Behold, my first attempt at restoring a 30 year old bronze memorial (plaque). It took me a few hours, but I was taking pictures after each stage and waiting for it to dry (and heat up) between coatings. Here are some before and after pics: Patina is an exterior surface change to a…
Author: Joe Del Rocco
New Porch
My in-laws bought a cute but ancient (1940s) house a few years ago, and while the porch looked good from a distance, it was rotted and structurally unsturdy. This year one of the deck boards broke, and it was clear that the whole porch needed to be replaced as soon as possible. So we built…
Cooking in Quarantine
The stores have no yeast, flour, or baking sheets… It seems we’re all cooking more these days. Here are some of the meals we put together. Kung Pao chicken Pineapple sweet ‘n sour chicken Spicy tofu, mushroom, and lotus dry-pot Lemon parsley chicken and potatoes Callos a la Madrileña (my dad made this) Clam chowder…
Hubble 30 Year Anniversary!
The Hubble telescope has been in orbit for 30 years now! NASA post. I put together this minimalist wallpaper to honor the Hubble Deep, Ultra, eXtreme, Frontier Fields Projects, which spanned almost the entire 30 years. I centered this wallpaper on my Desktop with a black background. The image is from the UVUDF project in…
Summer Pool For The Boy
Setup a small above ground pool for my son this summer. He’s a little restless in quarantine 😛
New Clear Sky Energy Paper
We published a new paper on estimating clear sky energy across the entire skydome. Wide spectrum sky energy is useful for many downstream applications, including PV building energy modeling, panel alignment, rendering, etc. This is a data-driven technique, using regression models on measured sky data. We validated the method with holdout data and with libRadtran,…
Bats About The House
Noticed a handful of bats swarming around near our front door tonight, hopefully eating lots of mosquitoes 🙂 More information about bats from the University of Florida, including awesome videos of their well-known bat barns.
Vanwho? Yes.
We had the pleasure of opening up for Vanwho last night at Uncle Lou’s. If music comes from the soul, this is music. She has a beautiful voice and playing style, very emotional and unique. I also like her use of whistling for leads 🙂 She is very talented. Make it a point to see…
Blues Jam @ Home
An impromptu blues jam at the house with some friends. My neighbor Jeff (of Lure Design and the Ten10 open mic jam) is shredding it as usual on guitar. Long time no see multi-band mate, Scott Sigman, on bass in this video, but Jason Hinders played bass most of the night. Joel Pickering and UCF…
House 2 Remodel: Addition
It took a loooooooooooooooooooooong time, but we finally finished our house addition. It’s actually been “finished” for 8 months or so, but we’ve been doing some landscaping and waiting for the city to approve our new fence. We added roughly 800 sqft to our house and remodeled another 400 or so (almost entirely downstairs). Tom…