Good morning! Today is the day almost forgotten in the era of front wheel drive — Hump Day. Partly cloudy with the sun peaking out in the south and 49 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a southwest breeze at 8 mph.  Nice sunny morning. Had to take the local because I ripped my jeans when the zipper got stuck on the boxers. Good pair of jeans, too bad.

Today will be mostly cloudy, then gradually becoming sunny, with a temperature rising to near 50 by 10am, then falling to around 42 during the remainder of the day. Breezy, with a southwest wind 8 to 13 mph becoming northwest 15 to 20 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 33 mph. No speeding! A year ago, we had cloudy skies. The high last year was 53 degrees. The record high of 66 was set in 2005. 3.3 inches of snow fell back in 1945.

The sun will set at 4:23 pm with dusk around 4:54 pm, which is 23 seconds earlier than yesterday. At sunset, look for mostly clear conditions and 43 degrees. There will be a northwest breeze at 15 mph with gusts up to 25mph. Today will have 9 hours and 18 minutes of daytime, a decrease of one minute and 29 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly clear, with a low of 21 degrees at 6am. Six degrees below normal. Northwest wind 5 to 10 mph becoming light north after midnight. In 2016, we had light rain and mist in the evening, which became mist by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 43 degrees. The record low of -10 occurred back in 1875. At times it can get very cold in November, although it’s rare.

Quite a pleasant morning that I wouldn’t have minded walking down to the express bus, had the zipper not gotten stuck in my boxers and I had to change, so I ended up taking the yokel local bus downtown which was running late due to Clarkson’s Vietnam, which is the popular name for Bethlehem’s Big Dig. But just think of all the state taxpayers money our local government getting! It’s actually probably not a bad deal, because most of state’s wealth is generated downstate, so it’s probably providing jobs in upstate that would otherwise not exist. I know, enough with the sardonic humor. People don’t like that. Hah.

I do need to think about getting more blue jeans. I have a size and type that I wear, I should just order them online. I usually get the Wrangler Jeans at Walmart, but the problem is they usually only have one or two pair in my size, and they aren’t always restocked as quickly as possible. The Wrangler jeans last for a couple of years, but eventually they wear out. I haven’t had a zipper failure like today for a long today, but once the zipper gets jammed with boxer cloth, it’s a pain to get undone, and often means the end to the zipper. I guess I could try to replace the zipper, but I think I will just end up donating them to the clothing donation bin.

Been working on a bunch of new infographics and maps for the blog. The partisan enrollment graphs and and maps are most interesting, especially how big enrollment advantages democrats have in Albany County, even in election districts where in recent elections they’ve preformed poorly. I wonder if people register as democrats just to vote in primaries or because they are more likely to get hired for government jobs and have the tax assessments reduced. It would be interesting to do a blog post comparing enrollments to partisan voting in a low profile county judge race. I could do that in coming weeks, especially if I got final 2017 election results.

So I think I am going to request Friday off from work. Taking off a long weekend would be nice, maybe heading back to the Adirondacks for the weekend. On Friday morning I would probably get the aluminum bar I need to build the solar panel rack. Even if I don’t get it built this weekend, if I have the bar I can mark it out and drill out the holes. Of course that involves finding time, which I will have less of if I decide to go up north. I’m not sure what I would do up north, maybe I could hike that trail overlooking Indian Lake and camp at Mason Lake, assuming there isn’t snow up there. Maybe spend some more time out in the woods with my shotgun. Or head back to the East Branch of Sacandaga River to camp, as even if there is a little snow there, NY 8 never closes and there will be less to no snow there as it’s far enough east that they don’t get lake effect snow. I will bring a shovel if I need to dig out a parking spot, but I don’t think it’s likely. I’m a bit low on propane, so I may buy a few small bottles, lest I run out. I don’t like using those expensive little disposable propane bottles that I’ve never had much luck refilling, but I’ve never had much luck for refilling them. But at least they are recycable as scrap metal.

Continuing to work on my LED driver. I think I’ve figured out what parts I need to build permanent circuit boards. I am going to go with perf board, solder and kynar wire. I am going to use solder connections rather then kynar connections for now, but the kynar wire is helpful for jumping over tracks made out of solder bridges. Kynar is great, but solder is more flexible technique and probably more durable. Perf board, throw-hole and kynar techniques are dated, but for the relatively simple electronics that I want to build for permanent use — with the complicated stuff done in the programmable Arduino, and turn the pulse with modulation and other signals into useful work via transistors.

Surface mount components and printed circuit boards are future, and there are definitely ways to build that stuff at home with acid batches, special paper and laser printers,  but it’s a more advanced technique then I’m interested in doing. Plus who wants to mess with acidic chemicals at home? You can also get printed circuit boards made online, but again, I think perf board is cheap enough — and the fact I plan to use the Arduino microprocessor to drive most of my projects rather then individual components besides some transistors and appropriate resistors — I don’t need to go unnecessarily high tech. Maybe some projects will use daughter boards on Arduinos, but again it’s just a limited number of actual parts to wire up. Much of it is done in code burned onto the microprocessor.

Looking ahead to January 2018, there are 5 weeks until State of the State Day when the sun will be setting at 4:35 pm with dusk at 5:06 pm. It’s the day we get to blame Trump for all that I’d wrong in the world. Trump deserves most of the criticism he is getting. Trump gives pigs and their delicious pork a bad name. On that day in 2017, we had rain, drizzle, freezing drizzle, mist, cloudy skies and temperatures between 37 and 31 degrees. Delightful January weather!  Typically, the high temperature is 31 degrees. We hit a record high of 61 back in 1913.