Fidalgo Island Crossings

I have been in the new house a little over three weeks.  I am now living inside the town of Anacortes, Washington.  This past weekend, I got the weather station installed after a month offline.  I got it up just in time for an expected heat wave coming this week.  Up north here we are looking at temperatures in the upper 80's F, around 31° C.  Seattle is expecting 99° F, 37° C, while the Portland/Vancouver area is looking at 105° F, 40 C.  These are temperatures that belong in Arizona, not the Pacific Northwest. The station setup is not ideal, but few of us actually have that luxury.  At the previous house on South Fidalgo Island, I had separated the anemometer mast from the other sensors, putting it more out in the open.  Even though everything is together in one place now, I elected to keep the two separate power supplies and transmissions.  This seemed prudent to preserve battery power.  During the day, the batteries are charged...

The old blog has a new look, thanks to some up-to-date templates just made available by Blogger.  Admittedly, the old theme I was using had gotten pretty stale.  A freshening up was overdue. Blogger's new themes are designed to work on any platform, PC, tablet or phone.  So far, the only failure I found in this regard was my antique iPod Touch.  Under iOS 5.5 (we're at 10.2 now), that was probably asking too much.  I don't use it anymore anyway.  It works great on the iPad Mini. I still have some work to do.  Some of the formatting didn't come across correctly, so I will be cleaning up and redesigning some of the pages.  Block quotes are handled very differently now.  I also removed some pages that had become stale, and probably were not serving any useful purpose. After some trial and error, I determined that a 3:1 aspect ratio worked best for the background image.  I chose one to reflect the season with a plan to update them ...

Image:   energy.gov My first experience with LED (light emitting diode) lighting didn't go well.  I have a small desk in the living room where the laptop lives.  A 25 watt incandescent bulb in the desk lamp was just right.  It was enough light for working at the desk and it was pleasant in the evenings.  A couple of years ago it burned out.  I thought this would be a good time to try an LED.  By then I had already converted all of the other table and portable lamps to CFL's , but LED's had become the best lights to use for energy conservation. I found a "25 watt equivalent" LED bulb at the hardware store, brought it home and installed it.  I felt good about it until I turned it on.  It was atrocious.  First, it was irritatingly bright, much brighter than the 25 watt incandescent it replaced.  And the light it produced was blue.  I mean really blue.  It was so unpleasant it didn't last ten minutes.  I replaced i...

Canon EF-S 15-85mm Lens @15mm (24mm image) Last fall, I bought a new camera, a Canon 7D Mark II .  As it turned out, the photo editing software I had been using with the old 7D1 couldn't process the raw files produced by the new camera.  For the moment, then, the new camera ended up stashed away in a cabinet. Canon EF-S 10-18mm Lens @10 mm (16mm image) Now I have new software that will process the 7D2 raw files.  Here are the first couple of test shots I took this week using two different lenses.  Although they were just test shots, they turned out fairly well.  They were also photos of my usual Skywatch scene, so I decided to post them there.  Although it is the same scene, these photos are very different from the one I posted last week . Compared to the old 7D, much less post-processing seems to be needed with the 7D2.  Colors are brighter and lighting is more balanced right out of the camera.  I take a lot of photos in t...

We all know the basic difference between deciduous and coniferous trees.  Deciduous trees drop their leaves in the fall and grow new ones in the spring.  Conifers are evergreens that hold their leaves (or needles) year around.  But that's really not the whole story.  In fact, conifers drop needles continuously all year around.  The big Douglas Firs in my yard and the wind like to send needles into the rain collector of my weather station.  These can clog the aperture in the bottom of the collector.  To deal with this, I devised a successful strategy using a kitchen strainer to catch the needles. About a year ago, Davis Instruments revised the design of their collector for the Vantage Pro2 station.  It included a debris screen that fit in the bottom of the bucket.  This looked like a good idea so I ordered one. Unfortunately, as you can see in the photo, the slots in the new debris screen are too large to hold back the fir need...

The New Weather Station Setup My Davis Vantage Pro2 wireless weather station provides data for the Current Weather  page on this website.  The station console has been connected to my main desktop computer via a WeatherLink USB module.  The WeatherLink software performs the uploads to this site, CWOP , Weather Underground , the WeatherLink Network and to the Northwest Weather Network (as "Anacortes"). The December 9, 2014 windstorm took out our power for about 8 hours.  Even with surge protection, pretty much nothing worked on that computer when the power was restored.  Using Windows Explorer or right-clicking would send it into a "Not Responding" freeze-up.  There were no restore points and it behaved like it had no file indexes.  It could take several minutes to open a folder.  I did manage to start the weather station and get the uploads working again.  After running overnight, it seemed to repair itself somewhat, but it wasn't ...

I have been waiting and saving up three years for this.  Canon finally released the new, long-rumored 100-400mm II telephoto lens.  I preordered one from Amazon on November 10th.  After a bit more waiting, it was delivered last Friday December 19th.  Yesterday was the first opportunity I had to try it out.  I went over to Kiket Island in the Kukutali Preserve .  Since this is a lens built for wildlife, I was sure I would find something over there to point it at. The full name of the lens is Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM .  It replaces the venerable 100-400 released in 1998.  No one can accuse Canon of rushing to market with new products. I was hoping my first shot would be the Bald Eagles that often perch on the east end of Kiket.  They weren't there, however, so this is the first shot with the new lens.  It is either a Glaucous-winged or Western/Glaucous-winged hybrid gull swimming in the pocket estuary.  I am ...

Photo:   Klick Health This will be a bit of a rant so consider yourself warned.  Also, I don't wish to start an argument.  These are my own experiences with my own devices.  There are no ulterior motives or conflicts of interest here.  You should make your own decisions based on experience, study and evaluations, as I did. In the spring of 2010, I purchased a 3rd generation iPod Touch .  It was a nifty little device, especially the apps.  The Sibley, iBird Pro, Tide Graph, mSecure, Terminology PH and iFeltThat were some of my favorites.  I could go to the barber or sit in the lobby at Les Schwab and keep up with my Twitter stream or do a little reading with Kindle or Nook.  By 2012, I had started thinking about a larger tablet.  At the time, the iPad seemed a bit much for my needs.  Then Google announced the Android Nexus 7 tablet .  It came with the much-lauded "Jelly Bean" OS.  The announcement was accompanied with...

Last week, I took my new Sigma 18-200mm  f/3.5-6.3 DC Macro OS HSM lens out for a test drive at Deception Pass State Park.   In Part 1 , I posted photos taken around the Deception Pass bridge.  For Part 2, I am posting photos from the West Beach/Cranberry Lake area of the park.  The site provided the opportunity to try the lens on several different kinds of subjects.  First up are some landscape shots taken along the Sand Dune Loop Trail.  It is spring and the dormancy of winter is giving way to fresh new growth everywhere.  All of the photos were shot with a Canon 7D in the raw format and edited with Photoshop Elements 11. A unique dune forest borders the eastern edge of the sand dunes.  Douglas Fir and Sitka Spruce are the dominant trees in the forest.  Beyond the forest are the Cranberry Lake wetlands.  This was originally all part of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  Fine ocean sands blowing off the Strait built up and cut t...