Today's High winds + snow + ice +..….


quillcom

quillcom

Well-Known Member
Unplowed shipping dock areas =

See you later I'm going home!

Our larger sister company shut down their operations.
These streets over here leading up to the businesses are not plowed.

I'm getting blown around slipping and sliding in this snow storm turned blizzard.

No thanks, I'm outta here. My weekend starts now.
 

Electric Chicken said:
Agreed. Instead of screwing around and waiting until today, I ran my shit yesterday as early as my 10 was up and got it over with. I'd rather hibernate.

No storm here yet but there was talk of big wind. Don't want to be on the roads for that.
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I felt like I was wind surfing out there today. Its no fun changing lanes when your just trying to go straight.

Some of these shippers are clueless. Every winter you'll see it. Pull up to the lot, 2 + incnes of unplowed snow. Walk into the shipping office and I tell them, hey I cant get in there without getting stuck. One time a shipper asked me. "well can you try".

I should have said yeah, if your willing to pay $500 for the tow wrecker fee.
 
I think there's about an inch on the ground here, maybe 2 inches.

Yesterday it was total white-out here though.

We still have all the wind but kind of cool atmospheric conditions at the moment.

It's night time, and ground level visibility is at least ten miles due to the lights I can see from here and knowing how far they are.

But like 200 feet up, it's a solid flat bottom cloud.

So distant lights are not just pale orange dots on the horizon like they normally are. They're illuminating the bottom of the cloud layer that's just above them.

I'm 3.2 miles southeast of I-57 exit 327 in a straight line, and there's a McDonald's, a Circle K and a new truck stop they just built that's not on the satellite image yet.

From here it looks cool the way they're lighting up the bottom of the cloud. With binoculars I can identify the logos on the big signs. With the naked eye I can only identify them by color and position on the horizon.

But I can't get a picture of it through the binoculars. My phone sucks in low light.
 
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Windy as hell today, I almost lost my hat, I should have been wearing a toque, but I hate the feel of a Toque.
Then the snow came and the shit show began. The plows they use don't scrape right down to the asphalt so they kind of leave a thin slick layer of ice/snow.

The people inside don't know anything about trucks or friction/lack of friction and gravity. Please stop asking me to bring empty trailers to your uphill dock.
I can bring you all the loaded trailers you want.

Then the freezing rain came and luckily my shift was ending right about that time.
 
Duck said:
I think there's about an inch on the ground here, maybe 2 inches.

Yesterday it was total white-out here though.

We still have all the wind but kind of cool atmospheric conditions at the moment.

It's night time, and ground level visibility is at least ten miles due to the lights I can see from here and knowing how far they are.

But like 200 feet up, it's a solid flat bottom cloud.

So distant lights are not just pale orange dots on the horizon like they normally are. They're illuminating the bottom of the cloud layer that's just above them.

I'm 3.2 miles southeast of I-57 exit 327 in a straight line, and there's a McDonald's, a Circle K and a new truck stop they just built that's not on the satellite image yet.

From here it looks cool the way they're lighting up the bottom of the cloud. With binoculars I can identify the logos on the big signs. With the naked eye I can only identify them by color and position on the horizon.

But I can't get a picture of it through the binoculars. My phone sucks in low light.
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You can take a picture through the binoculars.

I was on a Caribbean cruise and waaaaay off in the distance was a 3 masted schooner. Because I was out on the veranda with the binocs and camera, I thought I would try it. These binocs had 80mm lenses and I was using a small Pentax tourist camera. I set the camera for telephoto and then placed it at the binocular eyepiece and focused it. I got a great picture. When I had them printed my wife said she never recalled seeing that ship. I told her is was few miles off the Port side of the ship and she gave me a questioning look before I explained it.

My phone sucks in low light too, because I'm constantly trying to capture a rocket launch at night, but it just comes out as a bright orange ball of light rising in the sky. I'm 14 miles due west of the main launch pads.
 
Just like here, cloudy, rainy and cold. The forecast is the same for the next few days. The biggest difference is, I don't have to shovel it.
 
Kinda related but not really since we're on the topic of binoculars. Reminds me of the tripod talk we had in my thread.

I figured out the pistol grip head on my existing tripod does come off. It was just on for so many years and so tight I had to stick a screwdriver in the slot and pull harder than expected to crack it free.

Basically means I should only have to buy a sturdy head for those legs if/when I get a telephoto lens. I think the legs are solid enough. I already own them so it's at least worth a try before buying something else.

The pistol grip head definitely doesn't have enough bite around the ball. It wasn't even very good for my regular bigger lenses back in the day. Plus it's almost impossible to move with precision. I should probably get one of those geared heads.
 
Electric Chicken said:
The pistol grip head definitely doesn't have enough bite around the ball. It wasn't even very good for my regular bigger lenses back in the day. Plus it's almost impossible to move with precision. I should probably get one of those geared heads.
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For like 5 bucks you can get a bag of plastic gears for toys or whatever.

They're the type with one big gear and a smaller one in the same piece of plastic. It comes with 3mm axles and toy car wheels.

I figure with a few of those gears you could make a precision aiming device for a laser camera. You could use one of the toy car wheels as the adjustment knob.

I'm also kinda sorta looking at guitar tuning knobs with the little worm gear drive.
 
389 Hood said:
You forgot the precision steel gears. :toothpick:
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That would only be a selling point though.

For the application, plastic gears will work just fine because they're not going to be spinning at high RPM carrying loads. They'll never wear out.

The actual gear reduction box wouldn't be the engineering challenge.

The problem is when you are trying to fine tune the aiming of a super strong telephoto lens to center it on a distant object, every time you touch the tripod it'll move a little bit.

If I was taking telephoto long shots or trying to get my laser to hit an object the size of a dinner plate from half a mile away, I would want it to be hands-free.

I'd want a joystick controller for two bidirectional DC motors geared way down, and of course, a remote control for the camera shutter.

And I'd want to add weights to the tripod too.

I could make something like that.

But I'll wait for @Electric Chicken to tell us what a factory made system like this would actually cost. If it's something that can be had for under $200 it wouldn't make much sense to build one from scratch.
 

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