Flying over the Shenandoah Valley with a drone…
10 minute read
October 25, 2020, 10:45 PM
Elyse and I recently made a trip down to Augusta County to see my parents, and we both photographed a bunch of stuff with my drone while we were down there. So all in all, we had a pretty productive time. I have gotten pretty proficient in flying my drone around things, and I’ve gotten some nice photos. The goal of the drone photography this time was to duplicate a lot of what I did in my earlier entry about the area in Microsoft Flight Simulator, but in real life. All in all, I had a good time, and I liked the results, as I flew around Staunton, Waynesboro, Afton Mountain, and Stuarts Draft.
In Staunton, I first got aerials of the old DeJarnette Center, which is an abandoned children’s mental hospital that closed around 1996 in favor of a newer, more modern facility nearby. If this place sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve photographed it before. So here it is:
Continue reading…Categories: Afton Mountain, CFW, Family, Howard Johnson's, Photography, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Walmart, Waynesboro, Woomy
A weight loss update…
6 minute read
October 14, 2020, 11:18 PM
A friend of mine recently mentioned that I had not given any significant update on my weight loss progress since January, a month after I had my gastric sleeve surgery. So I suppose that it’s high time that I gave an update. After all, it’s been ten months since the surgery, and things have progressed since then. Compare the April splash photo (which was taken on February 3) against the October splash photo, and you’ll see a difference:
Categories: Personal health, Weight loss
Going down a nostalgia rathole…
6 minute read
October 11, 2020, 10:29 PM
Sometimes you sit down at the computer, and the next thing you know, you’re going down a major rathole on some obscure topic. For me, this was recently the case when I happened upon some videos about the old Care Bears movies by Nostalgia Critic. They did four such videos: one on the original Care Bears movie, the second movie, the Wonderland movie, and the Nutcracker special. Gotta love the Internet.
I watched all of these movies as a child, and enjoyed them quite a bit back then, considering them to have decent replay value. I watched some of these again more recently, and I kind of regretted it. The problem was that what my child self found to be quality entertainment, my adult self disagreed with that assessment. As an adult, I saw these movies for what they really were: feature-length commercials for toys, with relatively low quality standards. The stories didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense, the animation had mistakes in it, and it gave me an overall sense that the people in charge of this film knew that the public would eat it up regardless of how crappy it was. Therefore, quality was something of an afterthought. As such, I kind of wished that I had left these movies as memories instead of rewatching them, only because the new viewing has changed my stance on the films, and I didn’t like my new take on them after rewatching. I was hoping to have an enjoyable experience with an old favorite, only to be disappointed in what I was presented with. I resented the change in my views, and it made me nostalgic for the old memories of the films before I added to them, so to speak. Innocence destroyed. Some children’s movies are still great films on their own merits, even as an adult (Follow That Bird immediately comes to mind), but these, unfortunately, are not.
In any case, watching Nostalgia Critic try to reconcile the events that occurred in the first movie and the second movie got me thinking a bit. For those not familiar, both movies contain origin stories, and the two origin stories conflict with each other in a very fundamental way.
Taking my photography to the skies…
7 minute read
October 6, 2020, 10:37 AM
I suppose that it was inevitable. When Elyse and I were out meeting up with someone in Baltimore back in March, they had a drone device that they used for a lot of aerial photography, and they showed it off to us. I loved that thing, a DJI Mavic Pro 2, and they gave me all of the information about it so that I could do my own research. I wanted one of those things, but I couldn’t justify a $2,000 price tag for a drone that nice when I had zero experience flying a drone, and didn’t have a good idea about what I wanted to do with it. So I sat on the idea for a while, occasionally going on Amazon to drool over the drone that I knew I couldn’t justify to myself. Then I found a somewhat lower-end drone, the DJI Mavic Mini. A $500 price tag was easier to justify, and that price also told me two things: first, it was expensive enough that it would do what I wanted it to do, but also cheap enough to be a good, accessible starter drone. I asked the experts on Reddit, and the consensus was that it was a good entry-level drone, and it could do everything that I was looking for it to do. So I went on Amazon and bought it.
One thing that I got a quick crash course in after I bought this was the regulatory environment for drones. Basically, you can’t just take this thing anywhere and fly it however you want. Like the roads, you share the airspace with other users, and as a drone pilot, in the big hierarchy of pilots, you are down where the dog lifts its leg. And that’s how it should be. I’m flying an unmanned vehicle, and as such, my feet are firmly on the ground at all times. If something goes wrong with my aircraft while I’m flying, the worst thing that happens is that I lose my drone, as well as all of the material that’s stored on the card. I might be unhappy about losing my drone and the photos stored on the card, but no one’s going to die should this thing fail mid-flight. Compare to a real pilot, who’s actually up in the sky with their aircraft, and if something went wrong there, there is a very real possiblity that someone could be seriously injured or lose their life. Therefore, I quickly learned that you have to do your homework before flying. Thankfully, there is a phone app called B4UFLY that will tell you what restrictions are in place in different areas. Right offhand, I live in the Washington, DC area, and as such, there is a lot of restricted airspace there, because Washington. In short, don’t even think about flying in DC, and you probably don’t want to fly in the suburbs, either. Right around my house, I also have restrictions because there’s a small airport (GAI) nearby. Once you get out of the immediate metro area, though, it’s fairly wide open, though national parks are a blanket no-go. But outside of that, there’s plenty of stuff to do.
Categories: Cameras, Frederick County, Montgomery Village
Reimagining how we elect our local officials…
7 minute read
October 1, 2020, 11:17 PM
There comes a point where you have to admit that a process is broken. In this case, I have reached that conclusion with the way that we elect the county council and county executive in Montgomery County, Maryland. Our current county executive, Marc Elrich, is the result of such a broken system. Elrich is a real stinker in my book for a number of reasons, and I admit that I didn’t vote for him in the primary or the general election, because I saw his being a stinker from a mile away.
But this entry isn’t about Elrich specifically. Rather, it’s about the process that brought him into office. And ultimately, the problem is that Montgomery County is using a bipartisan process for electing its officials when the county is overwhelmingly one party – Democratic, in this instance. The way that it works should be quite familiar to most of you: candidates of a given party run for office and compete in a primary election in the spring to determine who will be the nominee for the general election the following November, where all of the various parties’ nominees compete, and the winner of that contest takes office a few months later. Many, if not most, jurisdictions use this to choose their elected officials. However, it does depend to a large extent on having multiple viable political parties. It starts to fall apart when one party completely dominates the process, and none of the other parties’ candidates have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being elected. In that case, the dominant party’s primary is the “real” election, and the general election is a formality. In other words, the result is already a foregone conclusion after the primary is done.
This situation is not unique to Montgomery County by any means. DC is similar, with the Democratic Party’s being the dominant political party over everything else to the point that the other parties don’t matter (save for an at-large council seat that is required to be a different party than the others), and the Democratic primary is generally considered to be the deciding contest for the mayoral race.
Categories: Montgomery County, State and local politics