Sloop

I was about to head home Friday night when I decided to take a look at the cams on my route home. Here is was I saw! Guess what? I stayed at work and got some more work done instead of sitting in traffic!

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Every day, kids from Academy Hill School in Springfield Massachusetts have been recording their own weather shows using WeatherBug youCaster technology. Our own meteorologists are using the tool as well to do their breaking weather reports.

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I play volleyball on Thursday nights at our local health club in Mount Airy. I have been playing since I was in high school and whenever I play I feel like I am 18 again! At least for the night and not for the days following. We had some great games last night. Lots of Volleys and lots of spiking on both sides. Good news is that we came out on top and we are in second place heading into the play-offs next week. So, after a night of great exercise I am getting a nice early start to the day and have lots to get done!

This is pretty cool. Dan Danopia has developed a WeatherBug DLL for the Game Maker Community. Game Maker provides an easy way to create games without ever writing a line of code. It is all drag and drop. I have not had a chance to use it yet. Maybe I can get my son to try it out? It was programmed using the WeatherBug API. Give it a try!

Last week I went to a Microsoft Research Tech Fair in Washington DC at the Reagan building and they were introducing something similar called Boku that runs on the XBOX 360. I got a demo of how it works and saw how you can basically create a character or set of objects and program these characters and objects to interact with each other. For example, one object they created was an Apple that sitting on the ground and a second object that looked like a Pac Man ghost was quickly programmed to look for Apples, move towards Apples and when the two object touched each other, the Pac Man ghost would eat the Apple. Again, I would love to try this out on my kids.

Speaking of Apple...I will be attending WWDC June 11 to 15th and look forward to trying out some of their new technologies and catching up with some people there.

Widgets and Gadgets are small applications built with DHTLM and Javascript. Niall Kennedy gives a good overview of the widgets that are now available on the Nokia S60 platform. WeatherBug provided one of the first examples of a Widget on the S60 platform, mainly because we already had quite a bit of experience in developing our Widget for the Apple Dashboard.

We have also done pretty well with our Gadget over on the Vista platform for their new Sidebar Gadgets.

More to come...

I have been using my LabPixies Google gadget quite a bit and have noticed some interesting things. In the morning on dry days like today, the sun's heat will rapidly warm things up. This effect can be seen clearly in the screen shot below. The live temperature from WeatherBug is the only one that caught the quick warm up effect and showed a difference of 20 degrees from what the default Google weather gadget shows.

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A second example of morning temperature differences, this time more than 20 degrees...

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Does it really matter? I guess that's up to you. For me personally, if I were deciding to go somewhere outside, it would mean the difference between carrying a jacket or wearing shorts. Of course, I guess most of us are used to just sticking our heads out the window and seeing what the temperature is, or using a thermometer in our house. Guess you could save yourself 15 dollars or more.

I logged in to my Google Home Page this morning where I have a WeatherBug Gadget made by LabPixies and the Google default weather information side-by-side.

Check out the differences:

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There is also a slight difference in their forecasts for today. WeatherBug is forecasting 68 and Google Weather is forecasting 62 for a high. Lets see what happens...

Get the labpixies gadget, it is pretty sweet! And by the way, NOTE THAT THE WEATHER IS FINALLY WARMING UP AGAIN IN DC! I CANNOT BE MORE PSYCHED!!

Usually when people talk about Global Warming, they also talk about increased intensity of hurricanes. You would think this might be the case since the water will be warmer and that is the fuel for the hurricane development.

This is an interesting release by NOAA discussing how Global Warming may actually weaken hurricanes in the tropical Atlantic and the east Pacific. Why? Because of increased vertical wind shear. Basically this means that as you move vertically away from the earth that the wind is moving in different directions and at different speeds at different heights. This has the effect of preventing the up-drafts from reaching their heights and nocking the top's off of the hurricanes and thunderstorms.

There are some interesting visualizations of this here.

Here is the NOAA press release:

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2007/s2840.htm

Like it or not...it is definitely warm out there..

A link to the article, "March Temperatures Second Warmest on Record for U.S.; Global March Temperature Fifth Warmest on Record" follows:

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2007/s2838.htm

You would never know it right now. It has been very cold around here for the last month. I think that April is going to come through as one of the coldest on record, at least in the Maryland region where I live. It has been one of the coldest April's I can remember.

I thought this video by the BBC was an interesting perspective on Global Warming that is contrary to the belief that CO2 is causing global warming. In fact, it may be the other way around..

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=The+Great+Global+Warming+Swindle

Stumbled upon this here...

http://www.embracingmomminess.com/2007/03/the_great_globa.html

As part of our launching with WPIX in New York, we also got some time on the Jumbotron in times square. Pretty cool!

PRN3-WEATHER-BUG-LOGO-ts 20070411161805