LOCAL: Spring. I finished a couple of oils: an aerial landscape of Gateway Plaza located in downtown Pittsburgh that took nearly a month, and a kitschy rendering of cats riding bikes.
My next aerial landscape is a nocturne called “Light Up Night” from a 10-year-old image. At the start of the Christmas holiday season every year, our town places candles along the residential streets. Volunteers drive a parade up and down the streets with sirens blaring and lights flashing, a real spectacle.
The image in the banner is from the very start of the event at sunset – it is edited to deepen contrast and shadows.
NEWS: Just a reminder that internet security is keeping us in interesting times.
I uncovered a problem on an FAA Dronezone page. I was browsing for press kit material, and I downloaded some posters and a reference guide and such. When I downloaded one particular image, though, it arrived as an unknown file type. Hmm, it was supposed to be a simple graphic that looked like someone rendered in Sketch Up or Word using clip art.
My PC suggested using a text file to save it, so I opened it and found 120 pages of Cantonese Chinese with a sprinkling of English phrases and words. That was an unusual experience.
The appearance of the text reminded me of looking at a login terminal in Fallout, where you have to pick the codeword from a character block of a few hundred characters, about twenty choices available in three tries, and you could know when you had identified so many letters of the codeword, but not placement or which letter. Like a crappy Wordle.
I scrolled on and on, a huge block of unknown text. Gigantic, a big, big wall. So, I translated a page, found mostly nonsense and repeated phrases.
I wrote the website admins, and they fixed it. I checked the link this morning. It was presenting a known filetype. I printed the image and added it to a press kit.
DRONE: Cold and rainy this past week, gusty winds in the 20s, no flights.
SCIENCE: The reed-solomon codes. Noisy encoders gonna encode. Voyager 1 and 2 use it. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/03/24/reed-solomon-golay/ and more
Artemis full stack: Artemis – NASA
NASA Science Data Received, Blue Ghost Captures Eclipse From Moon – NASA
ART:
I am going to get a portable easel to do some plein-air stuff this season.
Falcon P & O 
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