My Birthday
It was my birthday Wednesday.
It’s weird. I didn’t do a bit of work, no work on websites nor computers, I didn’t worry about having to do something or that I wasn’t doing something I should have been doing. I didn’t do anything for myself, for the house, didn’t have to clean up after any animals except for cat litter cleaning, didn’t do any maintenance on the house or anything else, didn’t do anything to the lawn or any housework, didn’t answer any technical questions except for one quick one (then turned the cellphone off), and I even have my General Brown Alumni webboard turned off because some idiots are fighting on there – and I didn’t even feel guilty about it being turned off so no one can post.
I drank three cups of my own special blend of iced coffee/cocoa/Cinnamon with lots of sugar and didn’t feel guilty about it.
I drove a long distance just for the fun of it (to take these pics for one of my personal websites – click link for pics and see some below) – like I used to do and didn’t feel guilty about it.
Jenny took me to pick out something in Lowes and to pick up a pizza.
In short, I didn’t do crap but what I wanted to; on my birthday.
This must be what a real vacation would be like. It’s hard to remember what it is not to have some sort of stress or worry or decision to make.
All in all, a pretty good birthday.
Snowfall Totals
I’m a weather spotter for the National Weather Service and keep track of snowfall totals. Again, the snowfall totals are lower overall then twenty years ago, yet up slightly this year. It was a very intermittent year, with warmer temps and not much snowfall except for certain high amounts during short periods; which pushed the totals up.
Around a 100 to 110 inches here. It’s always a challenge to get real totals here on top of the hill. The wind’s always blowing here, sometimes dropping more than other places and sometimes scrubbing my measurement areas clean.
(Old) WRT54G Routers Long Distance Test
I found a map photo diagramming a route test I did. Click it above to see a larger version. I used two WRT54G’s in repeater mode to connect to a laptop out in the field with a webcam. Worked well, and after a while I tried it with just one, which worked just as well.
This was, well, a year ago or more. One of the routers was using a power inverter and car battery, the other a battery pack. Both worked fine for powering them, though the power inverter needed a good amount of filtering. Both router had some omnidirectional antennas that I had built.
Avira Anti-Virus
I’m always playing around with various anti-virus programs, especially open source ones. Along with Avast and AVG Avira and Clamshell are a pair of excellent ones that rival the Big Boys.
I wanted something simple but with a good record for anti-virus finds, something low-resource but good protection. AVG has updated their version to 8, which kinda sucks. Not only are there some bug issues with it but it’s much larger than version 7.5 and much worse on the computer’s resources. When it works well, it works real well.
So I installed Avira on the laptop. Works very nicely, especially with this fast unit.
I probably am going to dump AVG off all of my computers and go with Avast or even Avira on some.
Old Buildings
On my recent birthday trip, I indulged in a hobby of mine – photographing old abandoned buildings. My site‘s gotten pretty popular and as it gets more popular people send me suggestions (and sometimes pictures to add).
My site is called “Old Abandoned Buildings of Northern New York“. Sometimes the submitters do forget that exact wording and send me interesting pictures or directions to buildings which are 
still in use, or being remodeled. I don’t mind, but I do have a strict idea of what I want on the site.
I took a number of suggestions and picked a route to find and photograph some of the suggestions I accumulated over the last few years. But there’s plenty more in my list!
I photographed a massive old building hidden in Calcium. I drive by that area once in a while when taking the dogs for a walk, and never saw the place. Probably because it was down a little hidden road. Giant of a building.
Also found an old abandoned and closed bridge on a place called Donnattburg (there is no “burg” there now, no buildings very close by in fact).
But the most interested thing I ran across was an old abandoned crypt and could go inside it. Creepy.
For more pics of all of the above go to my site here.
