Clearly, I know how to break a drone…
5 minute read
November 24, 2021, 2:54 PM
I haven’t mentioned it on here yet because it’s discussed in an upcoming photo set, but I got a new drone last month while I was on my trip to North Carolina and Hampton Roads. My DJI Mavic Mini threw a propeller blade and crashed nearly 400 feet up in the air while I was photographing a shopping mall in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. I was positioning the drone for my first shots of the mall, and then I noticed a “motor error” message and saw some uncommanded rotation. Then I saw the view start to tumble, and the connection with the remote dropped. I was soon able to reestablish contact, and found the drone on the ground, laying on its back in the grass about 500 feet away. Here’s what it looked like when I picked it up:
Continue reading…Categories: Cameras, North Carolina, Travel, Woomy
What is the point where elected officials have killed their credibility?
10 minute read
November 18, 2021, 11:41 AM
Starting Saturday, November 20, Montgomery County, Maryland implements mask mandate number three. This is based on rules that the Montgomery County council, sitting as the Board of Health, determined in August and October, where seven consecutive days of “substantial” COVID-19 transmission by CDC guidelines (50-100 cases per 100,000 people), based on raw case counts, automatically triggers an indoor mask mandate, and seven consecutive days of “moderate” COVID-19 transmission by CDC guidelines (fewer than 50 cases per 100,000 people), again based on raw case counts, automatically rescinds an indoor mask mandate. This continues until 85% of the county’s population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The result of this auto-on, auto-off policy has been a yo-yo effect, where it’s masks one week and no masks the next.
For some history on this, the Montgomery County government first implemented a mask mandate in April 2020, not long before the governor issued a statewide mask mandate. That mandate was rescinded in May 2021 when everyone else did after the CDC said that fully vaccinated people didn’t need to wear masks anymore. When the county had reached a 50% vaccination rate, they abandoned their own COVID rules and began following the state’s guidance instead, which included no more masks and a full reopening of everything. Then in August, after the CDC revised its guidance again, and the county council watched as case numbers went up, Montgomery County started implementing its own rules again separate from the state, and brought back the mask mandate. The idea was that the mask mandate would last until there were seven consecutive days of “moderate” transmission, after which time it would automatically be rescinded. This happened in late October, and the mask mandate was rescinded effective Thursday, October 28.
Right after this is where they started to shoot their credibility, and it demonstrates what is wrong with looking at raw case numbers as a metric for determining public policy. On October 30, two days after the mandate was rescinded, they were already talking about reinstating the mask mandate, as they soon returned to “substantial” transmission territory, and announced a return to masks less than a week after they were rescinded, to be effective on Wednesday, November 3 (i.e. six days from rescission to reimplementation).
Categories: COVID-19, DC area local news, Montgomery County, Reddit, State and local politics
The master at work…
7 minute read
November 14, 2021, 8:52 PM
Most of the time, when I’m doing photography, I only get to see the end result, which typically ends up on my Flickr page, along with other places. It’s far less common for me to see candid shots of myself, just because I’m usually the one doing all of the photographing. But when you go on a trip that is explicitly photography-oriented, and when everyone is shooting, I end up seeing some candid shots of myself. Recently, from October 15-21, Elyse and I went on a trip to North Carolina and Hampton Roads, where we photographed a lot of stuff, some familiar, and some less familiar. The parts of North Carolina that we visited were almost entirely new territory for both of us, while Hampton Roads was a more familiar setting. In North Carolina, we got together with my friend Patrick, whom I’ve known for a very long time, and had a quick meetup with another friend who formerly lived in the DC area. Then in Hampton Roads, we spent time with Aaron and Evan Stone. I’m not going to go into too much detail about the trip itself right now, because I’m working on a much larger photo set about the adventure for the Life and Times section, so for all of the details, stay tuned, but it will be a while before it releases, because it’s going to be a big one. In any case, some of these shots are posed, but a lot of them are candid. If it tells you anything, when Elyse and I were reviewing them on the big screen in the living room, we put on “Yakety Sax” and laughed a lot.
In any case, here they are. These shots were all taken by Elyse, unless otherwise noted.
Group selfie at the North Carolina welcome center on I-95 southbound. From left to right, there’s Elyse, Woomy, David (a clownfish), and me.
Categories: Elyse, Hampton Roads, Myself, North Carolina, Photography, Travel, Woomy
Virginia governor’s race? Not at all surprised…
7 minute read
November 3, 2021, 4:17 PM
On the evening of November 3, I, like so many others, checked in on the various news websites to learn that Republican Glenn Youngkin had defeated Democrat and former governor Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia gubernatorial election. I saw this result, and I was like… meh. The pundits all said it would be close, and the results seem to bear that out, with Youngkin’s winning with 50.9%, McAuliffe’s coming in with 48.4%, with Princess Blanding, who was running on a “Liberation” ticket, taking the remaining 0.7%. In any event, it seems like Youngkin did his homework and pulled it out. It seemed like he had the better campaign overall, while McAuliffe tended to run on, “Hey, remember me? I’m not Donald Trump. I was also your governor back in 2014, and I’d love to have another go at it!” In other words, while McAuliffe may have done his homework in 2013 and come out on top, the same can’t really be said for 2021. I also did quite a bit of traveling through various areas of Virginia during the last few months of the campaign, and I saw way more campaign signs for Youngkin in my travels than I did McAuliffe signs, to the point where seeing a McAuliffe sign in my travels was noteworthy.
Terry McAuliffe’s win in 2013 was unusual because it broke the pattern of Virginia’s voting opposite of the president’s party. Virginia, along with New Jersey, votes for its governor in what is called an “off-year election“, the year after the presidential election. Since Barack Obama had been reelected president in 2012, by the usual Virginia pattern, Republican Ken Cuccinelli should have won. I would suggest that people just didn’t want to vote for someone like Cuccinelli, because based on the public statements that I’d heard him make as attorney general, I had long come to the conclusion that he was nuts.
In any case, the pattern is well-established. Looking through the list of governors of Virginia, the trend of voting opposite the president has been the case since 1977, when Republican John Dalton was elected governor while Democrat Jimmy Carter was in the White House. That followed two other Republican governors that were elected following Nixon victories in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections, which followed 80 straight years of Democratic control of the governor’s office. Following Dalton’s tenure, there were three more Democratic governors, which corresponded with the Reagan and Bush presidencies. Then there were two more Republicans that corresponded with the Clinton presidency, and then two more Democrats that corresponded with the George W. Bush presidency. The pattern then continued in 2009 with a Republican for Obama’s first term, and then McAuliffe broke the pattern in 2013 during Obama’s second term. After that, the governorship fell right back into the pattern, with a Democrat’s being elected in 2017 while Republican Donald Trump was in the White House. And now the pattern continues, with a Democratic president in Joe Biden, and a Republican governor’s being elected in Virginia.
Categories: State and local politics, Virginia