jonathan.bare.to

style="padding: 0px 5px 0px 0px;" />Well, Izzie is here. And, in typical
geek fashion, I set up a web cam, using my PowerBook and iSight camera and
borrowing Liana's window.

You can see it here: http://jlb.to/izzie/

The image is updated every five minutes, and it keeps 48 old images. So,
as long as we have power, there should be a running four hours of images
to look at.

If it gets interesting, I'll also upload the time lapse movies it is
creating locally on my hard drive. They have the same images as the web
site, but they're in a QuickTime movie so you can see them whiz on by.

Izzie is here now. It's raining steadily for the first time and the winds
have picked up to a steady 20-30 MPH. I'll try to add a few more updates
here today and tomorrow, as long as we have electricity and an Internet
connection...

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Posted by jonathan at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

style="padding: 0px 5px 0px 0px;" />Have you been to Home Depot for
plywood and nails yet?

Are you stocked up on batteries, bread, bottled water, extra rain ponchos,
and assorted "theater size" boxed candies (on sale for 80 cents each at
Target)?

No?

Well, Dizzy Izzie is spinning her way in this direction.

A spokesman for Home Depot quoted on WTOP (AM news radio on D.C.) said
that once a storm is named and is targeting a specific area, stores in the
area freezes the price of plywood.

Now if they'd only convince people to buy snowblowers in July instead of
18 hours before the biggest blizzard of the decade hits.

Anyway, there's a good chance we in the greater Washington area will be
seeing heavy rains and gusty winds by the end of Thursday.

Seriously, it can't be much worse than the regular monsoon we've had the
past four months. I fully expect the area to become the next rain forest
before too long, if this keeps up.

But back to Izzie.

Now, if I was still at the DP, some paniced student editor might ask me a
question like, "Where are the generators in the building?"

Generators? At a college newspaper? Right. You didn't care when you
cancelled that one issue before Thanksgiving only because there were no
ads for the paper. Not having a paper because of a hurricane (or blizzard,
or power outage, or just because no reporters did any reporting for that
day) really wouldn't be such a big deal.

Though there was that one issue of The Dailiy Free Press completely
created from one photography editor's apartment during a localized power
outage. That was nuts.

So Izzie has us in her sights. The television coverage has started already
-- and it's not even a sweeps month (watch for big weather-related news in
November and February, it's fun to see the weather people whore
themselves out for higher ratings).

Basically the only two things I care about are that we don't lose power or
the cable (including the cable Internet connection). That would be a real
disaster...

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Posted by jonathan at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello, Comcast? Is anyone at hoooooome? Apparently not.

Broadband, that's what the kids like to call high-speed Internet access.
(Note the capital I in Internet -- the Internet is a proper noun; an
internet is any two or more connected networks.)

Broadband, that's not what Comcast "High Speed" Internet has been of late.

It seems an enterprising individual or two have discovered that Comcast's
own routers (the things that make the Internet go) are sending hundreds of
"ARP" packets every second to just about every single Comcast subscriber.
Now, don't ask me what an ARP packet is, frankly I don't really know or
care. What I do understand is that this is wrong and it's making our
Internet connection, formerly blazingly, fast completly unusable for most
of the past week.

Comcast blames their problems on: 1. User error. 2. Infected Windows users
(but what about us Mac users?). 3. Bad lines and/or the recent severe
thunderstorms.

Well, whatever they want to blame, the true root cause is out there and is
being largely ignored. For my part, I've ordered up Verizon DSL because I
frankly can't get any work done without a fast Internet connection... even
if the DSL is significanly slower than the cable was once, it's still
better than the 28k connection I can get on the regular dial-up modem.

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Posted by jonathan at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)