June 4, 2018 Evening

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Good evening! Another rather damp, cold and wet Monday. I heard it’s National Cheese Lovers Day. 🧀 One of many important holidays. Also one month until Independence Day. Light rain and 65 degrees this evening in Delmar, NY. ☔ There is a southeast breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. The skies will clear tomorrow around noontime.

Today was a relatively quiet and non insane day at work. Italian Legislators Day at the LOB so I got a free lunch. Went down to the park for a nice walk, started to rain a bit on the way back home. Worked on another electronics project until late in the night.

Tonight will have a chance of showers, mainly before 1am. Patchy fog after 2am. Otherwise, mostly cloudy 🌁 , with a low of 49 degrees at 4am. Four degrees below normal. Northeast wind around 5 mph becoming light and variable after midnight.

Tomorrow will have a chance of showers, mainly after 8am. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a high of 65 degrees at 3pm. 10 degrees below normal. Maximum dew point of 51 at 8am. West wind 6 to 8 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New precipitation amounts of less than a tenth of an inch possible. A year ago, we had mostly cloudy skies. The high last year was 66 degrees. The record high of 97 was set in 1925.

A pretty quiet weekend. I could have probably done a lot more but most of the weekend I spent home, although on Sunday I did catch and toss back in some pan fish in Lawson Lake🎣 and went out to my parents house for Sunday dinner. 🍔 I was going to hike up Bennett Hill but I got busy doing other things around the apartment, and then it got very humid and gray later in the afternoon. I kind of try to avoid driving much on weekends I stay in town, to save on gas ⛽ and mileage on Big Red, so I can burn up more of it on other weekends. That said, now with the solar panel, I can just park and stay in the same place all weekend while camping, which will save more money.

Fixed then broke my GPS logger.📟 Over the weekend I decided to move the GPS logger to the truck cap so I would not lose the signal as much as I do inside the cab, located below the seat were it used to be located. I had rewrite the code a bit to keep it from recording when the vehicle was stopped, as I don’t have switched power in the truck cap.⚡ I don’t worry as much about vampire loads now that I have solar panel, plus I it wired to a switched port. Somehow though after I re-programmed the code, the SD card writer stopped working.

I think it’s a loose wire keeping the SD card from reading, 💾 although I think the Nano is not working properly, as at least the USB FTD converter chip is acting up, as I can no longer supply power over the USB to the Nano without hooking it up through the 5 volt input wire. I think I need to replace it. Somehow it got fried in the truck, 🔌 not totally sure why. Maybe it was defective or maybe the heat and cold of being in the truck. I’ll have to get the test meter out to try to figure why the SD card part of the logger is not working, although I think I will have to replace the Nano. I know the SD card reader is working, as I tested it with another unit I have just for testing purposes.

The green LED array I ordered from China arrived. I actually soldered together the 6 different modules over the weekend, putting a wire connection on the middle two modules so they are a bit more portable. :idea:I brought home the display that I had my desk at work and will work to make the changes to the code and packaging to hook it up to the bigger display.

Right now, a split verdict on the weekend. 🐥Saturday, mostly sunny, with a high near 77. Maximum dew point of 56 at 6pm. Sunday, a chance of showers. Partly sunny, with a high near 75. Chance of precipitation is 40%. Maximum dew point of 57 at 7am. Typical average high for the weekend is 76 degrees.

Next weekend thinking about camping in Schoharie County and attending the Gas Up.🚜 I might only camp one night and stop at the Gas Up on the way out then do some fishing at Looking Glass Pond and maybe hike the cliffs of Middleburg on Sunday. I thought about taking off Friday but I don’t think so this weekend. Might be a nice weekend but I expect to be fairly busy with work. I guess I could still change my mind.

One month 📅 from now will be Independence Day 🇺🇸 when the sun will be setting at 8:36 pm with dusk at 9:10 pm. Of course this year, many people will be wishing our country was still part of the crown, while others will be denouncing how the holiday mostly sticks up for right wing extremists who like to light off dangerous things in their backyard that make colorful displays in the sky, and scare puppies who hide under the suburbanites kitchen table.

Looking ahead, Independence Day 🇺🇸 is a month away, Labor Day 👨‍🏭 is in 13 weeks, Consitution Day 👨‍🏭 is in 15 weeks, Columbus Day 🛥️ is in 18 weeks, Daylight Savings Time Ends 🛥️ is in 5 months, Veterans Day Observed (Monday) 🇺🇸 is in 23 weeks, Cyber Monday 🛍️ is in 25 weeks and New Years Eve 🎆 is in 30 weeks.

Congress Must Act to Enforce It

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Second Amendment: Congress Must Act to Enforce It

"The solution to the southern Democrats’ abuses of power was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was enacted after litigation on a case-by-case basis proved insufficient to curtail Fifteenth Amendment violations: State legislatures became adept at replacing unconstitutional laws with new ones that had a similar effect. In response, the 1965 act prohibited states from adopting practices or procedures that deny or abridge Americans’ right to vote. Crucially, the authors of the act recognized that obstructionist states could be singled out for extra scrutiny. Politicians in those states were prohibited from making arbitrary changes to voting rules."

"The same approach can remedy abuses by anti-gun states. The Second Amendment applies to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, which allows Congress to police the actions of wayward states “by appropriate legislation.” It’s true that Congress is limited to remedying or preventing unconstitutional actions, as the Supreme Court stressed in a 1997 religious-freedom case. But even in that case, a majority of the justices said Congress “must have wide latitude” in enacting laws to protect constitutional rights “despite the burdens those measures placed on the States.”

"A federal law could prohibit states from adopting practices or procedures that deny or abridge Americans’ Second Amendment rights, with obstructionist states singled out for extra scrutiny. The law should preempt unconstitutional state and local anti-gun laws, require concealed-carry reciprocity, and split up the Ninth Circuit (why should Idaho and Montana share a circuit with California and Hawaii?). Some of those proposals already have been advanced by advocacy groups including the Firearms Policy Coalition and the National Rifle Association."

The DOJ ruled 44 years ago that the president cannot pardon himself

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The DOJ ruled 44 years ago that the president cannot pardon himself

"However, as Bloomberg reporter Steven Dennis pointed out, that wasn't the case at the end of former President Richard Nixon's time in office. "Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the president cannot pardon himself," the Department of Justice declared in 1974. The DOJ spelled it out just four days before Nixon resigned, explaining that the president's pardoning power "does not extend to the president himself."