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.

Footbridge in Watertown #2, trail down to Black River, Kittens, Pool Table in an Aztek

Footbridge in Watertown, trail down to Black River, second post

Earlier this week I took my father to the doctor's for a routine procedure, so afterwards we made another pass by the footbridge off from Eastern Boulevard. This time the gate was open (last weekend was the whitewater kayaking event, I believe).

The bridge itself has a fine sheen of discoloring (rust?) all over it. The "island" it leads to has a fenced in area where you can look over the Black River, the plant on the other side along with the old walls and base of the original Eastern Boulevard Bridge.

There's also a (somewhat) steep walkway down to the rocks along the Black River. Here's some pics, a few more at my Flickr set.



Panorama from the stones. Taken with my Motorola Razr V3xx. A surprisingly good photo pano, taken with my cameraphone (forgot my Canon on this trip!).


The old bridge foundations.

The trail leading back up. Concreted stones. Nicely done, though maybe too steep for some people, probably slippery during wet times. More photos - my Flickr set.

Kittens are getting larger.

They're wandering around, playing with every other animal and thing they can find, and are developing their own little personalities.

Pool Table in the Aztek

We've fit pretty much everything into our 20005 Pontiac Aztek Rally Edition. The seats come out which makes for a large space, it seems none of the newer SUV's have seats that actually physically come out; just fold down.

Anyway, I didn't think this would fit but it did - a full size pool table.

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Tucker; in mid-jump, Flickr, Wayback Machine, Commodores and Modern ASCII Art

Another picture and playing around with the camera some more, Flickr

Another nice action shot taken with the Canon A570 IS. Continually impressed with the 570's features, quality, and quality of the pics.

Lots of interesting little things with the camer along with the bigger features - I discovered yesterday that when you're looking at previews if you tilt the camera is automatically rotates the images on the screen to keep it horizontal, kinda like the Iphone.

This pic is hosted on Flickr, and was posted to this blog using the integrated blogger poster. Works nicely. I've been a member of Flickr for quite sometime but never got around to using it much - there's so many photo hosting sites and places to set up photo albums...

Anyway, I recently got back into using it. Very nice; nice choice of uploaders, the ability to organize your photos via a JAVA drag and drop applet, and the EXIF info from your pics are read by the site and posted (if you want it to be). And you can make photos private if you wish, important sometimes. Also, lots of photos from the Jefferson County area by others.

Will our websites be archived for eternity?

I've often wondered and pondered if the stuff we write in blogs, the websites we make, and other things on the Internet are REALLY going to be archived forever, or such? Not just for a few years, or five or ten years, but a long time.

Sure, there's a lot of things that you maybe don't want being available "forever" or even for a long period of time (and sometimes for no period of time).


But what about that genealogy website you joined and painstakingly added your entire family to - will it be available to distant relatives a hundred years down the line? Will your artwork you posted on your website? Or your photos? Or a posting on a forum website for dog ownership that is what you consider to be the best philosophical statement you've ever made, something so deep you'll never be able to do better?

I think in the far future (if the human race is still around and still civilized) much information will still be available from our time period, though probably very patchy. Sites like the Wayback Machine are massive archives of websites, websites of many descriptions and various types. And not just the newest stuff but ranging over long time periods (at least "long" in the computer world). Google and other sites too (and if you listen to some people even your Google searches and the e-mail you deleted from Gmail are saved somewhere).

I think some data will be lost, some will never be archived in the first place, others will be archived but those archives will not themselves be stored permanently.

Commodores, ASCII Art

Maybe an occasional reader to this blog will remember the "good ol' days" of the Commodore and the burgeoning of the home computer, back in the 80's. I started out with the Commodore Vic-20, 5 whole KB of RAM! Wow. I had a tape drive, an 8k memory expansion (I even learned to do "high res" graphics), and some other accessories. I graduated to the Commodore 64, wore one out and bought another, then the Commodore 128 and wore at least one of those out too. I even started setting up businesses with Commodores and writing my own programs for myself and businesses. In fact, some people were still using databases and software I set up well into the mid-90's (hard to believe).

Hey, they were the thing at that time, along with TI-99's, Atari's, etc. But Commodore was the most popular, I believe.

At one time, even though bit-mapped graphics were readily available on these machines, ASCII art got kinda popular. Making pictures from the text on your keyboard. BBS's used it for their opening screens, etc (you don't remember BBS's? No, they were the things we used before the Internet started being used by individuals. I even wrote my own software and ran one for a bit - didn't everyone at that time?)

Here's a website that kinda brings that all back (though people never stopped using ASCII art on their computers) - Photo2text. Upload a pic and their computer automatically creates an ASCII text picture.

Here's an example - My photo. Kinda nice, you can also do it all in 1's and 0's, shaded text, etc.

The difference between the Days of Commodore and now is that the computer does it itself, back in the day you had to painstakingly create your ASCII art by hand.