OK, gang. It’s my last day in the office until I return from CHASE2008. So far, everybody I’ve checked with says I’ve covered what I need to cover before vacation (thanks to preparations made earlier in the week).
I’ve gotten emails from Alex and Dan, but still need to hear from Scott on his itinerary, his power needs for his laptop, etc. Guess I’ll have to call. The van is ready except for some last minute storage of stuff we won’t need for the trip (so I have luggage space for the four of us). “Good to go!” (more or less).
Once I hear from Scott, I will post the consolidated itinerary for our team, so we know who’s where when. 🙂
Category: Prologue
Prologue
Ain’t Technology Wonderful?
I continue to grind away on revising the new UnderTheThunder (UTT) web site.
It has been an exasperating experience, actually. After traipsing through Inkscape (a public domain SVG editor with power graphics options), I put together the new UTT logo, complete with lightning bolts and natural looking CG glow.
The process took 5 hours, mostly due to an unwelcome distraction: while I was trying to download the site to my primary home laptop, the transfers kept geting interrupted. At first I thought “Gee, yesterday’s storms must have impacted my Internet connection here at home.” I worked until 2:30 a.m., when I was too tired to go on.
I continued the effort this morning, but the timeouts and interruptions got worse. Suddenly, it dawned on me: te annoying fan noise I’d been hearing the last last week on this laptop was gone. Overcome with a wave of panic, I touched the bottom of the laptop. OW! Way too hot!!
I started a manual backup of the machine immediately, cursing aloud as the machine seemed to get slower and slower, then POOF, it turned off (probably due to thermal alarm). More cursing. Being a computer professional, I have redundant backups run daily, but I’d done substantial work since the backup ran (at 3 a.m.). I let the machine cool off and started assessing the completness of my backup from another machine: mostly there, but my beautiful new logo was nowhere to be found. On the Plan B.
After going to make lunch, I checked the laptop and found it had cooled tremendously. I started it up, blowing cool air into its vents myself (picture ‘computer CPR’ … or the adult version ,if you prefer). After 5 minutes of puffing and panting, I was able to copy the missing files from the laptop to a USB memory stick, gracefully shut down the laptop (before it overheated and before I hyperventilated), and continue working on the backup laptop. Total time lost: 3 hours!
To make matters worse, I was in ‘high gear’ with inspiration moving me along with web site revisions when the crisis struck. The lost hours wer bad enough (as I have so little spare time and my chase trip is only a few weeks off), but being dead in the water after getting so much done had completely shut down my creative juices. And I had to run the laptop across town to the computer repait shop to have its ‘fever’ looked at by my favorite local computer doctor.
Ain’t technology wonderful?
I got some of it finished, but much of it is pretty skeletal. TO look at it check out http://www.underthethunder.org/beta. (Your feedback is welcome, but try to be nice; I’ve had a rough day, especially for a non-work Saturday.)
Some Boring Preliminaries
Yawn! Trying to identify the right web authoring software. Looking at cheap/free stuff first. read “WebEasy7, WordPress, …” Once I find what i want, edits will go quickly, particularly since I have some idea how i want to ‘remodel’ the site.
CHASE2007 – PROLOGUE
Well, another season is upon us. So far this year is looking ominously like 1997: I waited until the bottom half of May and spectacular storms (like the EF-5 tornado that flattened Greensburg, KS) happened in the top half of May. In 1997, the atmospheric pattern fell apart, so there was nothing to chase. What’s worse is that the tour operator I signed up with neither offered to travel anyhow, nor refund my $500 deposit. I even went as far as sending the attorney general of Oklahoma after him (to no avail), as did another prospective storm tourist from New York (who was also cheated).Frown
It seems a trade-off for my rewarding job in downtown Chicago is a loss of flexibility in vacation scheduling, a definite handicap for the storm enthusiast. If I had the ability to trade vacation weeks on about a week’s notice, I would probably have more opportunities to look for the big storms. C’est la vie! If I had a job with that kind of flexibility, I might not be able to afford to chase often either. Like so much in life, we are both victors and victims of our compromises.
This year my planned chase vacation was to be a 10-day expedition with Scott Weberpal and three other chasers he invited to join us. I provide the van (and technology in the van) in exchange for a price break. I have also committed to do he lion’s share of the driving, allowing Scott to relax a bit and concentrate on forecasting and watching the sky. (I’ll watch, too, as well as form my own forecast, but Scott wll be the tie-breaker when our predictions disagree. His experience certainly justufies this approach.)
I have spent nearly every waking hour of non-work time working on getting the van and its technology in top shape. Over a hundred hours later, after much blood, sweat and tears, the van is ready to chase, and so am I. Tongue out
The communications gear is nestled in a new console, the new weather instruments are ready for the road, the broadband internet connection and laptop are working admirably, and the van had new brakes and tires ready for the open road.
Saturday (26 May 2007) looks like a day with a marginal chance to produce storms in eastern Iowa, and Scott is willing to meet me along the way, if conditions look favorable for good storms by late morning or early afternoon.
CHASE2002 – HANGING OUT IN OKC – Thursday, 02 May 2002
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HANGING OUT IN OKC Thursday 02 May 2002 |
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| TRAVEL | Oklahoma City, OK | ||||||||||||
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| ACCOMODATIONS | Holiday Inn, Airport 2101 S. Meridian Av. Oklahoma City, OK 73108 405-585-4000 1 night, 1 rm, 2 dbl beds COMMENTS: very cozy, but too close to the activities in the atrium (translation: VERY NOISY); the cool phone jack on the lamp at the desk had no connection, so I had my laptop on the spare bed and power connnected WAY across the room. Dial-up connection did fire up immediately on the first try, but the connections sprawled, dividing the room cleanly in two. Service was very polite and thorough. |
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