With minimal damage too! Two of our side fence panels popped off, one on each side. Both have already been repaired. Several sections of the back fence didn’t fare as well. I’ll have to replace some posts to fix that.

The only other casualty was the gate. I’ll have to build a new one and I’ll probably replace the posts while I’m at it.

Other than that, it’s just some minor cleanup from all the small branches blown off the tree and shingles that came from my neighbor’s roof.

Time to unboard windows and set up the generator!

Hey, @Brickman, how are things down there?

Well, Hurricane Ida looks like it's going to be a wild ride. They are saying that we haven't been hit by a storm this intense since 1850. Katrina - you remember Katrina, right? - was a category 2 storm. Ida is predicted to be a Cat 4 by landfall tomorrow. That's sustained winds of 130+ mph.

So, we did the right thing and covered our windows and secured any/all items that can be blown around.

I originally cut these panels back in 2008, when Gustav paid us a visit during our first year in Louisiana. This is the third time I've put them up. The thing that's crazy is that we are the only people in the neighborhood to board up. Seriously. I took a drive to see for myself. I found exactly one other house a 1/4 mile away with the windows boarded up and one other house with real shutters that were closed.

I'm not sure what these people are thinking.

What I do know for sure is that there will be flooding. We went through a major flood back in 2016 which was caused by about 17.5" of rain across the Amite river catchment.
Sorry for the legend - this is the 2-day estimate and the area in white is the 10-15" rainfall range. There was one more day, but I didn't find a map for it.

Ida is predicted to drop 10-20" of rain in the same area.

There's been a lot of discussion about where to park cars that will remain dry. The general consensus is to park in the new neighborhoods. What they don't realize is that the houses have been built up to avoid flooding, but the streets have not. In fact, many of the streets are designed specifically to act as a detention facility during extreme events - holding water so the neighborhood doesn't just dump all that water on their neighbors. Here's what my neighborhood looked like in 2016 the day after the peak:
My advice to them is to avoid parking in the streets if possible, especially in the new neighborhoods.

Well, if you've made it this far, you realize things are about to get really windy and really wet in South Louisiana. Keep us in mind and we'll try to keep everyone updated.

For those who are interested. I plan to update it as interesting things happen. I'm hoping @Brickman can drop in with his perspectives. That is, if he still has power.

7:30PM - Rocky insists on going outside, presumably to do his business. After making the rounds of the yard, he decides that the downed tree branches are gifts from the gods which should be brought inside. New stick selection is problematic because all of the branches are just too big. He proceeds to lie down so he can chew his way through a branch and make it a more reasonable size. That’s when I insisted he abandon his quest and come inside for a very thorough toweling. Awful photo taken in near-dark conditions.

7:00PM - Still here! The winds are getting stronger and we can hear the load shifting in the rafters of our roof. Our neighbors have some tall trees that are taking a beating. The trunk of our pecan is actually swaying in the wind. That’s a first. At least the winds are out of the north since we’re on the west side of the storm. If the pecan falls, it will be away from the house.

It’s moving about 10mph, so they’re saying it may take four or five hours to get past us. Definitely the most intense storm I’ve experienced!

4:15PM - Ad now the power is out. I'm making my last post from my laptop. Here on out will be my phone as long as the big battery lasts. We'll probably fire up the generator tomorrow morning to get the refrigerator cooled down, charge up phones, etc. and get the window a/c unit installed and cooling. Right now, the house is freezing cold and the alarm is alerting me that the power is out. Now to remember how to disable that alert....

The eye may be going east of us. I just don't know.

1:00PM - We are starting to see power glitches at our house and that prompted me to check the map. We live on the south side of Baton Rouge. We still have power, but areas nearby have gone dark.
Frankly, I'm surprised to see that parts of New Orleans still have power. I'm guessing it won't be long before we lose power here.

The skies are cloudy and rain has been spotty, but sunshine keeps peeking through the gaps. It looks like we'll be getting some heavy rain pretty soon.
owlt

Early last week, my daughter informed me that the oil light came on in her car. I tell her to stop driving it (she was at home) and check the oil. As expected, it's below the minimum. We need to do an oil change anyway, so I tell her that I'll stop and get her some oil on my way home. But she and her mom had some errands to run, so they take the truck and on their way home, stop and buy supplies. When they get home, my daughter takes the initiative and tops off the oil so she has use of her car until we can do the oil change.

Saturday finally rolls around and I'm itching to get the oil change done but the ladies need to run more errands. On Saturday afternoon, they finally get home and inform me that the Outback isn't running right. My daughter tells me it hasn't been running right since she added oil.

Oh, no.

At this point I'm wonder where things might have gone wrong. Did she put the oil in the wrong spot? Wouldn't the oil light have stayed on if she had? Did she run it too long with the oil light on and burn up something? Inquiring fathers want to know!

So, I did the only thing I could and went outside to check the oil myself. I discovered that she added oil into the right place, but she added too much oil and it was over full.

To the uninformed, this may have seemed like No Big Deal (TM), but I'm here to inform you that it is a Really Big Deal (TM). The dealer adding too much oil is exactly how I ended up with a new engine in my WRX. When the oil level is too high, the crankshaft gleefully splashes around in what was once a shower but has become a kiddie pool.
The splashing turns the oil into foam, much like whisking oil and egg together to make mayonnaise. The poor little oil pump can't move air, so it stops delivering oil to those critical moving parts. They overheat and start disintegrating. Next thing you hear is a whole lot of tapping coming from your once pristine engine.

So, I do the right thing and call my daughter outside to take a look for herself. I tell her to check the oil and tell me what she sees. She recognized her mistake immediately. I ask her to go get the jug of oil so we can see how much she added. Two and a half quarts. Whoops.

Now we don't have enough oil to do the oil change. We also discover that she bought two different weights, one 5-quart jug of 0w-20 and two one quart containers of 5w-30. Cue another conversation about getting the right oil and she is completely confused. I'm telling her to buy one weight, "the car" is telling her to buy another. We discover that someone switched the oil cap for the one off a 2.5L which specifies 0w-20, not the correct weight of 5w-30. Thanks Subaru techs. You screwed it up again.

So, we take a trip to the Zone of Autos and buy some more. I show her again how to look up all of the part numbers and quantities and we get our supplies.

The next morning, we went about changing the oil. It's an oil change. Nothing new here. The only thing we did differently was have a conversation about knowing how much the car holds, how much oil it may retain, and how to sneak up on the right oil level.

On the post-oil change test drive, the engine was back to normal. Crisis averted. All is well once again. Now to address the rattle coming from the back....

I'm working my way through some training to keep my GIS Professional certification. The training is on image analysis. I figured most of it would be learning the same old stuff in the latest version of the software and that's the way the course went until a couple of days ago. Now we're working on a module which shows how the latest photogrammetric processing is being used to build 3D models. This stuff is just too cool not to share.

Let's start with the basics. A drone was flown over a construction site and was used to capture "nadir" imagery (that's looking straight down). The images had significant overlap so that photogrammetric techniques could be used for calculations. Three control points were established within the area. That's three easily-identifiable points where the lat, long, and elevation are surveyed. When the data is brought back into GIS, it looks like this:
The orange line is the flightline, the blue dots are the points where images were taken, and the green crosses are the control points.

That's a good start, but after some processing, a 3D mesh can be generated from the images. The meshes contain millions of points. To display them, they must be filtered. It's hard and takes an unreasonable amount of time to display the full dataset.

The points are being displayed with "cool-warm" symbology - lower elevations are blue and higher elevations are red. It's easy to see the rooftops of the houses. It's also easy to see that the general slope of the site is higher in the southwest (lower-left) and lower in the northeast (upper-right).

From the point cloud, the software can generate a surface. This lets us see a lot more detail without having to zoom into the point cloud.

Note that we can see the forms for the concrete pads which will be poured soon.

After the surface model is built, the software can be used to remove the buildings. If you've ever seen one of those shows where they use LiDAR to see through the trees and expose the ground beneath, this is the same math but the source data is different. Anyway, here's the ground.

And now for the really cool part. All of this data can be used to create a fully interactive 3D scene.

Keep in mind that all of the images were taken from directly above, so the sides of the buildings weren't captured directly. If we wanted that additional detail, the drone would have been set to make a second flight with the camera pointed at a 30° angle so it could take pictures of all four sides of the houses. Now for the really, really cool part. We can interact with the mesh and take measurements like the height from the ground to the roof.

Or get the area of a driveway.

Or see what the shadows are like on September 18th, 2021 at 9:00am.

In the map, we can bring in whatever background we want to provide context. Here's the model sitting in the middle of the most recent aerial imagery.

It's hard to emphasize how incredible this is. Processing the images took about 45 minutes and the bulk of that was me reading through the instructions. Let me run through it a few times to get familiar and I could get that down to 20 minutes, including computer processing time. The drone flight was pre-programmed in the office (the training materials included video on the setup and image capture process), so capturing the images was a matter of setting up the drone at the site, turning it on, and pressing the button to start the flight.

Making the data capture and processing this easy creates an opportunity to watch things change over a shorter period of time. In the example they provided, a project manager can watch the progress of a site weekly with little cost. Of course, this could be applied to just about any industry from construction to environmental monitoring. It's amazing.

So, if you made it this far, I have a really, really, really cool treat for you. The viewer is available through a public website. Point your browser to here and have some fun.

Welcome to the future.

@rusty-vandura

I must say all that cycling is doing you well.

Sometimes it's good to get things off your chest.

If you don't bother to consult me when bidding your project, then don't get mad when the actual effort takes way more time than you thought it would, thereby blowing the tiny budget you allocated for my work. As they say, poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. I'll help you put out the fires, but I won't accept any of the blame.

That is all.

Rocky has a selection of chew toys in the yard.

Of course he picked the biggest one.

My son and I were walking through the store and passed by the toy section. I was teasing him about wanting a toy (he's a teenager, so toys aren't on his radar anymore) and he, joking back, said something about getting a new Hot Wheels car. So, I went with it and immediately turned down the aisle to the Hot Wheels. Only one car caught his eye.

I'm so proud! I've got a true jalop on my hands!

Of course, we bought it.

As I mentioned in another post, I noticed yesterday that my son had parked on the street, so I told him to move it to the driveway. His excuse? My car was parked in the spot where he usually parks and there "wasn't enough room" for his truck to park behind it without hanging out in the street. He suggested that I move my car and he'd move his truck. I just grabbed the keys to the truck and backed it in myself.

Today, when he got back from school, he excitedly asked me to look out the window. He decided that if I could do it, he could do it too, and he backed into the driveway by himself. That picture is the result of his driving, not mine.

It may not seem like a big thing, but it was a big step for him. He's been somewhat reluctant to drive and now he's taking on challenges on his own.

Next up, backing the trailer!

@chariotoflove said in Bored in the doctor’s office. Have some dad jokes.:

@gibbsemphasis
Sounds great, but how often do you think drivers would disable it? People seem wedded to their following distances.

In some areas people drive like cats - if they fits, they sits. Increase the following distance to something safe and someone is going to see that as an invitation to fill in the gap. That's the way it is in Louisiana and in Texas (at least in the southern half).

@ibrad said in How comfortable are you with the outer dimensions of your car?:

@bicyclebuck I was joking that you should have backed your truck up to the line (and over the nissan)

I win at parking but fail at joking.

My joke comprehension has been faulty lately.

@ibrad said in How comfortable are you with the outer dimensions of your car?:

@bicyclebuck He seems to have stopped short of the line. Don't want to block the aisle.

No, he parked over the line. I backed in and closed the gap.

@gibbsemphasis

Modern equipment has made precision parking quite easy, even if you're driving a big truck.

@chariotoflove said in Bored in the doctor’s office. Have some dad jokes.:

@bicyclebuck said in Bored in the doctor’s office. Have some dad jokes.:

@chariotoflove

I heard that four was thinking about asking five out for a date but couldn't bring himself to do it.

He was two squared.

Did you also hear that six was scared of seven because seven ate nine.

Everybody knows that, but do you know why?

Because seven's mother told him to eat three squared meals a day.

@qaaaaa said in Bored in the doctor’s office. Have some dad jokes.:

@chariotoflove Technically, if you have a PhD, your office is a doctor's office. Would make for a great excuse to get out of banal meetings- "sorry can't make it to today's team meeting, am at dr's office"

This is an excellent point. I think I need to institute the Doctor's Cube. The downside of working in a cube farm....

@chariotoflove said in Bored in the doctor’s office. Have some dad jokes.:

@musashi66 said in Bored in the doctor’s office. Have some dad jokes.:

@chariotoflove I see a fellow follower of DadJokes on Instagram

You saw through me. These in fact came on my Insta.

Most of them were on reddit recently too. /r/dadjokes

@veearrrsix said in Auto sector blasts Mexico's move to legalize imported used cars:

@bicyclebuck half my family is Peruvian. When I was little I had no idea the "beef" skewers we were eating on Christmas was beef heart. That stuff is delicious! And when I go to the good ass taquerias I'm always pumped to get tacos de lengua when I see them. I can't do the super hot salsas though. It ruins the day, and usually the next day too.

My wife loves barbacoa and lingua. I can eat the barbacoa. Lingua is a no-go. I like to eat tex-mex fairly spicy. Really, I like most of my food to have some kick. Super-hot? No. Hotter than most of my family? Yes.

@veearrrsix said in Auto sector blasts Mexico's move to legalize imported used cars:

@bicyclebuck tripe is a no go for me as well. It's been a while since I had some, but I remember it tasting like old hay and barnyard mixed with a faint poo finish. No me gusta, tambien.

The first time I went to meet my future wife's family, it was during New Year. The uncles promptly took me out back and put me to work cutting up the tripe so they could make menudo. I dove in with gusto. I knew it was a test and I was going to make sure I passed. I managed to choke down one bowl of the menudo they made that day.

We've been married over 20 years now and I still haven't had a second bowl. Once was enough for a lifetime.

@chariotoflove

I heard that four was thinking about asking five out for a date but couldn't bring himself to do it.

He was two squared.