuates where a day is in moon's cycle
    //     
    // input:    time in seconds since epoch
    // ouput:    0 to <2 where:
    //           new moon = 0, waxing moon = .5, 
    //           full moon = 1, waining moon = 1.5
    // requires: none
    // based on: http://www.voidware.com/moon_phase.htm
    // and also: http://mikesmith.com/blog.html

    $year = date('Y', $time);
    $month = date('m', $time);
    $day = date('d', $time);

    $c = $e = $jd = $b = 0;
    if ($month < 3) {
        $year--;
        $month += 12;
    }
    ++$month;
    $c = 365.25 * $year;     // avg days per year
    $e = 30.6 * $month;     // avg days per month
    $jd = $c + $e + $day - 694039.09;  // jd is total days elapsed
    $jd /= 29.5305882;      // divide by the moon cycle
    $b = (int) $jd;      // int(jd) -> b, take integer part of jd
    $jd -= $b;        // subtract integer part to leave 

    return $jd * 2;
}

People have asked what code I use to get the moon cycle data on my blog. A while back I found some BASIC code that did the job and ported it over PHP for ease of use with my Wordpress based blog. Here is the code that you can use as needed.

Handwriting Day 2016 Morning

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Good morning! Handwriting Day. It is currently overcast and 20 degrees in Delmar. While the snow is staying south of us, still kind of a dark and dreary day. Today will be cloudy to mostly cloudy, with a high near 25. North wind 8 to 10 mph. Sunset will be at 4:57 pm with twilight at 5:27 pm which is one minute and 16 seconds later then yesterday.

There are 4 months, 7 days until Memorial Day. A long way until the official kick off of summer but it will come here eventually. This day in 1964, the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the use of poll taxes in national elections, is ratified.

I’m thinking of doing an oil change today, but let’s see what the weather is later. I do need to go to Walmart to buy oil but I figure do that before the change so I can warm up the engine. But if it snows or its cold, I can wait another week as I am still at 25% oil life.