Toys and tools

Good afternoon. Notice that there is a little sun in the above weather icon. I should point out that this is what we call a rare weather event. We’re all quite awed by the wondrous sight!

I learned a couple of days ago that lack of sunshine may cause brain cells to shrink. Apparently this news helps to explain why many people get the winter blues. Once the days grow longer, the shrinkage is supposed to reverse itself. But, it helps to have some sunlight—which we haven’t had in several weeks. So when the sun pokes its head out from behind the clouds, it’s probably a good idea to go out and do some basking. Or yard work. I can already feel my head getting bigger!

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Today is, officially, the first day of the 2005 Hurricane season. Isn’t that swell news? So far, there’s nothing to report, but the clouds pouring off the west coast of the African continent are still impressive. I’ve been watching the route they travel and now would like to make a request of Mother Nature—could you please drop the jet stream a little lower so all those clouds don’t end up over my house?

Over the last couple of days, I’ve updated/reconstituted my weather page. I found a few neat new toys to display for the advancement of weather monitoring. It’s not enough for some of us to simply peer out the window to see what it’s doing out there. And, of course, there is more than just weather to keep an eye on, like local tides and the moon. If you look at the tides schedules, you might notice that the days when the tides change are also the days when the moon either is full, new, first, or last quarter. It’s an interesting visual confirmation that the moon does, indeed, have a direct effect on the tides.

The section that I am rather pleased with is the Atlantic Tropical Storms/Hurricane section. The National Weather Service/Hurricane Center offers a news feed of the daily tropical outlook and storm activity (you can find details on the weather page). The news feed is updated four times a day. Along with that are a couple of nice maps of the Atlantic basin—one is animated and the other static. Both are updated hourly.

One of my new toys might be useful to others who would like to display rss news feeds on their web pages, but either don’t know how or dislike the format offered by the newsfeed providers. headlinedepot.com allows you to customize the way a newsfeed is presented on your page. They make it very easy. You plug in the news feed url and then you can format the width and colors and fonts of the presentation to your own liking. I chose a fairly tame presentation, though it matches my web page colors, but if you’d like to see how another weather geek set his up, check out Earth Log II. He was much more creative with his feeds. Nice. (Headlinedepot is not just for weather feeds, of course.)

And that, as they say, is that. For the moment.