saint louis

There are annual cicadas. Then there are 13-year cicadas. And 17-year cicadas. Then there are days like today when 13 and 17 year cicadas emerge from the ground around the same time, creating a fairly odd event in our backyard.

My daughters are helpfully pointing out a few of the thousands of holes in the ground around our yard—sites where cicadas have been emerging for the past two weeks.

Almost every day there's a new batch that starts climbing up the garden, the trees, the house, the barbecue grill, the kids toy box, the toys the kids leave in the yard... pretty much everything.

And then for a day or two you see them shedding their old skin, emerging, walking around a bit drunkenly, then eventually flying up into the trees.

Today on Geerling Engineering, my Dad and I toured the tower site for WSDZ-AM, located in Belleville, IL. It's a 20kW AM radio station broadcasting with an array of eight individual towers:

How does one get a single coherent signal out of an eight-tower array? Enter the phasor:

That's phasor with an o, not phaser with an e, so Trekkies need not fret about a misspelling.

KSDK-TV broadcasts to well over 1 million households in the St. Louis metro area. And my Dad and I went to their broadcast tower last month to explore how the digital TV signal is delivered through the air to so many people.

On our tour, we explored over 75 years of television broadcast history, seeing how things transitioned from thousands of volts down to hundreds, and from analog audio and video to all-digital.

And we even found strange artifacts of the past, like this random microwave dish that received a signal through the roof of the broadcast building for a time:

I shoot the 'A-roll' for my YouTube videos with a Sony a6000 and a small Glide Gear TMP 75 smartphone teleprompter:

Until recently, I had these mounted on a tripod just off the back corner of my desk:

Some people mount semi-permanent camera rigs on a pole on their desks (example), but my adjustable-height desk (by UPLIFT) is not rock solid, so sometimes when I'm typing or accidentally bump the desk, anything mounted to the desktop wobbles.

For lights, monitors, etc., a little wobble isn't a problem. But even with image stabilization in my camera, the wobble becomes noticeable if I have the camera physically attached to my desk.

I'm not sure why I haven't seen this before, but there's apparently an EarthCam permanently pointed at Downtown St. Louis from across the river in the Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park, and it gives a live view of the iconic St. Louis cityscape 24x7. On a nice crisp fall evening like tonight, it looks very nice:

You can watch downtown St. Louis live on the EarthCam - St. Louis website.

The St. Louis Drupal Users Group has hosted a Drupal Camp in the 'Gateway to the West' for four years (since 2014), but this year, the organizers have decided to take a year off, for various reasons. Our camp has grown a little every year, and last year we even increased the scope and usefulness of the camp even more by adding a well-attended training day—but life and work have taken precedence this year, and nobody is able to take on the role of 'chief organizer'.

All is not lost, however! There are other great camps around the Midwest, and this year we're directing everyone to our northern neighbors, in Iowa: DrupalCorn Camp is going to be held in Des Moines, Iowa, from September 27-30, 2018!

I was recently invited to take some pictures of the campus and interior of St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church in Shrewsbury, MO (nestled in a neighborhood just outside of the City of St. Louis), and I just finished processing and uploading them to Flickr; see my St. Michael the Archangel photos.

There are so many of these little Catholic churches in St. Louis and around the country, with so much hidden beauty. I always try to find a neat little parish near where I stay in any city I visit; usually these parishes showcase more artwork than even the diocesan cathedrals—though that's not the case in St. Louis!

The St. Louis Drupal Users Group (STLDUG) just finished it's fourth Drupal Camp, held at UMSL yesterday. I had a great time meeting with everyone, and am excited for next year! Last year I had to miss the Camp due to unexpected surgery, but this year I was able to attend and even bring some of my photo gear, to take pictures (I love contributing to open source through means other than code!); here's the obligatory 'whole camp' photo:

You can view all my photos from the camp in an album on Flickr: Drupal Camp St. Louis 2017 photos by geerlingguy

(It's not too late to submit a session—and register for DrupalCamp soon, since early bird pricing ends on August 1!)

The organizers behind DrupalCamp St. Louis 2017 are happy to announce we have a speaker scheduled to present the Keynote, Adam Bergstein—Associate Director of Engineering at CivicActions!

Adam's Keynote is titled "Restoring Our Lost Imagination", and here's a short summary:

DrupalCamp St. Louis 2017 will be held September 22-23, 2017, in St. Louis, Missouri. This will be our fourth year hosting a DrupalCamp, and we're one of the best camps for new presenters!

If you did something amazing with Drupal, if you're an aspiring themer, site builder, or developer, or if you are working on making the web a better place, we'd love for you to submit a session. Session submissions are due by August 1.