I’ve been a weather buff all of my life but haven’t had too much interest in hurricanes until recently when I found out a family member may be doing some work down in the area very soon. I’d found the tools on the internet to be somewhat lacking until today. Do you wonder where Hurricane Ike will hit or when Tropical Storm Hanna will pass? What about the projected storm path after it makes landfall and is downgraded? Hurricane season gets lots of people glued to the Weather Channel or local news to get the latest updates on developing storms. I don’t put a lot of faith in what most of the metorologists say so I often seek out the information on the web so I can interpret the data myself. One of the best places I found to do this is Stormpulse. (Google Earth is another one). Stormpulse shows active hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic. And the graphics are better than TV because you can modify their appearance and add or subtract additional layers of data.

You can turn on layers to show projected paths and historical tracks. The severity of the storm is color coded from Tropical Depression to Category 5 Hurricane. You can see all active hurricanes at once, drag the map around, or click on a specific storm. The site also offers satellite pictures and storm news.

Base geographic imagery is provided by Nasa and Data is pulled from the National Hurricane Center and the Dundee Satellite Receiving Station, Dundee University, UK. The site has storm data going back to 1851, soyou can see the paths and intensity of previous hurricanes. There is even an API for embedding Stormpulse maps on other sites which I’m looking into for a page here on RCS.

Try not to be offended.

I logged in last night for the first time in about 40 days and cleared out all of my invites.  This is how many I’ve received in less than 24 hours and I only have 15 friends.  I used to think they were cool until I learned that people just send these invites to everyone which detracts from their value, at least for me.  When I learned that Scrabulous is a person to person game, I played.  Maybe social networks just aren’t for me.  Maybe I’m just not social enough.

Here’s the thing though, I feel guilty for not “accepting” the invites or not sending anything out in return.  Maybe I’m weird but the last people I want to bother are my friends (even though I don’t consider and invite a “bother” if that makes any sense).  I understand that Facebook just wants to make their site as sticky as possible but at some point, in become more of a hassle than a benefit when you have a bunch of friends.  When sending an invite to someone, the default should be to invite just a single person rather than your entire address book.  I want to use FB to keep tabs on what’s going on in my friends’ lives, not hassle them to death.

Ok, I admit it. I love and have loved for a long time, progressive vocal trance music. I’m hardcore and I take it seriously. I have a seperate NAS (Network Attached Storage) dedicated to this kind of music. I don’t advertise it and I hide it on my LAN like I would hide porn. Amy doesn’t even know how much I like it. But no more. I don’t dance to it but it’s really the only music that can make me completely lose myself and focus on something if I need to. But I have to be careful, it’s like a very powerful drug and has to be taken in moderation.

I had to write a very tight piece of code for work tonight and I remembered that trance keeps my ADHD at bay. So I loaded up a new directory of new tunes I’d recently downloaded and found an absolute gem that I’d forgotten about. My code got done, tested, and checked into SVN but I can’t get this track out of my head.

Check it out:

Burned with Desire by Armin Van Buuren

And don’t make fun of me

I was so exhausted tonight and had laid down but it was futile- this song gave me new life and I wanted to share.

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip