February 25, 2020 Night

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Good evening! Clouds and 41 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ There is a north-northwest breeze at 7 mph. 🍃. Bit cooler than expected when I went for my evening walk. 🚶 No rain yet, but it’s definitely coming. At least it is not snow. Temperatures will drop below freezing at Thursday around 7 pm. ☃️

I was going to go over to John Wolcott house after work 🏡 but he’s at an event for lent. Fat Tuesday? 🍩 I don’t know or understand all the catholic traditions. ➕ Tomorrow I guess is Ash Wednesday but that’s not an all day thing. ⛪That’s fine, I ended up staying home, figuring out why I couldn’t get the old OrthoPhotos of the Pine Bush to geo reference correctly but it was a setting issue. It really is amazing how you can match up a few intersections and the software adjusts the photo or map to line up with all the rest of the data. I am also doing shadow analysis on the buildings for Save the Pine Bush. I also rode the bike for a while and went for my evening walk 🚶.

Tonight will rain likely before 4am, then rain and snow likely. Cloudy 🌧, with a low of 34 degrees at 5am. 14 degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around April 6th. North wind around 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%. Little or no snow accumulation expected. Too warm. In 2019, we had light snow in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 15 degrees. The record low of -11 occurred back in 1950.

Tonight will have a Waxing Crescent 🌒 Moon with 6% illuminated. The Worm 🐛 Moon is on Monday, March 9. The darkest hour is at 12:10 am, followed by dawn at 6:11 am, and sun starting to rise at 6:39 am in the east-southeast (102°) and last for 2 minutes and 58 seconds. Sunrise is one minute and 34 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 7:18 am with sun in the east-southeast (109°). Tonight will have 12 hours and 56 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 2 minutes and 49 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will have a chance of rain and snow before 9am, then a chance of rain. Cloudy 🌧, with a high of 43 degrees at 3pm. Five degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around March 12th. North wind 5 to 9 mph. Chance of precipitation is 50%. Little or no snow accumulation expected. A year ago, we had light snow. The high last year was 24 degrees. The record high of 63 was set in 1976. 8.4 inches of snow fell back in 1972.❄

In four weeks on March 24 the sun will be setting in the west (273°) at 7:12 pm (Daylight Savings Time),🌄 which is one hour, 33 minutes and 24 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had mostly sunny and temperatures between 57 and 26 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 48 and 29 degrees. The record high of 69 degrees was set back in 1976.

Looking ahead, St. Patrick’s Day 🍀 is in 3 weeks, 7:30 PM Sunset 🌇 is in 6 weeks, Cinco de Mayo 🤠 is in 10 weeks, Memorial Day 🇺🇸 is in 3 months, Primary Day 🗳️ is in 17 weeks, Election Day 2020 🗳️ is in 36 weeks and Election Day 2020 🗳️ is in 36 weeks.

🇺🇸🦅Only 86 days remain until the start of Memorial Day Weekend!🦅🇺🇸

A Few Leaves Remain

Healthcare Future

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I think improving healthcare affordability should be a top priority of our leaders in Washington DC. Not putting forward message bills, but making practical changes to existing law to make prices on health insurance come down, and ensure people have access to affordable healthcare at all stages of life.

While I’m quite young and relatively healthy still, I am well aware how the high-cost of health insurance outside of a job can be a limit. Even if I have enough money at some point in the future to retire or work part time, in a place where I actually want to live, having access to affordable care may prove difficult. I am not sure if we should be going for universal care, but we should be going for something that is better and more affordable for all.

Row Houses

SSD Drives are Worth It

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One of the best upgrades I’ve ever made to a computer is installing an SSD drive.

The SSD drive is for purposes of booting so much faster then a conventional drive — taking my laptop about 4 seconds to boot into Linux with the XFCE window manager compared to 30 plus seconds with the traditional drive.

Applications load somewhat faster, but the real speed difference is when you are preforming operations that are highly disk intensive, such as loading a large database or processing many digital elevation models at once. Obviously, CPU intensive applications aren’t improved by SSD, so if something involves more processing then loading, the benefits will be smaller.

All together though, I’m much happier with the speed of my machine with the SSD drive installed. It’s well worth the $150 to be able to start and shutdown the machine quickly, and have more access to my files. Plus, I still have the old hard drive in the DVD drive bay, so I have ample space on my laptop for years to come.