Friday, August 26, 2005
I had a decent title for this when I thought of making the post, but I've lost the thought since then …
Well, Hurricane Katrina was certainly anti-climatic. I first heard about it ealier this week, but unlike the past few hurricanes, it was still a tropical storm and would only become a hurricane just prior to landfall. I was expecting some bad weather very late Thursday and throughout Friday, but the timing was a bit off.
The worst came throughout late Thursday, and given that Hurricane Katrina hit land just south of Ft. Lauderdale, a good fourty miles to the south, we just got some stiff breezes and some light rain here at Casa New Jersey. That's the good news.
The bad news—I was hoping to get Friday off from work, but seeing how Hurricane Katrina was already offshore by the time I got up, workbound I was.
Fortunately, the office is very quiet today and it appears that most people have today off anyway. Now it's just a regular muggy Auguest afternoon in South Florida.
In looking over the satellite loops of Hurricane Katrina, I'm struck by the fact that as a hurricane, it was a rather poorly defined one (at least, as it went over South Florida)—no real eye developed and except for possibly some hurricane force winds (sustained 74 mph) between Ft. Lauderdale and Miami, it was nothing more than a really bad storm. I do wonder if conditions in the mid-Atlantic are less favorable to hurricane formation now. We're almost half-way through the season and Katrina is the 11th storm so far. Is there still enough energy in the mid-Atlantic to sustain more hurricanes this season? (for comparrison, back in 1992, the first storm of the season, Hurricane Andrew, formed in mid-August).
It takes quite a bit of energy to feed a hurricane, and while there's another storm that might get named in the mid-Atlantic, it's been that way for a few days now (with the National Hurricane Center labelling it a “possibility in 36 hours” for the past three days) and I have to wonder if there's anything left in the mid-Atlantic to give, energy wise.
Then again, I'm not a meterologist …
Google is acting like a female dog, and I don't mean that in a good way either
Google is being annoying today.
I'm used to doing a search (like, for Miami, Florida) and being able to copy a link directly from the results page. Occasionally Google will link to the result through itself, like:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//www.ci.miami.fl.us/&ei=ZXcPQ62OKY78sQH2qfmsCg
Annoying when it happens, but if I do the search over again, the results page will have the links going directly to the results, as in:
http://www.ci.miami.fl.us/
But not today.
Today, no matter how many times I restart my search, clear the cookies, click on the munged link or what have you, Google is insistent upon returning the annoying links that are useless to blogging. And to make matters worse, there's JavaScript in the results page to munge the status bar at the bottom of the browser (in Firefox, hoving over a link will show the URL in the status bar) so it's not readily apparent what's going on.
Come on Google, cut it out! You, of all companies, are supposed to be above such things …
Quiet time
Yes, I've been quiet for the past week or so. For two reasons:
Both items have been sucking up vast amounts of time, but in a good way.
That's why I've been rather quiet here.
A little bit about a little Mac
Smirk misunderstood an entry I made last week, thinking that I wanted to keep the Mac mini I was testing for work. He went ahead and ordered the PS/2 to USB adaptor (and a few extras for the office) so I could use a real keyboard (along with DoubleCommand since the IBM keyboards I use don't have Windows keys).
At that point, I figured I was having so much fun with the Mac that I might as well keep it, seeing how it was below steet price to begin with.
But that wasn't my intent with the entry. At the time, I was cursing the keyboard I was using and wishing I could use an IBM PS/2 keyboard. It was then I decided to search Google for a “PS/2 to USB adaptor” and lo'—there it was.
So I really meant: “Ask Google, and ye shall receive.” Not “ask Smirk, and ye shall keep.”
But I kept the Mac mini anyway.
