The WX Station reporting to Weather Underground for Wicker Park, along with its respective camera, will be going down in the next 24 hours to prepare for relocation.
There is currently no ETA for either to return.
Using Google Sky, I actually feel the urge to keep zooming endlessly.
Well, that was a fun ride. Before the storm took down the weather station on our roof, we recorded a gust of 41.6mph—although I’d say the gust that really brought it down was probably closer to 55-60mph. I managed to bring it back up within 15 minutes once the storm calmed down a bit.
There are some trees down and other miscellaneous damage here in the Wicker Park area, but nothing incredibly serious as far as I can tell. Other areas were affected quite a bit more.
7:12pm Update: Second round is coming through currently; it also appears the rain gauge jammed—a first. Rather frustrating, that. Looks like I’ll have to get back out there and take care of it when the weather settles. This storm’s not as powerful as the first go-around in terms of wind, but there’s far more lightning associated with it.
This weekend was pretty productive — on domestic projects. As my wife and I have up until this weekend been using cell phones that in “cell years” would be somewhere around 75 years old (approximately 5 human years), we decided to trade them out: I got a Motorola RAZR v3m
There’s something about going through a serious technological leap (such as these new cell phones) that lends itself to wasting the subsequent three hours messing with the new features just because you can. And that’s just what we did.
I know I mentioned domestic productivity earlier. Well, we did buy a new vacuum and get some work done around the apartment. I swear.
Later this week, the weather station mount and shield I ordered last week from Ambient Weather should arrive, allowing me to finally get the weather station I mentioned online and loading weather data to Weather Underground.
Wired still has it on their site after more than two months. Slashdot isn’t backing down, either. However, Digg is currently being overrun by posts and comments containing the (somewhat) recently-discovered HD-DVD hex code in response to an executive decision to start wiping the offending code from both comments and articles. It appears to be a surreal cat-and-mouse game, as front-page articles that advertise having 250+ comments are whittled down to zero by the time one opens the comment thread.
(Of course, taking things up a notch into the “obvious lawsuit” realm, there’s already a domain begging for its imminent demise.)
On the Internet, overall this actually constitutes an interesting night. Kinda. If people were really into messing with “the system”, though, they’d just bury the hex in some random photo using a freeware steganography suite and distribute the image widely.
Update: Digg has relented.
Well, since the sale involving much of my video game collection has been going so well, I decided it was time to start upgrading my old desktop PC — a Dell Dimension 3000 I got for free from those “referral” deals a few years back — and give it some new life. (It’s not really a bad machine, actually.)
Here’s the rundown of what all I’ve picked up for less than $200 total:
- 320GB Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive
- 250GB Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive
- VisionTek Xtasy Theater 550 Pro
- External USB Hard Drive Enclosure
- 8-Port USB 2.0 (5 ports) and Firewire (3 Ports) PCI Card (replacing the separate USB 2.0 and Firewire cards currently installed)
Not a bad set of grabs, really. Looks like I’ll be a busy guy this week getting it all set up (in between the myriad of other things I’ve got on my plate).
Having recently picked up a cheap wireless 1.2Ghz CCTV unit and receiver combo, I decided to fiddle with the webcam space here on the site and implement a smoother solution that didn’t require an entire page reload every time a new image was uploaded. Every 20 seconds, it’ll now update automatically — assuming there’s a new picture — in a pretty subtle fashion.
Right now, the camera unit sits on a ledge outside the 4th (attic) floor window of our apartment, pointed down our somewhat sleepy road toward Division Street. The relative brightness of the closest tree compared to its surroundings is due to the decent onboard infrared LED array bouncing its light off the branches. The feed comes through the receiver directly into a old ATI TV Wonder VE VisionTek Xtasy Theater 550 Pro capture card; the image is then processed and uploaded using the freeware webcam app Fwink every 20 seconds.
That lone dot in the upper-left corner at night? It’s the Sears Tower.
The trip with my wife to Chicago over the weekend went well. We signed a 13-month lease for a great apartment in the heart of Wicker Park yesterday, and we’ve only got a few weeks left until the day of the move is here.
Until then, expect a little less activity from me (as if it could be any slower). XBMC-TV was updated again today, but I’m holding off on the release until later this week when I have time to do it properly. Thanks for all the feedback and interest in my obscure little project!
I’m the proud owner and maintainer of the only website dedicated to the small village of Butte des Morts, WI 54927, population 378. I visited my grandparents in the village every summer from ’85-‘95, and lived there in ’96-‘97. Really good folks there, the majority of ‘em.
One might ask why I’d even bother, but it’s part of a larger idea I’m fleshing out. Slowly but surely. That and, when I went to find information on the town, not one site gave me a good roundup. The .com address had already been taken, so I snagged .net and .org while I went looking for domains the other day.
So, this is my way of giving something back.
1. Anyone who addresses themselves as ‘Posty McPosterson’.
2. Anyone who can’t figure out the difference between affect and effect.
3. Those banal ‘quizzes’ passing themselves off as memes.
Stop it.
Sadly, one of our two cats, Oscar, had to be put down on Saturday night due to a severe case of Feline Urological Syndrome. He’d been a faithful office-dweller and had honed his skills of getting attention through being by our side over the years. We already miss his distinctive personality around the apartment, from his paranoid mentality, to the way he’d nip at my elbows just to get attention while I worked. The remaining cat, Dante, looked rather lost most of Saturday night wondering where his lifelong buddy went.
I came home to find Oscar in very sad shape earlier that day; hiding from everyone and crying in a heartwrenching way I’d never experienced before. After rushing him to the vet in a thunderstorm and receiving the diagnosis, my wife and I realized there wasn’t much we could have reasonably done to keep him alive and had him put down rather than suffer.
Coming to that decision was the hardest thing we’ve ever done; rationally, however, we already knew in the back of our heads the answer before we even deliberated.
It wasn’t a good weekend.
Comedy Central says it. HowardStern.com says it. Several other people I know have apparently confirmed it through calls to venues he was supposed to appear at soon. Here’s another link. His official site is mum, even though he had someone else updating it — so it should have been updated.
Update: He’s confirmed to have passed away:
Hedberg, whose space-case persona was as much part of his soul as it was his act, died early Wednesday morning in a New Jersey hotel room. He was 37. A medical examiner hasn’t issued findings, but Hedberg’s family is told he suffered a heart attack. His wife was with him.
God damn, it’s another comedic supernova — another comedian taken in his prime. He was my favorite, perhaps of all-time. His off-kilter delivery of humor and his general demeanor were immensely likeable, and he surely leaves a massive void in many comedy circles. I’m just glad I got to see him live back in 2003; it was a show we almost missed.
Mitch and his legion of fans had a hell of a lot to look forward to:
His stand-out performances secured a development deal with FOX to create his own sitcom and prompted TIME magazine to include him as one of the next generation of comedy stars and The Hollywood Reporter to headline their review of the Festival, “Laughs are Loudest for Hedberg.” Mitch also recently completed a reality show pilot for MTV.
In tribute, here’s one of my favorite one-offs:
“I like cinnamon rolls, but I don’t always have time to make a pan. That’s why I wish they would sell cinnamon roll incense. Perhaps I’d rather light a stick and have my roommate wake up with false hopes.”
F*CK. Site’s going black for the day.
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