Buffalo Dan's Bison

A double rainbow imaged and sent to me earlier today In an effort to expand my surveillance capabilities on the ranch I'm now in the process of developing smaller independent surveillance stations that are able to connect (via wifi) to the central surveillance station.  This will allow the stations to be positioned at other parts of the ranch and, consequently, image more areas.  Each station will be solar powered and have a minimum of one camera and one Raspberry Pi computer.  Testing the new systems electricity consumption.  On a 106ah marine battery the system operated for seven days.  For this project, to reduce the risk residual software complications such as those highlighted in my first technology post , I started with a clean install of the Wheezy operating system and wrote mostly new programing.  Though it is more work to start from scratch now, it will probably save me a lot of trouble later.  The programing of the system handles three basic tasks: 1) how the cam

Having a ranch in such a remote part of southern Virginia has some interesting consequences.  Because my home in northern Virginia is about a four hour drive from the ranch in southern Virginia, I try to stay down there several days at a time.  Through experience I have found my natural limit for being on the ranch to be about six days.  This limit is due largely to the fact that I have virtually no human contact while at the ranch.  Though I do have Internet access there, my data quota is limited and reading emails is not the same as talking to real people.  Often the closest I will come to real human contact is viewing a vehicle driving along a distant road.  After six days of this isolation, I've found that my frame of mind shifts too much for my own comfort.  It is at this point that I will sometimes start talking to myself out loud and I even once caught myself thinking that the bison looked like gigantic furry people faces on legs.

 As a follow-up to the unusual bird image captured by my surveillance system in a previous blog post , I thought I'd make the public aware of a new giant menace on the ranch.  A giant spider, possibly on the scale of Mothra, is now occupying Camera 2.  The giant spider may have been looking for a small deer that passed by the day before. 

The bison don't really seem to care if the weather is sunny or rainy.  As long as there's grass to eat and water to drink they're pretty satisfied.  It has rained extensively for the past few weeks, so, through it's been quite damp outside, the temperature has remained cooler than normal.  I've taken advantage of the cooler temperatures to do as much hard physical work at the ranch as I can.  Base on the most recent weather forecast, though, it appears that the cool period will be over.  This means I'll have to confine the hard work to early mornings and late evenings or find some way to cool myself while I work in the heat. Since I've started ranching a number of people of told me of the dangers of wearing a wedding ring while working.  On occasion a ring can become snagged on some object resulting in an avulsion (i.e. either the skin of the finger or the finger itself is torn off).  I've been married for ten years now and, for me, the idea of no