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Hurricane Omar has been an interesting storm and shows how quickly these storms can change.  It looked pretty good on satellite yesterday with deep convection.  Early this morning its intensity peaked at almost category four.  I really would’ve never expected that.  They plane this morning reported hail and couldn’t get into the entire storm due to extreme turbulence.  The National Hurricane Center estimated the storm peaked at category 4 status.

Things change and now the storm is not down to 85 miles per hour with the convection pretty much gone from the center of the storm. and the center is exposed on visible satellite pictures  It’s amazing how  quickly things can change.  This weakening has pretty much happened in just an eight hour time period.

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After the tropics got fairly quiet we now have Tropical Storm Marco in the Gulf of Mexico.  It’s not that strong but very interesting still.  It’s tiny.  The smallest storm I remember seeing and they’re saying tropical storm force winds only extend out 10 miles from the center.

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NASA’s Phoenix Lander Might Peek Under a Rock

I thought this was really pretty interesting.  It must be pretty cool to work on this and try to come up with a way to make the lander’s robotic arm perform a task it wasn’t designed to do.  To me it would be a great challenge to make it do something that is so simple that we take it for granted yet in reality a complex task and break it down into commands.

It would also be interesting to see what they find  under the rock.

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Hurricane Ike which was only a category 2 storm made landfall in Texas and moved  north through the Ohio valley yesterday proves that the rating doesn’t tell the whole story.  They’re saying it caused 30 billion dollars n damage and has caused at least 30 fatalities.

From what I’ve read it brought  in a  pretty high storm surge over a large area.  What really made this storm was the size of it I think.  Instead of getting stronger winds it expanded in size after hitting Cuba and looked like at one point it was affecting almost the entire Gulf of Mexico

Even after landfall it’s fast speed and taking a while to wind down brought strong winds all the way into the Great lakes states as it merged with a cold front.  It was an amazing storm to watch.

I think a lesson to learn from this storm is that it’s probably not a good idea to build on barrier islands but we’ll never learn that.  I really would never want to have my permanent house on one of these types of islands.

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I had to sign into Microsoft live today for some reason.  Well being visually impaired like I am makes the graphical ones hard to read.  Usually it takes me a bunch of tries to get it right which really is an inconvenience but it’s the normal thing now.

As usual reading the text really sucked.  I happened to mouse over an icon that was too small for me to really tell what it was but the title said “use audio mode”  I thought how great!  I’ll be able to actually do what I need to do with out a bunch of failed attempts.  I was in for a surprise.  It harder for me to understand the audio than it was to struggle to read the text.  The voice was distorted and hard to understand.  To add to that they had another “voice” to throw off automated programs.

Oh well.. Back to trying to guess from the picture which luckily only took 2 tries.  It was one of the easier ones to read with high contrast.

It really irks me that with all the technology which should increase accessibility they have to do such annoying things to stop spammers and other people who up to no good.  There has to be a better way.  Let’s face it.  They get through anyways so why go through so much trouble and waste other people’s time to do nothing in the long run?

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Hurricane Ike has maximum sustained winds near 100 miles per hour right now but the real story is it’s size.  It’s a big storm with hurricane force winds extending up to 115 miles from the center.   Tropical storm force winds extend up to 255 miles from the center.

The minimum pressure (945 millibars) is borderline low enough to support a category 4 storm but I imagine the size of the whole storm is keeping the gradient from being tight enough to cause the winds.

Another interesting storm for this year.

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I had read about Google chrome and just had to try it out.  I would’ve tried it sooner but I kept forgetting to boot into windows.  I always like to try different things.  I first tried to use it under wine but that didn’t work out for me.  I’ll try again another time.

I was disappointed right from the beginning.  No menus?  No title bar?  That really takes away from the usability for me and just isn’t how I prefer things to be.  I only really tried it for five minutes or so and just wasn’t right for my needs.

With no title bar I guess it’s OK to make it look clean and all but it’s how I know which program the window belongs to. Imagine how confusing it could be if all of your program you have running would have a ui designed like this.  To some the lack of a title bar is a good thing because they just take up space for them.

No menu bar?  I really don’t like this at all.  I pretty much expect all programs to have a menu bar and know where to expect to find different options or features.  After a few wrong guesses I found out how to find preferences in order to find out if I can set my own back round colors and fonts for pages but I didn’t see that option.  That is what would really stop me from using it.

What I did notice is it loads very fast and is fast with opening the few sites I tried.  I will try it again in the future for sure.

No addons like Firefox has is a disadvantage for me too.  I’ve grown used to using and being able to find addons for just about anything I might want to do.

It’s certainly different than what I’m used.  It’s not really a bad thing but just doesn’t fit what I want.  I’ll stick with firefox.  It’s good to see something else out there.  Maybe it’ll help encourage  innovation.  The other thing is that Chrome is still a beta version.  Time will tell how it really turns out.

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Today is the day LHC goes on line for testing.  I’ve been looking forward to seeing what we can learn from this massive machine.  It’ll probably create more mysteries than it solves.  Will it confirm our current theories or prove them wrong or  make no difference at all?  This is real science.

It’s not going to create a black hole that will destroy the earth.   Even if there was a small risk of that happening I believe the risk would be worth it to expand our  knowledge.  I really wish science was a big priority for funding.

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That was a pretty good line of storms for this time in the day and year.  I don’t think it approached severe criteria in my back yard but still we had a nice very heavy wind driven rain.  It got as dark as it would be about 8:30 pm as the storms moved in.  Just before the rain started I noticed low level clouds racing across the sky from west to east.  The line heald together as it crossed the river better than any I remember of this season too.  We even had lots of lightning.

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Today is going to be a good day. 7:40 in the morning and there appears to be some pretty strong thunderstorms moving towards us.  Not bad for September.  The other nice thing about these storms is it seems like a pretty solid area of storms so I don’t expect to be just missed by them like my area was all summer.

Some counties west of here have already had severe thunderstorm warnings due to the storms.  Radar was saying they were capable of producing quarter sized hail.

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