Life According to Me
The sunrise this morning came after a ver hard frost. You’ll see the sun melt off the frost from the ground as it rises.
Once again, I wasn’t up to see this particular sunrise but my Raspberry Pis were and this is what they saw.
I hope your day started as peacefully as mine.
Yesterday I was up early and out he door for a meeting in DC. When I bounced out of the garage I looked up and saw this:
That part of a sunrise is appealing. The getting up part … not so much.
Click on the picture and look a the moon. I posted a similar picture I took with my iPhone but you could not make out the moon after the dumb down the image so it fits in their ecosystem.
I hope you have a nice day.
It was a busy day of work that started very early but an otherwise quiet day.
There wasn’t much interesting to talk about or take a picture of while I was working and nothing interesting to report there. After working more when I got home it finally stopped around 6pm. Mongrel, Gloria and I went for a walk for a few minutes to enjoy the sunset and quiet evening in the country.
One of my video cameras caught us during a time lapse.
You can see in the video how calm the weather is but what you can’t see is how humid and hot it is. At sundown the temperature is still in the 80’s and the humidity is above 90%.
The trees are starting to change ever so slightly all over the county. They must be confused by the warmer weather we’ve had. I think that the lack of sunshine during the day is what triggers all that. The colors may not be as bright as they’ve been in years past with all the rain and warmer weather. But I’m just guessing on that.
I flew one of my RC planes before the sun went completely down. The wind was calm and air smooth which makes for good weather to do aerobatics. So I did a ton of aerobatics. By the time I landed I could barely see the plane if it weren’t for the strobe lights I have on it. That’s always good fun.
Maybe one day I can do this:
That is so crazy!
I hope you did something fun today.
Today it will rain most, if not all, of the day. We are thrilled:
He’ll be waiting a while for the rain to stop.
Conveniently the girl cats came inside this morning, ate and slithered downstairs without me noticing. Mongrel was outside and wanted inside almost immediately when he was the weather. So I shut the basement door and let him in while leaving the back window open so he can come and go.
Eventually he came up where I’m working, protested for a short period of time before laying down and playing with anything that moves. Then asleep.
That’s sort of how I woke up this morning. First at 6 (this will never happen unless the house is on fire), then 7, then 8 … fed the cats … then 9 and finally up at 10am for good.
I’m very curious if that video will work for you since I’m not sending it through YouTube like I normally would.
Yesterday I spent most of the day cutting all 20 acres of grass on the property knowing that it was going to be raining all day today. I sort of unmotivated to go do much of anything other than work on my computer here in my office today. Maybe later this afternoon I’ll grab my camera and head for the hills. We’ll see.
The rain has subsided some enabling me to go outside and snap a few photos.
Sundays really should be just lazy, do nothing days.
It all started like this:
I had to give up some blood for a blood test this morning at 8:30 so I was up early to head out for that appointment. I didn’t get to see the actual sunrise but I did get to see the start of an early morning around here.
Sometimes it’s hard to think about how peaceful my existence is when there is so much crazy going on around me. Run. Fight. Hide.
The work I do has been interesting and stimulating lately. Things change a lot, the opportunity to learn new things is nearly constant and the level of work load has been very manageable unlike years past. So it’s all good. I’m enjoying this time of life.
As much as I hate to admit it I did some damage to my tower 2 this past weekend by putting excessive load on the lifting structure at the base of the tower.
It started out by trying to unwind a steel cable that was binding on the worm drive drum. After extending the tower on the ground I needed to lift it like 4″ to clear the high point of the ground. I thought I could lift it extended that much but instead of lifting it did this damage. Ugh. I’ll need a new tower base and lifting arms. I don’t trust metal that has been bent like this. Once it’s bent it’s no longer good. Unfortunately, I think I ruined it.
The tower up/down mechanisms are still fine. But the lifting mechanisms need some work. The power of a worm drive winch is nothing short of amazing. Every time I move that tower it’s a bit frightening at some level. There is a lot of steel and technology on that thing. That it moves is simultaneously both wonderful and unnerving.
I hope you do something fun today.
Fall (autumn equinox) was Friday, September 22 (today)at 4:02 PM. Happy fall, y’all.
It doesn’t feel much like fall yet outside while it’s still 90º during the day at some point. We haven’t had rain in a while so things are drying out pretty good but that is totally normal. Frankly surprised it didn’t dry up a bit in August but August was cool and wet for us here.
I took a lunch break and saw the bees actively getting all the honey they could. I think this is a golden rod plant which I masked to black and white to show the bee a little better. The sun was wicked bright today so the light was quite harsh.
When I look at this photo on the blog it looks “fake”. But it’s really not. here is the unmasked photo:
It’s so interesting what you can do with a computer and photography these days. I often wonder how one would go about doing something like this if all we had to work with was a negative and dark room. I suspect it would be quite difficult if not impossible.
This is easy to do with Photoshop. Just create a black and white layer mask and “unmask” where you want to color to come through. A few “scribbles” with a mouse or Wacom pencil will complete the work.
I flew my drone about ¾ mile away from home to check out the pavement on 287 near our home. I didn’t make it off the property today so I have no idea of their progress. Turns out the road is still not paved.
While I was up there I took a few photos of the farm. Here’s one above the back fields after a hay harvest today. The drone was about 100 meters in the air at the time.
With no clouds in the sky it’s easy to take some high contrast black and white images. When I was looking at the images I was trying to figure out why my camera had these dots on the image. When I zoomed in it was clear that these are spiders building their night webs in the tall grass. If I posted this on Facebook all that detail would be erased. But if you click on the picture below you’ll see them.
Another fall day begins early tomorrow morning. All critters here have found their safe spot, box or both. I hope you’ve found yours too.
That is all for now.
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As you know, I don’t get up early enough to see most of these.
As summer moves into fall the sun rises more to the right of my window each morning. As we get closer to October it seems like it goes much faster each day than the day before.
When the air temperature is different than the ground temperature we experience the low lying fog every morning that blows about in the light wind. This happens pretty much every spring and fall morning when the sky is clear or mostly clear. Today was no exception.
It’s nice here today. Barely a whisper of wind under a mostly clear sky.
Tonight we start planning for the Lovettsville Oktoberfest event in the small city near our home. I volunteer at this event with the Loudoun Amateur Radio Group. It’s a fun few days if you have time and are near here.
Tomorrow is the first night of the festival and then Saturday is the crazy day when 10-15,000 people show up between 6am and 6pm in this dinky town of Lovettsville. It’s a fun time at a great time of year around here. The weather is supposed to be basically perfect this weekend and on into next week.
These flowers grow as weeds in our yard. The other day I had to weed eat around this rock and thankfully they came back a few weeks later. When they all get together and grow all at the same time they are pretty flowers that look like they’ve been planted there.
And, of course, what a normal day would be without a climbing exercise on our walk together?
Boring, I think.
He’s “paws up” in his box.
And that’s where I go now.
Today is September 19, 2017. A pretty normal day.
It was a quiet but very full day. I spent most of the day on the phone on work related projects that I needed to complete today. I don’t normally talk about work but that’s what I do during the week from the time I wake until the time I sleep. I may play in between but I think about work all the time.
Speaking of playing, I was able to fly both my drone and RC plane today. It was one of those super harsh sunny days where there is no clouds in the sky. On these days it’s super hard to take a good picture that is not all washed out. It’s hard to look up at what you are controlling from the ground and for the same to look down and take a decent photo.
Of all the photos I took during the day this the one I liked the most.
I post in Facebook as well but Facebook will down sample the image and make it look like junk. If you touch the one here you’ll get a full photo that you can fill your screen with and really see what it looks like. Even this one is downsampled a bit. It’s only a JPEG image out of a GOPRO 3 camera. It’s amazing what that little camera will do. When it’s hung under a drone and lifted into the air I just think it changes everything about photography.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a picture from the bottom of a drone. It was way, way before it was the cool thing to do. I was mesmerized. I mentioned to Gloria that this is going to be a big thing when it catches on. And it did catch on. People like Casey Neistat became quite famous flying drones and publishing videos.
One of the things I did today was work on my weather station. The Raspberry Pi computer had a disk failure and won’t boot. A year ago I bought some “cheap” microSD cards to use as disks. They have all failed so that didn’t pay off. Name brands for me from now on. I’ll pay a little extra for those things now. None of the SanDisk brands have failed even after years of use. They are not hard to fix but it takes too much time. I’ll have my weather station back working again tomorrow.
Mongrel and I didn’t go for our normal walk today. Instead we played in the grass. Well, he played in the grass while I troubleshot my weather station some during one of my breaks from work. Watch it to the end if you want to see what it looks like for a cat to run through grass like a deer … but he’s only a cat.
We won’t tell him he’s any different.
It’s quiet here. Everyone is sleeping. Tomorrow is on the horizon and should be similar to today.
I hope you’ve had a nice day today. If not, I hope you have a better day tomorrow.
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This weekend was about goofing off. Goofing off as much as possible. It all started like this:
| … sunrise September 17, 2017 |
Officially I had to do some volunteer work for my radio club but that was over before 10am Saturday which left the rest of the day to do something I’ve had in my calendar for a while now: The Flying Circus.
We didn’t stay long but we made a day of getting there and back like we tend to do now and again. Typical trip down I-81 where you have to be crazy to be with crazy. But it was OK with both of us in the car together to stay distracted. Although I think my driving drives Gloria crazy. She has to listen to me postulate about statistics of queuing and crowding; the mathematical advantage of being in a small car in a big car world. 210 horse power helps but not as much as being small.
The venue for the RC event is atop a hill south of Covington, VA where people are flying all kinds of different aircraft from fixed wing to drones and even some cars and the like. But it’s mostly about flying something. It’s put on by Jeremiah at Stone Blue Airlines. Jeremiah owns the place there in Lynchburg two hours away from Covington. He’s helped me outfit some of my RC gear here that I fly. It’s cool that he’s made a living out of his passion. It’s really hard to tell when he is working and when he is playing. Which is I think the point to life.
After looking through my FPV goggles at other people flying we took back off for home in hopes of getting back at a decent hour. We lumbered along the back way home up SR220 through some really pretty West Virginia and Virginia back roads. After a dinner at the Fireside Cafe it was slabbing it back home as fast as we could once the sun went down and both of us grew tired.
Gloria had a big morning on Sunday and presentation in the afternoon so we needed to get her back and rested. She had a good, productive presentation on how to make Kombucha. She makes really good Kombucha!
Not me. I took the day (Sunday) mostly off. Besides a 5 mile run at sundown I really didn’t do much but goof off with electronics, some photography, RC flying of various types, radio. Some people have said that my goofing off looks a lot like work. I resemble those remarks.
Oh, radio. I chatted with a “DXpedition” station from the Czech Republic operating in Mauritania using call sign 5T5OK. I was parked on a 14 mhz frequency when I noticed the activity on the spectrum scope. Turns out these guys were testing their station and I was able to snag them in a “pile up” on the first call once I figured out how they were set up on the split frequency. We really didn’t chat long and they went on to making more contacts. It’s about 4,200 miles from here to there. I’m always amazed that I can just “key up” and talk to a totally different country on the planet. Makes the world seem really small. I was on and off the radios all day today which was particularly fun.
I’m working on an adjustable square wave generator circuit with a 555 timer chip. I’m not terribly good with electronics so this is half learning and half doing. I want to create a string of LEDs that use a transistor to switch between on and off at a rate that I can control with the timer chip. The circuit is gonna look something like this:
I got my bench power supply back from the shop so I can start building stuff again. Or breaking stuff, depending on how badly I mis-calculate things like voltage, current and the like. My method is less “Ohms Law” and more “Poke-n-Prod” until the blue smoke comes out. When I see blue smoke it’s generally back to the drawing board. It’s a good way to learn but leads to a lot of dead parts.
I’m sure I could buy the circuit from China for a buck but what’s the fun in that? I have this idea on making an LED string look like it’s pumping electricity like water through a tube. I want to vary the alternating lights at a rate and amplitude I can control. Yea, boring.
Mongrel and I got to walk together some today. When we weren’t moving he was chasing his tail. I can’t tell if he is goofing off like cats can do or if he’s frustrated that he can’t control it. One thing’s for sure is that he is very transparent because of that tail which exposes his current mood. The little biting flies were bugging the crap out of us both too.
We were also still a lot today. It’s interesting to watch Mongrel. He generally sits facing opposite of me. If I were to lay down he sits on top of me. Must be some weird instinct thing going on there. Seems to watch out after me when we are together. Anything out of the ordinary while he is on watch will render a “growl”. Could be a dog ½ mile away or a person riding a horse. He just lets me know it’s out there.
When all that is done and we are back in the quiet, cool of the house where his guard comes down he starts to slow down after some dinner. Quietly protesting that he doesn’t want to be inside he climbs in his box next to my desk. He starts off looking at me. Then falls asleep.
Soon he is on his back with his feet in the air. This cat can sleep like none other I’ve ever met. And will sleep like that all night long.
I hope you’ve had a day that was fun like ours. And that you are back in your safe place where ever that may be.
I’m done goofing off. Work tomorrow. Headed to my box.
Yesterday I was reading yet another article about what “mode” to keep one’s camera in so that it is always on the ready. The consensus is that no “pro” would shoot anything other than in full manual mode in raw format. The stories go something like, “5 reasons why you should alway keep your camera in full manual mode…” blah blah. It’s all BS.
In the last year I’ve learned that capturing the shot is the most important thing. Forget how the camera is set. Set the darned thing in a way that when you pick it up the next time you are ready to capture the shot when the shot happens so that you are not “fiddling” trying to figure it out … sometimes in complete darkness.
You just can’t predict where you’ll be and there is just no such thing as a perfect camera setting. And you don’t need a “pro” camera to take good pictures. You don’t need the latest technology. You need to get in the back yard and take the picture with the shit you got right now. That’s how this works.
So touch the picture above and look at the details. It’s not like standing in my back yard and feeling the dew on your face as it moves about in the cool breeze. But you’ll get the idea.
What’s in your back yard at night?