It hasn’t been that big a deal for me here in Boca. Windy and rainy, but nothing damaged, and not so windy that I can’t go outside. We lost power this morning for a few minutes, but not long enough to knock down the computers on the UPS. And the pool is full, which is always good.
Category Archives: Administrative
To Shutter, Or Not To Shutter?
I don’t have to decide today–it looks like it will still be far enough away tomorrow morning, with a better track, to make the decision then. Right now, I’m inclined not to, even though we’re still in the uncertainty cone (but over at the eastern edge of it). Most of the models, other than GFDL, have the thing out in the Gulf or along the west coast of the state. We are on a tropical storm watch on the east coast from Jupiter south, but that’s all.
The best outcome overall (other than completely falling apart) would be for it to come up through the swamp and run up the middle of the state, where it would weaken pretty quickly. If it stays out in the Gulf and hits farther north, it could intensify and really pound wherever it comes ashore. Either way, though, barring some dramatic shift in conditions, it looks like we’re in for rain and tropical-force winds, at worst, over here on the east coast. That’s a lot better than it looked a few days ago, when it looked like it might have come right at us through the Bahamas.
[Early afternoon update]
Well that’s good news. Jeff Masters says that this won’t be another Charley, despite the similarity in track. One thing that I notice a lot of the weather people talking about are the sea surface temperatures, but they are ignoring the fact that the upper-level winds aren’t that favorable for intensification.
[Update at 4:30 PM EDT]
The latest model run (2 PM) has moved it farther to the west, which is bad news for the panhandle, but good news for south Florida. Unless they’re all wrong, this thing isn’t heading to southeast Florida, and we may not even get much in the way of wind, though we could use the rain. There’s actually an outer band moving through Miami-Dade on the radar right now. Hope it makes it up through Broward and into south Palm Beach County.
[5 PM update]
Heh. The headline of one of the stories over at Accuweather is “Florida Approaching Land.”
A lot of people who bought swampland down here probably wish that it would do it faster. Now, if they could just give the place a few mountains. Or even hills.
In “The Swamp
Obviously, it was supposed to be “Fay,” not “Florida.”
[Update a few minutes later]
That was quick. Good thing I caught the screenshot. It now says “Fay Approaching Land.”
[Update about 6 PM EDT]
OK, it looks like shuttering tomorrow is definitely off the table. The track, per the models I described above, no longer has us even within the cone. I expect some wind and rain (which we need) but nothing more at this point. The only preparation I did this weekend was to fill up the tank of the car, and it looks like that’s all I’m going to do for Fay.
But the hurricane season is still young, and we’re heading into the heart of it. It’s particularly problematic because I’m going to be in LA for the last week of August and the first week of September, which is one of the highest-probability times for major storms here. I may have to shutter up before I leave, just as a precaution.
[Update a half hour later]
The first squall line from the storm is approaching. Unfortunately, I don’t have a camera handy, but it’s looking ugly to the south, and the winds are picking up (and the local radar confirms it). We just put in a new tree, which needs watering every day. I’ve put off doing it all day, in anticipation of this.
[Tuesday morning update]
We didn’t actually get much rain from that squall line last night, but about 8:30 this morning, the heavens opened up. The rain’s been hard and steady for an hour now. Guess I didn’t need to water that satin leaf.
I should note that Brendan Loy’s Weather Nerd blog is the go-to place for blogging the storm.
As he notes, it’s kind of good news, bad news. The good news is that it’s shifted eastward, and will hit Florida sooner, which means it won’t have much time to develop. The bad news (for me) is that it will affect the east coast much more than anticipated. Hope I won’t regret not shuttering, because it’s too late to do so now, unless I want to attempt it in wind and rain. The rains have come sooner than I expected, and a wind gust has already blown off a down spout that I hadn’t properly tied to the wall. If I get a break, I might try to fix it later today, though it’s not a big problem–just blasting water against the front wall.
Good For Me
But bad for the Gulf coast. All of the models for Fay have shifted the track west, and it now looks unlikely that it will hit southeast Florida, so I probably won’t have to put up the shutters on Monday. Still need to keep an eye on it, though.
[Late morning update]
That was the 2 AM runs. The 8 AM model update has it coming back slightly to the east, over the Florida peninsula, with GFDL just to the west of us, which is a little too close for comfort. But still, no decision before Monday.
Time To Dig Out The Shutters?
I’ve been keeping an eye on that disturbance in the Atlantic for a few days, but it’s starting to look like there’s a chance of a hurricane here early next week. The models are all showing it curving to the north off the coast, and missing Florida, but the models aren’t to be trusted this far out. I may have to shutter up on Sunday.
[Update early afternoon]
This morning’s model runs have it heading across the top of the greater Antilles, and then tearing up through the Bahamas. Except for GFDL, which has it heading right up the Florida east coast, starting in northern Palm Beach County, and then right up to the Cape, four and a half days from now (i.e., late Monday). Despite my earlier musings on the palliative effects on space policy from a Kennedy Center hurricane, I hope it’s wrong.
Firefox Problem
I tend to have a couple dozen tabs (in multiple instances) of Firefox running at any given time. But I’ve noticed (at least in Windows) that sometimes the program will start to saturate the CPU, and take forever to reload a site, or even to switch from one tab to another. When I shut down the program, the CPU usage goes from a hundred percent to a few percent. But when I reload it, with all previous tabs restored, it shoots back up to a hundred. I suspect that it’s just one of the tabs that’s causing the problem, but the Windows task manager can’t provide any insight, because it’s happening inside the application.
It would be really nice if the Firefox folks would put in a diagnostic tool that would tell which open tab, or tabs, was causing the problem, so that one could just close that one without having to kill the whole program. It’s really made it almost unusable until I can figure out which one it is. Or just start over, but keeping them open is my way of bookmarking items for later blogging.
Fedora Diagnostics
Pete Zaitcev asked for a screen shot. Here are two.
This is the screen where it hangs up for several minutes before going into install mode.
And this one is the cryptic message that I get. I have no idea what it’s looking for here.
New Fedora Laptop Issue
OK, when we last left our intrepid laptop, it couldn’t install Fedora. Following advice in comments there, I tried a live version of Ubuntu, and it had no problem, other than telling me that it didn’t have an open-source driver for the WLAN. Then I tried Fedora again. It hung up as it did before, but I went away and ignored it, and when I came back after a while, it had finally booted into the installer. Apparently I just hadn’t been patient enough the last time.
Now, after selecting languages, it gives me a message saying “No driver found” It tells me that there is no driver for this installation for the device, and asks me if I want to install manually, or if I have a disk. When I try installing manually, it gives me a drop-down list of every driver for every device known to Linus. The only problem is that it doesn’t tell me what device is causing the heartburn.
Any suggestions? I’m guessing that it might be the wireless, because of the message on Ubuntu, but who knows?
[Update a few minutes later]
The exact (cryptic) message is “Unable to find device type needed for this installation type.”
Huh?
Back To The Sunshine State
I’m catching a plane back to Florida in a bit, so probably no more posting until tomorrow, since I don’t get in until late tonight. I get to go through DFW, so they get (at least) two chances to lose my suitcase this time. But they apparently only need one.
[Saturday morning update]
Arrived late last night, with suitcase. Now to catch up on all the things that didn’t happen while I was out of town.
It’s Healed!
Miraculously (and mysteriously), my internal wireless adaptor started working yesterday. Unfortunately, that gives me one less excuse to return the laptop.
I still have to figure out what to do about Linux. Also, I’m unimpressed with Vista so far. Last night, the machine crawled almost to a halt. It’s a 2 GHz Turion with three gigs of RAM. It took forever for task manager to load, and it provided no information as to which process was causing the problem, but the CPU was saturated. I couldn’t even shut down applications, or the computer itself. I eventually had to just power it down. It’s been OK since I rebooted into safe mode, and then rebooted again, but I have no idea what was going on.
Off to California
Hopefully I’ll be checking in tonight.