News 14 Carolina, Time-Warner’s recently-hacked news channel, has two good accounts of the twenty-two strong tornadoes that swept the state on March 28th, 1984.

Reading parts one and two give a sense of just how far we’ve come in being able to predict them, though that doesn’t make them any less scary:

“Literally, the whole warning philosophy was that you didn’t want to issue a tornado warning unless you definitely knew that there was one on the ground,” said Jeff Orrock of the National Weather Service. “We really didn’t try to forecast severe weather back then, it was more of a reaction type thing.”

The weather this week is “unstable,” which can sometimes produce severe storms. We’re approaching the time of year when these storms can pop up. Makes me glad I’m a volunteer with Skywarn, the eyes and ears of the National Weather Service during severe weather.

Did I really just go over thirty hours without a post? You’d think I was busy or something.

I spent the evening as officer of the deck of the USS Hallie while Kelly went to her board meeting. The watch was mostly uneventful, except for the time my ship ran aground. I was finishing up my dinner (soup! yay!) with Hallie playing in the den. Then I heard a thump. I ran in to find her sprawled out on the underside of her step stool, its plastic edges pressing into her ribs and back.
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I wrote a lengthy bit on a heavy topic about secrets tonight, then decided it was better suited for my alter-ego site, Mindblogging.com.

Click over if you want to learn a secret about secrets.

Let’s see. CompUSA has a Seagate 200GB drive for $99, after rebates.

Kelly and I own in the neighborhood of, oh, say 500 compact discs. Each holds an average of 600 MB of music in CDDA format. Shorten losslessly compresses music to roughly half its original size.

500 x 600 MB = 300,000 MB / 2 = 150,000 MB * (1/1000) = 150 GB.

I could store all of our music digitally in lossless format, and still have 50 gigs left to play with. It may finally be time to build the Mother Of All Audio Servers. Continue reading →

Jamie Gaines, one of the few, the proud readers of MT.net, alerted me to this story of how John McCain (why isn’t he president?) is prodding the cable industry to quit masking the price of cable channels through their tier packages. He’s drafting a bill to force cable and satellite providers to offer a la carte pricing.

Says McCain:

“When I go to the grocery store to buy a quart of milk, I don’t have to buy a package of celery and a bunch of broccoli,” McCain said. “I don’t like broccoli.”

This is long overdue, of course. To the point that it may not go far enough. Now that Tivo has made a la carte shows a reality, I’d like to see this being offered. Then, we could cut out the middlemen and buy our shows straight from the production companies.

Cable beats broadcast. Satellite beats cable. The duo of DVR and a-la carte shows will beat them all.

The television channel is now redundant.

I got a new check card in the mail this week, thanks to a security breach this month at B.J.’s Wholesale Club. It seems some script kiddies spent time in the parking lot, capturing unencrypted point-of-sale 802.11b traffic (my speculation only, as I can’t find many details on the actual attack). Their haul was a few hundred card numbers at the most, but enough to get the attention of BJ’s and many banks.

Odds that our card number was swiped are pretty low, considering the theft occured at only a few stores. Still, it shows that many retailers and other businessess aren’t taking the most basic care to keep your data safe.

Now would be a good time to hang out your shingle if you were in the security business. I guarantee you won’t be bored.

All of this aside, I’ve long had a beef with just how insecure credit cards are in general. With the advent of smartcards and digital cash, you’d think we’d be so far beyond this by now.

Spent a good part of the weekend resting up in front of NCAA basketball. I was on the fence as to who I wanted to win yesterday’s game of Xavier vs. Duke. I love a good Cinderella story as much as the next guy, but I ended up wanting an all-ACC championship game.

With any luck, we’ll see Georgia Tech beat Duke next Monday for the national championship. I won’t be down at all if Duke wins, but competition in the conference helps us all. Let’s see if someone else has what it takes to win it all.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. The damaged Unit 2 remains sealed, but Unit 1 still churns out megawatts of electricity.

On a related note, I found this account called Ghost Town, where the daughter of a nuclear scientist takes her camera along for a motorcycle ride through the Chernobyl area. It’s eerie seeing this city stopped dead in its tracks, with thousands of roengens per hour blasting out of the cripped reactor one morning in 1986. It makes you wonder how those people felt to have been left cooking in deadly radiation for over a week before officials announced the accident.

A recent news story mentioned that the local Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant had four unplanned shutdowns last year, while most nuke plants typically have none. I don’t know if there are more serious problems here, or if they’re just being extra careful. I don’t think another TMI-scope accident is likely, but there is always the possibility of trouble, however small that possibility may be. I hope we’ve learned our lesson.

Once again, my visit to the hospital has shown me humanity at its best. Doctors may spend thirty seconds with you (if you’re lucky), but the real heroes are the nurses. I am constantly amazed at how these people deal with the toughest situations with real grace. When you’re at your filthy lowest, they are there to pick you up. Sure, there are one or two who seem to just be punching the clock, but for the most part, its a job that one just has to love.

I can’t complain about anything with my job when I see what these people deal with day in and day out. God bless ’em.