April 12, 2019 Night

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Good evening! Pouring rain and 57 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☔ There is a south breeze at 11 mph. 🍃 with gusts up to 21 mph 💨💨💨. The dew point is 51 degrees. It really is coming down tonight, at least right now.

I’m continuing to play with some different parts of QGIS and data tonight. 🌐I skipped doing my evening walk 🌃 because of the rain and I kind of got into mapping a bit too much. To celebrate Grilled Cheese Day I made up some sandwiches and soup. Been raining on an off all evening here. At least I’m not out camping in this rain.

Tonight will have showers and possibly a thunderstorm before 3am, then showers likely. 🌧 Low of 55 degrees at 3am. 18 degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical night around June 9th. Maximum dew point of 53 at 4am. 🏖️ South wind 11 to 14 mph, with gusts as high as 24 mph. Chance of precipitation is 90%. New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. In 2018, we had light rain in the evening, which became cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 40 degrees. The record low of 19 occurred back in 1874.

Tonight will have a Waxing Gibbous Moon 🌔 with 65% illuminated. The moon will set at 2:59 am. The Pink Moon 🌕 is on Thursday night with a mostly cloudy skies then chance of showers skies. The sun will rise at 6:17 am with the first light at 5:48 am, which is one minute and 40 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 Tonight will have 10 hours and 41 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 2 minutes and 46 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will have a chance of showers, mainly before 7am. Partly sunny 🌞, with a high of 75 degrees at 3pm. 18 degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical day around June 3rd. Should be a nice day once it clears out. Maximum dew point of 53 at 6am. Southwest wind 6 to 14 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New precipitation amounts of less than a tenth of an inch possible. A year ago, we had mostly sunny in the morning, which became light rain by afternoon. The high last year was 63 degrees. The record high of 87 was set in 1977. 5.5 inches of snow fell back in 1950.❄

Busy day tomorrow. Transfer station first then haircut then fix the brakr switch on the truck 🚚 , test the cruise control and Sunday dinner on Saturday at the folks house.

Looking ahead to Sunday, showers likely, mainly after 5pm. Increasing clouds, with a high near 59. Calm wind becoming north around 5 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New precipitation amounts of less than a tenth of an inch possible. ☔ Typical average high for the weekend is 57 degrees.

Sunday I want to start loading up the camping gear and fix the broken LED strip in the cap with a more modern energy efficient strip. 🚥 I may need some crimp connectors for that although I thought about soldering it. Then I’ll be set for camping as soon as the weather gets better. Probably not Easter Weekend 🐰 but maybe the weekend after. I don’t want to start out my first trip of the year in the pouring rain.

In four weeks on May 10 the sun will be setting at 8:05 pm,🌄 which is 31 minutes and 32 seconds later then tonight. In 2018 on that day, we had mostly sunny, rain showers and temperatures between 73 and 56 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 68 and 45 degrees. The record high of 92 degrees was set back in 1970.

Looking ahead, Good Friday ✝️ is in 1 week, Mothers Day 👩‍ is a month away, Pack Rat Day 🐀 is in 5 weeks, Memorial Day Weekend Starts 🏕️ is in 6 weeks, Dog Days of Summer 🌻 is in 12 weeks, Last Sunset After 8 PM 🌆 is in 4 months and Labor Day Weekend Begins 👨‍🏭 is in 20 weeks.

Thruway Bridge

The Future is Unpredictable.

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It’s easy for me to feel daunted and unsure at times about my hope to eventually own land, and an off-grid home out in the country at some point in the future. Each week, I invest and save a little more, but it’s still a distant future, with many questions, difficulties and unknowns, but I’m not that worried.

Nothing that I am investing in, really ties me to any one path going forward. Money, not tided up in anything but financial assets is entirely fungible, I am free to move it from one purpose to another. Maybe when I get older, I will want an ordinary house in suburbs, or I’ll decide to be an urbanite and live my final years in the city. Or maybe, rather then living off-grid, I’ll do something with agriculture. But it really doesn’t matter — savings can be used for any purpose.

My job, my family and in many ways my fear of the unknown keep me in New York State for now. But forever, that I do not know. I’m interested in many other states. But things can and do change. Markets go up and down, policies change, new job opportunities present themselves. Even renewable energy and electronics are rapidly changing, the off-grid technologies of today are likely to be different in a decade.

So who knows where I will be in a decade from now … much less 20 years from now.

Boots!

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This year, prior to camping season, I am going to get myself a pair of inexpensive farm muck boots to use while I’m out in the wilderness. Don’t get my wrong, I like my insulated hunting boots, but there is no way in hell I’m going to wear $100 huntin’ boots around a campfire where I could accidentally melt or burn ’em by getting too close to the fire on a cold night.

But at the same time, I really need something that is waterproof, especially if I plan to spend more time up at the Finger Lakes National Forest or other high-elevation, shallow soil area where the mud and muck is intensively deep. Work boots don’t cut it when your dealing with mud that is ankle deep. And deep mud, is just part of spending time in the woods, just like it’s part of time spending time on a farm.

Mount Wahington State Forest

Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM – IEEE Spectrum

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Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM – IEEE Spectrum

In the years leading up to its 7 April 1964 launch, however, the 360 was one of the scariest dramas in American business. It took a nearly fanatical commitment at all levels of IBM to bring forth this remarkable collection of machines and software. While the technological innovations that went into the S/360 were important, how they were created and deployed bordered on disaster. The company experienced what science policy expert Keith Pavitt called “tribal warfare”: people clashing and collaborating in a rapidly growing company with unstable, and in some instances unknown, technologies, as uncertainty and ambiguity dogged all the protagonists.

Ultimately, IBM was big and diverse enough in talent, staffing, financing, and materiel to succeed. In an almost entrepreneurial fashion, it took advantage of emerging technologies, no matter where they were located within the enterprise. In hindsight, it seemed a sloppy and ill-advised endeavor, chaotic in execution and yet brilliantly successful. We live in an age that celebrates innovation, so examining cases of how innovation is done can only illuminate our understanding of the process.

This is a rather fascinating story about the history of the technology.

Your car is watching you. Who owns the data?

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Your car is watching you. Who owns the data?

If you’re driving a late model car or truck, chances are that the vehicle is mostly computers on wheels, collecting and wirelessly transmitting vast quantities of data to the car manufacturer not just on vehicle performance but personal information, too, such as your weight, the restaurants you visit, your music tastes and places you go.

A car can generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour and as much as 4,000 gigabytes a day, according to some estimates. The data trove in the hands of car makers could be worth as much as $750 billion by 2030, the consulting firm McKinsey has estimated. But consumer groups, aftermarket repair shops and privacy advocates say the data belongs to the car’s owners and the information should be subject to data privacy laws.