House of the rising Moonglum

So I’m a big fan of the weather channel radar widget. Living in Chicago I guess I have to be obsessed with the weather. Working from home, I am especially interested in it since I don’t really experience it first hand any more. So I have my weather widget (built in) that gives me the current weather and five days in the future. I have my indoor outdoor thermometer (actual thermometer, not in the computer!) if I don’t trust that OHare is the same as Roger’s Park (which it often isn’t). I also have a window, but looking outside isn’t much help as those who know the deceptively sunny winter days in Chicago. All that aside, I checked out the doppler radar when I was shocked to see some lines across the map:

Those are way to long to be tornado tracks and they never put front lines on these maps. That is the first time I have ever seen them and I have been using this radar for years. Thoughts on what they could be?

My Treo crashed while ringing. As far as I can tell someone called it and hung up right away. It just kept playing and playing. Since it crashed there were no inputs, so I couldn’t “answer” or hang up or turn it off. I was on another phone call at the time (on my land line) which added another layer of complexity and urgency to solving the problem. Oh yeah, and it was on vibrate.

I ended up popping the battery and hitting the reset button.

But now I will have the cosmo canyon theme song (midi (how do they do that bend in midi?!), lemme know if you find a non-remix mp3. Update: Got it!) running through my head for the rest of the day.

I’ve been negligent in posting about international news, in part because there has been so much local news. However I like to bring forward good news wherever possible, and I just saw some excellent news from Lebanon. As most of you know, Lebanon is a multi ethnic, multi religious, modern state tucked carefully between Syria and Israel. Because of this, everyone and their dog has a hand in the pot in that country. In particular March 14th, the current government, on the one side and Syrian and Iranian backed Hizbullah on the other. (Funny how a common enemy, Israel, will bring adversaries together.) Many in March 14th feel that Hizbullah incited Israel to attack in the disastrous war last year. Unfortunately since Hizbullah has tons of money from Iran, they have been doing a lot of the reconstruction taking away legitimacy from the democratically elected government.

Of course there both sides are backed by numerous conflicting internal groups, making the country very volatile. And to top it all off, the government is currently trying to enact an international tribunal to implicate Syria in the assassination of the Lebanese PM who was trying to remove Lebanon from the Syrian yoke of oppression. This environment has led to much violence and a number of bombings.

The good news is that it appears that the Lebanese police were able to capture the perpetrators of the most heinous of the bombings. This is extremely important for March 14th, though contrary to what Mustapha says I don’t believe that this will end speculation that the Americans and Israelis were behind it (Update: apparently neither does he). If you are into that kind of “the powerful are super-competent” conspiracy theory in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (see Israel’s war last year and our war in Iraq) something as simple as a confession isn’t going to change your mind. The important thing is that numerous future terrorist plots were stopped.

Yet another way to get off call non do not call call lists…

I work from home and so I often answer my phone with my ‘business name’. Today they called me and asked if this was a place of business. I replied, “um, sort of…”. They responded, “oh, we’ll take that number off our list so we don’t bother you any more.” Heh. So they admit that they are bothering people!

My agents inside the music industry have informed me that Lordi, Finnish monster metal sensation, who has appeared here before, is coming to the USA and will be playing the METRO on the 27th of April!!!

I might be too old to show up at that concert, but I hope not! (Shameful Confession: the reason I think I might be too old is that I told a bunch of kids who were playing on my roof to stop the other day. My responsible side said that I didn’t want them to fall off, but the kid in me was kicking myself for stopping their game of tag. To make matters worse, I even used the phrase “the roof is not a playground.” *sigh*)

Well at least we are all in agreement. I have never seen such a lopsided poll on CNN.com. It seems that everyone agrees that our dependence on oil decreases our security. Nonetheless, those SUVs keep selling.

Anyone who knows me a little bit, knows that I am a bit of a map lover (neither cartophile nor chartophile are in the OED). Anyone who knows me well knows that I LOVE maps. So I am pretty much a fan of the google maps. I have been using it for years (MapQuest before that) and have generally come to trust it. In particular it’s directions tend to be superb. So Imagine my surprise when I was plotting a trip to Indy and the address that I was supposed to be going to didn’t exist. Somewhat humorously the satellite imagery is more recent than their map data:

It’s not the missing roads that bother me so much as the missing connectivity. I can go straight up Woodland, I don’t need to go up Zionville. I guess NavTeq needs more employees in Indianapolis. Fortunately for my work, county boundaries don’t change that often.

Hey all you people who are going to be asking me for computer help next week. Don’t forget to let your auto-update run. You will probably be fine anyway since most computers deal with incorrect dates and times, however there are some things that may become more difficult. As such these updates will let your computers know that DST has changed.

A note on time: The sun is not overhead at noon (though it is close). Unless you live on 24 very precise sections of the earth, the sun is directly overhead at some time within a half hour of noon. Not only that, but those sections of the earth move from day to day! To see how far off you are, check out the Analemma for your location. Time is just a way of coming up with a common consensus for when we need to do certain things. It turns out that changing that common consensus is much more difficult than simply changing the time. (Also, Ben Franklin was an understated, sarcastic prat, which is probably why I like him so much.)

Wow, the New Horizons spacecraft is really cooking. I didn’t realize that it was going to get to Jupiter in just over a year. Pluto is a long way away, but I figured on a 20 year trip or something like that, just 10 years? Well, it won’t be there for very long, but it has a fairly impressive primary mission in the Kupier Belt as well. Figuring out how the Kupier belt objects are formed will help us deal with it if we ever need to nudge one out of the way. In any case, we get nice pictures of volcanoes on Io in the meantime.

That’s what seems to be left over on the local blogs after the election. I think I’ll just talk to my neighbors in person and try to bring them around. And speaking of silly elections, I know precinct by precinct how we voted on the alderman question, what ever happened to that poorly worded, non binding ballot initiative on the lakefront? I would think it would be being touted one way or the other if it went through….

Last opened… 4/13/06. I cam this || close to deleting it. But it lives on. The thing I really wish I could delete is OS 9. I could do a reinstall of the entire system, but who has the time for that?

I just got a letter from ComEd today trying to sell me on a rate deferral plan. This pisses me off. They are playing off the consumer culture that has permeated the USA and this idiotic notion that paying later is a fine way to be able to afford something that you can’t afford now. If you can’t afford the extra $14.40 a month now, you WILL NOT be able to afford the extra $80.00 come the end of the year. I suppose if you were to take a little extra money each month and stick it into a money market account that made more than the 3.25% interest that ComEd is charging you for your loan, you could do ok. But make no mistake, ComEd is giving you a loan. You are increasing your bill even more by taking advantage of it. They make it look like they are giving you $8.40 off your bill, but you still have to pay it… with interest.

This is a self serving ploy on the part of ComEd to take some of the heat off themselves for increasing rates 24%. And then to have the gall to charge interest on top of it. The only people who are going to fall for this ploy are the ones who can least afford it. If they really cared about their public image they would have amortized their total rate increase over the next 5 years. Of course maybe this is the amortized rate… now that would be scary.