Blogs, Friends, Clayton Car Show, the Environment, Indian River Conservancy trail, more Canon A570 IS, Scribefire Addon for Firefox

Blogs

I just can't see myself blogging and analyzing every strange bowel movement every single day of my life {SARCASM}.

I mean - I haven't actually seen the above chronicled but I'm sure multiple people have done so on numerous occasions. Gawk!

I've recently been enjoying using Flickr.com (as mentioned in an earlier entry) and some people do the same with pics. They have this 365 day thing. Kinda interesting, but along the same lines.

I guess to the student of psychology (or biology - if the above were the case); as well as the occasional odd stalker, delving that deeply into a stranger's (or a friend's) life would be of a certain fascination.

But I'm going to try to keep mine a bit more impersonal and more technically-oriented if possible. The entries won't be as often but I'd rather spare you the in-depth and likely excruciatingly boring details of any weird bodily function incongruities and such.


Friends/Clayton Auto Show/The Environment

The Clayton Car Show. Lots of cars, and people. BTW, the photo at left is just an amusing one I took - an Adirondack chair and table built on top of the bed cover of a classic truck.

Despite trying to be more environmentally conscious nowadays I still love the big musclecars and the old cars. They're part of our heritage, part of what made America great as well as a little piece of what still makes America great, as well as the human species.

I miss my hotrod (at right - '79 Olds Cutlass Salon, '77 403 Olds Rocket, etc etc - I won't bore you with the numerous details and money and work I put into it - great car, miss it every time I get into my Lumina), but on the other hand at this point in my life I'd rather have something more fuel efficient. Yet there are days I see a particularly nice older vehicle and yearn for something more then my Lumina Euro. A nice piece of engineering that's also fun and powerful is something that I can appreciate.

Yea, Human Ingenuity - both on a large scale (mass-invention and mass-production of the autos and auto evolution over a short period of human history) as well with the ability of individuals to improve on something that thousands have worked at creating. And despite environmental issues we all have to have the occasional thing that we enjoy in life.

That's one of the things that environmentalists and those with agendas forget - that we need to find a happy medium ground. That life is too short to live in mud huts and skimp and scrap for each erg of electricity. There needs to be a happy medium.

And of course; in the Clayton area - I saw a lot of another extreme. Lots of people with signs that say "No Wind Turbines" etc. I live near large power lines and a radio tower - I WISH for a nice big wind turbine. No EM fields, clean and productive, a good meshing of technology with the environment. And a nice comforting white noise sound. Unfortunately some birds and bats also blast themselves all over them. (Photo at right from the Maple Ridge Wind Farm, Lowville, NY - more of my photos of the wind farm at Flickr.)

I read somewhere that if we had taken all the money spent on the Iraq war we could have added some sort of alternative energy sources for every home in the US. What a waste that we have to put so much money into destruction.

I also saw an old friend there yesterday; a guy I'd been best friends with for many years when I was younger. We picked up girls together, wasted days, had fun, drove around a lot, etc. The type of thing when you do when you're younger and have less obligations.

Over the last decade I've seen him about as many times as I can count on one hand. Human relationships are funny - I still consider him a friend but if we now ended up spending time with each other every day we'd probably find that we are significantly different now. I noticed the differences in us right away, I'm sure he did too.

But it's one of the great things, as well as the sometimes-downfall of humankind - that we can still be friends despite our differences. I have friends and friendly acquaintances who have fundamental ideas so different then mine that it amazes me that we can even be civil. Yet I'm friends and on good terms with these people.

And then, the other and opposite hand, you have the people who were good friends but who turn on you for the smallest and most unreasonable thing. Whether it's hard feelings for imagined problems, drunkenness due to work and family pressures, or what-have-you. Oh, now I am getting personal...

Humans are funny creatures, that's for sure.

Indian River Conservancy trail
I stumbled across a couple interesting trails, off the seasonal Burns Road outside of the Redwood area (I sometimes wander on the way home after doing some work for clients).

Yes, I had my trusty GPS this time - 44'19.599N -75'44.450W (Still have to work on learning more functions of the GPS, so many and so much potential I haven't tapped yet).

These are apparently on state DEC land but the trails themselves (as well as the parking spaces) are created and maintained by the Indian River Conservancy. I couldn't find any website on them. But the trails look interesting, though some are very rough-looking. My trail page on it - click here.

I took a quick walk along one and at one point a cable of some sort was hanging across the trail just above head-height. After leaving and driving down the road I went by a house (with apparently no lines to National Grid ['National Greed' as my wife writes on the checks]). The cable seemed to go down and hill and into some solar panels. Wonder what the other end of the cables was powering at the top of the hill?

I also took a few shots of abandoned buildings on this road and the one leading to it. There was one old building far, far off the road and surrounded by high brush and woods. I would have loved to look at it closer, know the story behind it, etc. Fascinating stuff, and never enough time to do everything.

BTW, check out my Old Abandoned Buildings of Northern NY website if you like old buildings, I got lots of them!

More Canon A570 IS
Check out these two pics. I noticed this helicopter flying sideways nearby. Yea, it was windy but not THAT windy. It had some sort of device attached to it's side, which it seemed to be keeping pointed toward a large electric line that runs nearby. Camera, IR?

Anyway, I took a few shots at extreme zoom (full optical, full digital) not expecting a very good picture due to the above as well as the wind buffeting me back and forth and the overcast day, not to mention not wanting to mess with switching it off AUTO.

Surprisingly I got some pretty good pics, with a shutter speed good enough to capture the individual blades.

Scribefire Addon for Firefox
If you do a lot a lot of blogging, or even just occasionally, and you have the inkling and resources for yet another Firefox addon for Firefox check out Scribefire (formerly Performancing). It lets you blog from right inside a pane at the bottom of Firefox. Nice, though there are some idiosyncrasies that can be annoying. Overall real nice, though I do finishing up in Blogger itself (once I learn all the quirks I believe I will be comfortable enough with it to use it completely). Still working on figuring out how the API works for uploading.