Month: February 2020

Wednesday, February 19th, 2020 – diggin’ out –

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Wednesday, February 19th, 2020 —> -3˚C / +26˚F —> Still light outside @ 6:14 pm – on, I think, Jeff Bender’s Birthday – Hope it’s the happiest, most wonderful birthday he ever had –

— We had our second ‘significant’ snowfall over night – It had already stopped at 3 something am when I peeked in at the security camera monitor.

Mountain at the end of the driveway

– So, while we only got between 3 & 4 inches of snow { 5-10 cm } The plow- person saw fit to dig farther into the snow bank on the side of the road than the previous plow – guy – { grumble grumble — } –

— I’m still hurting from our last storm, luckily, I had lotsa help from Cathi – or maybe she had some help from me?

Cathi, the Van, & a lotta snow -

– The wind knocked the the faery-land effect of the snow from the trees, and there is a hill off to the right of this shot —> out of the photo – but that is all hand shoveled snow in that pile there. —> & the funny thing is, where the sun hit the sides of the van – it melted the snow on both sides –  { the temperature reached +2˚C / +36˚F today – with a bit of wind giving us a chill }  – and left a bit of snow on the roof and front hood { facing north } –

— I’m thinking some of the snow on the roof might have melted and seeped down and froze in place which might be a slight headache tomorrow morning –

Cathi and her shovel with the four and a half foot mountain of snow behind her that wasn't there yesterday.

– Cathi – I got her to take a couple minute break to pose with the four and a half foot high mountain of snow behind her. She had cut down the top of the peak to her left behind her { Our right } the other day – but that ugly schnarr to her right, our left, is brand new –

— Looks like evidence that the plow guy wants to make sure I die of a heart attack – doesn’t it?

And this is our goofy Security Camera 01's view of the driveway and beyond -

– This security cam does not like sunlight on snow and still goes crazy from about 10 am to 3:30 pm-ish – even after I pushed the ‘brightness’ slider all the way down to zero – But I do get some interesting effects when the danged thing isn’t flipping out… –

— Best guess? the security cam scans from left to right or right to left as opposed to vertically. I’ve never seen the sky that colour ‘in real life’ And the icicle dripping down in front of the camera gives us some odd reflections.

— So, um, Happy Birthday – Jeff – hope its so good it takes you all year to celebrate it. 🙂

— Hey, Vermonters, I could use a “Feel the Bern” bumper sticker –

————— Yay?

~~~~~ Jim

Friday, February 14th, 2020

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Friday, February 14th, 2020 —> -14˚C / +6˚F With over bright sun and a wind chill @ 12:26 pm in Atlantic Canada – on my God-Father’s birthday and coincidentally, Valentines Day

Stabilized Security Cam Shot

– Our new-ish Security Camera System apparently doesn’t like the cameras it came with. It killed two of the four cameras within weeks from the time we got it. Lately Camera one which was moved from a different connection, has been flipping out in bright sunlight. —> Schnarr! –

— The above photo was taken two days ago – we’ve had some snow blow in and an inch or two fell since then.

Gaaa - image weirdness

– The video we get on our monitor flips between the nice colour image up top – then to a black “Video Loss” screen – then through the weirdness you see here, then tries to bring up the colour image again, and sometimes tries to go black and white before flipping through the whole routine all over again. – The camera it replaced died on Sunday, I think, and we replaced it right away, and this has been going on every day since.

— There was more weirdness when I tried to capture this stuff happening in still photos with my iPhone, like with iPhone’s “Live” action stuff, it would cycle through a couple different images as the monitor went nuts and three times in a row, it settled on an odd – slightly messed up image of my MacBook Pro’s desktop. & That kind of gave me the creeps, made me wonder if all this nonsense is symptomatic of somebody trying to hack into our network to mine any details it can steal from us. Pitty the poor suckers who do that, they’ll probably die of boredom checking through any information they find here.

Security System Monitor

– This is what the Monitor Screen looks like when it begins to settle down – which, so far – it has done every day –

— The grey images are from the cameras our original system came with, and that thing crapped out when the warranty expired. The middle top and middle middle images come through two “Q-See” brand 720 p cameras that have the best colour. The middle middle camera got burned out when we turned it to face straight out through a window and the reflected uv lamps messed it up, so it can only live indoors for now, but —> what the heck? we’ve had no problems with the cameras that did not come with this system.

— Oh, and another weird thing, the DVR – the box that runs the whole show, and looks like a cable box – has been restarting itself every hour on the hour when camera one’s feed is flipping. { Go figure? } So I hope the company that made this system doesn’t want to know what I think of their products.

— Shrug —

~~~~~ Jim