Amazing Journey

When I was 10 years old, my older brother had a "portable" record player up in his room. I used to take the speakers that could detach from the sides of the main unit, face them towards each other, and lie down between them to listen to music from Strauss to The Who.

The Who music, in particular, was Tommy, their concept album about a blind, deaf, and mute boy who nevertheless was a whiz at pinball and developed a following. I played the grooves off the album, and knew every word of the lyrics (still do). But much of it simply didn't make sense because there was no context to put the lyrics in.

Fast forward almost 40 (ouch!) years, and the Dallas Theater Center is putting on "The Who's Tommy", and we saw it on Friday night. It was awesome! A local rock band played the music; all the guitarists were wireless, and they and the band's vocalist walked around the multistory industrial stage and interacted with the cast while playing. The character Tommy aged by switching out boys-to-men wearing the same shirt as the musical progressed. The stage had water pouring into, around, and down onto it. And the lyrics to the songs finally make some kind of SENSE after all these years! We took our 14-year old to see it, and though reluctant at first ("It's a MUSICAL???"), he was a thorough convert by the end. I think we're going to try and catch one more performance before it closes.

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Avast!

I just discovered we're already halfway through International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Where's my eyepatch...

 

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VWS is both stupid and smart at the same time

I use Virtual Weather Station to upload weather station data to the web. It's obviously a home-grown program that's had various features bolted on, one after another. (I'm running version 13 and 14 is out.) I've wasted too many hours of the last 24 trying to get the page  uploads to work correctly, and just about given up. Now mysteriously http://www.deuby.com/weather (the default home page) is updating correctly and showing the correct location information...I have no idea why. So use that if you're looking.

At the same time, VWS does a great job collecting both weather station and Weather Underground data, posting, and displaying them.

And don't get me started on the Oregon Scientific weather station's RS232 serial port to communicate with the PC. When's the last time anyone used an RS232 port?

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Ike's a Coming

We're in the more or less direct path of Hurricane Ike, though several hundred miles inland. By the time it gets here we should see sustained winds of 40 - 60 MPH, from the north I expect, and 1 to 4 inches of rain in a 24 hours - a "good Texas thunderstorm" :). That's IF Ike passes to the east of us, which is apparently the weaker side, but there's no telling until it's closer. Most of them have so far.

Plus, it's massive. On the Weather Underground site, Dr. Jeff Masters argues that calling it a Category 1 or 2 hurricane is underselling it's potential for damage - most especially because of the storm surge, which is supposed to be GREATER than Katrina. He predicts the largest and longest power outage in Texas history, though he thinks Dallas will be on the fringes and not suffer major outages. (He's in Ann Arbor.) I highly recommend you read the posting.

If anyone's interested, I've got my weather station up and running, and it posts local data to http://www.deuby.com/weather/usa.htm every 5 minutes.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go mow the back yard and put some construction adhesive under shingles on a section of the roof where they keep blowing off...

Technorati Tags: Ike,Hurricane Ike,Dallas weather,weather station,Dallas,hurricane weather

Lost Out Of The Lot

I'm up in Seattle for the week, and I got here over the weekend to take part in some festivities - some hiking, an Earl Klugh concert at Chateau St. Michelle winery, some wine releases at local Woodinville wineries. In other words, a strenuous few days :).

My friends Craig and Deb Hovey, my sister-in-law Cheryl, and I got together on Saturday morning to go hiking out in the Cascades out east of Mount SI. We took off out of the very basic parking area along the trail, with another party of 4 hot on our heels.

Surprisingly, the trail wasn't very heavily used for the good period of nice weather that preceded our hike. We didn't think too much about it until we got fairly far up the mountain...and the trail just petered out. For the next hour or so, both parties of four wandered around on the slopes of this mountain, into and out of the forested slopes, looking for something a bit bigger than game tracks. Thank goodness I had my GPS with me. I didn't have specific trail maps for the area, but I could see where we had come from - and how we were crisscrossing our tracks! Finally, we ran out of time and made our way down, me in the lead with the GPS. I swear even though I was looking right at our tracks they were barely recognizable.

Finally one of the other party figured it out. We weren't on a groomed trail at all; THAT trail led from another trailhead about 100 feet up the road from the parking lot. We'd wandered off what looked like a trailhead - probably from all the other hikers that have been lost off the parking lot. Indeed, we intercepted three other hikers and turned them around with us in the time we walked back to the lot! Oh well, at it makes for an interesting story...