Snow in April

Snow in AprilWelcome to Spring in WNY. It snowed today. Most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon looked like this.

Try as it might, it couldn’t stick and didn’t accumulate except on the furniture. It made an interesting day, had it been just rain, it would have been depressing. But snow made it a bit interesting.

It wasn’t really cold, either. I went outside several times with just a sweatshirt and worked in my garage for a few minutes in my shirtsleeves.

Fall colors


The last photo I took on my old phone was this shot of the leaves along the Erie Canal in Lockport.

I decided it was time to move to the current state-of-the-art in phones and get a smartphone. I ended up playing it safe and getting a HTC Incredible. Why is that safe? Because my son, Bryan, got one almost the minute they came out. He ordered one before they were in stock and waited for it to ship. Continue Reading…

Autumn is here

Mist Clouds

I drove Melissa to school today. It was a beautiful fall day, warmer than the past week or so and the rain is finally gone. I looked to the south and saw a long line of fluffy clouds. The entire rest of the sky was blue with a few cirrus clouds. These clouds stood out and I realized they weren’t ordinary clouds, they were caused by the mist from Niagara Falls!

This is something that you don’t see every day. I’m sure there is plenty of times when there is moisture in the air due to the falls, but you don’t notice it. Either there are so many other clouds in the sky, one more doesn’t stand out, or the wind is different and they don’t build up like that. The wind today was pretty steady and it kept the clouds of mist moving to the east in a long line.

I stopped near the intersection of Mapleton and Lockport Roads to take these photos. The one above is a HDR shot – a combination of three shots at different exposures that I used software to combine and enhance for the effect. Here’s a single shot, what it would look like straight out of the camera.

Mist Clouds

and another HDR shot:
Clouds of Mist

A velo weekend

I finally got the trike out for an overnight trip. I heard about a thing called the Niagara Velomobile Happening and found out that there was free camping for those attending. Seemed like something interesting and a good way to do a shakedown cruise with the gear on the Trike.

I’m usually the ‘cycle that gets the comments and stares whenever I go out for a ride, but with this group, I was the conservative one. In case you haven’t heard the term velomobile before, it refers to a vehicle that is usually based on some form of human-powered vehicle and often has a full body, or at least some windscreen.

These enthusiasts took that to heart and many velos there were fully enclosed and electric motors to assist pedaling were very common as well. Some were home made, some were commercial products. They were pretty much all very interesting.

Like going to a robotics event, the same concept often resulted in a wide variety of solutions, some odd at first, some elegant, but all original and very cool. In this crew, my basic trike was boring… Continue Reading…

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