Too many rocks on the roads here to make no-windshield motoring a viable option.

If you are looking to protect your home, it’s hard to beat a mosquito trap of some kind. My uncle owns two acres in the Texas coastal zone. His back yard was best described as a mosquito war zone. He bought a trap which he placed a the back of the property. Although they say that it only protects an acre, it seems to…

These days it doesn't take much to have a catastrophic claim. State minimum liability amounts in Louisiana are 15/30/25, meaning $15k bodily injury (BI) per person, $30k BI per accident, $25k per vehicle.

The insurance rates in Louisiana are among the highest in the nation due to lax litigation laws (at least that is what the agent says). Liability insurance for our third vehicle, a 21-year-old truck, with only two drivers in the household, is almost the same as full coverage on our new vehicles. Once my oldest child…

“... there are a lot of times I have almost been hit by people turning across the bike lane without looking or just drifting across lanes, or running lights.”

Lake Jackson, Texas is a company town built by Dow Chemical. The layout was planned by Alden B. Dow, son of the company's founder. The story is that he asked his secretary what she thought about calling the streets and she exclaimed "Don’t ask me. You’ve got all these streets going this way and that way. I don’t know…

Neither is it smart to farm where farming shouldn’t be.

Remove the corn and just call it blight and we have Interstellar.

Water and agriculture won’t be it for the U.S. Our “bread basket” has moved around quite a bit over the years. For Texas, the blackland prairies and the Rio Grande valley used to be the primary areas of ag production. That was changed by land development for the former, Prior Appropriation for the latter (basically,…

Needs a little bit of this.

I moved to the B.R. area after Katrina. What I learned is in Louisiana, the difference between the North and the South is I-10. If you can’t tell by the speech, you can certainly tell by the cooking. I’ve seen some heated arguments about the “right” way to make gumbo....

I’ve heard Cajun French maybe 3-4 times in my whole life, and always from older people who are probably now dead.

South Louisiana might not be, but ranked number 9 on the list of Top 30 Highest Murder Rates in the U.S., New Orleans most certainly is.

Yes, but it often means that they have live seafood that you can take home and boil for yourself.

Despite the fact that there are 43 dams across the river along its 2,300-mile length, the water at its southern end was still brown and silty.

If you aren’t familiar with trucks, it is really easy to lock up the rear wheels under hard braking since the load is so light. I’ve always driven a truck and learned how to brake properly. My wife, however, always owned a car with ABS, so she is used to stomping the pedal and letting the ABS do its job.

Does ‘94 count as “modern?” At 21 years old, my Mazda truck (Ford Ranger) is still going.

In 1995 the broad-scale network of base stations transmitting RTK wasn’t available. Today we have multiple systems from WAAS operated by the FAA (it’s meant for airplanes) to HARN (the high-accuracy reference network operated by NGS) and other local, regional, public, and private networks.

Beats me. I do geospatial work, so I know a fair bit about GPS. The only control systems I know about use two feet and two hands (ten fingers, two eyes - you get the idea).

No need to circumvent SA for speed calculations. SA introduces a pseudo-random wandering path that doesn’t jump around within its bounds. At 60 mph, the distance between position updates (~26m) is roughly half the average SA error (50m), so speed calculations will be pretty accurate, especially if you build in some…