Well, I got my laptop back Monday night, but found out on Tuesday that it takes much longer to start up than it did before, and it won’t come out of standby. I did manage to back up the few files that I had not backed up since the last update, including a few website files. So although I took my laptop back to Best Buy yesterday, I should be able to manage doing some website (and blog!) work now…although I am still pretty swamped, so time spent on both may be limited until towards the end of next week (the end of the semester, woohoo!).
The first thing I did was update the photo of the week (it’s a tornado) and the “this day in history” blurb on the front page.
When I did that, I noticed that this older computer messed up the color scheme a bit, and I haven’t been able to figure out how to fix it yet. My problem is that I want to have hyperlinks in blue, with the exception of the hyperlinks overlaid on the dark purple tabs on the left side of each page. I didn’t have a problem with it with Vista (now I’m back on XP), so I may just have to wait to fix once I get my newer laptop back. In the meantime, I tried to keep the white hyperlinks on the front page, while highlighting anything else that should have been blue. When it came time for the chase pages, though, I just left them as is…for now.
I also went through my chase photos from Thursday and picked out a grand total of 45! That’s something else I want to eventually do for the website–find or create some sort of slide show program, where everyone can click through the large photos (kind of like Webshots does it)…rather than seeing the thumbnails and having to click on every one you want to see. Anyway, that’s for the future.
I did post the chase log and photos for April 22, so you may want to go check that out–there are lots of tornado photos!
I also took some HD video, but as my disclaimer on the photo page says–I couldn’t post HD quality. I use Windows Movie Maker to edit videos, so I wanted my raw video converted to WMV. When that happened, it was degraded to standard definition. The video was then further degraded when I saved it from Windows Movie Maker. So what I uploaded to YouTube is not the original video–the original is clean and sharp. I will have to find a way of posting at least higher quality video, if possible. For now, I don’t have the time to mess with it, especially as I’m wrapping up stuff for the semester.
There won’t be any regular updates to my website (and probably not much to the blog, either) for at least the next several days…as my computer decided to not start up yesterday and I had to take it to Best Buy to be serviced. I lost a few files and updates, but thankfully nothing too serious. I’ll probably be fairly busy over the next few days, trying to re-create lost files and update old files to my older laptop…including starting over on my final project for my GIS class.
Hopefully I’ll return to more regular posts and updates by the end of the week or so.
In the meantime, check out the SPC convective outlook–there may be hope of severe storms by late this week (Thursday and/or Friday):
Air space has been shut down indefinitely across Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and a few other parts of western Europe, including at London Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport (see BBC, CNN, MSNBC)
A large volcanic eruption in Iceland has spewed ash towards Europe, causing a safety hazard for aircraft (the ash can get sucked into an aircraft’s engine and cause the engine to fail).
A friend of mine and fellow OU grad student (from England, incidentally) told me a few weeks ago that a volcano in Iceland started erupting on her birthday, March 20. She shared a website with a “volcano-cam” where we could watch Eyjafjallajökull spew ash and lava. Eventually the poor camera gave out (we theorized that it got “lava-ed”), and a new webcam took its place (unfortunately this new one was farther away and did not give quite as good of a view — if interested, you can see it at the link above).
The following image from the UK Met Office shows the projected coverage of the ash by 7am British Summer Time (0600 GMT) tomorrow, at which time the airports hope to re-open.
And here’s an interesting satellite loop, from EUMETSAT, showing the plume of ash heading for Europe (the ash is the dark, reddish-colored area coming from southern Iceland).
In case any of you, faithful readers, have been wondering what happened to me, I have been pretty swamped the last couple of weeks with classwork — hence the lack of blog posts and website updates. Weather (especially severe weather) has not been too exciting here lately, though, so I have been spending time getting stuff done before the chasing season really sets in.
I did just update the photo of the week (it’s a photo of a pileus cloud that I saw on my last chase, on April 6th) over on my website (see link on the right of the page). Later this afternoon, after I get a bit more work done on a class project, I hope to update chase logs and photos for this year and to write the next feature post on global weather.
Come ye, kings, queens, knights, and peasants to the Medieval Faire in Norman this weekend! From jugglers to jousting, from camel rides to Camelot, thou art sure to find much to amuse thee.
Weather: Fair and warm today, slightly cooler (high near 60 °F) and windy tomorrow with a slight chance of showers, and cooler (high in the upper 50s) on Sunday with mostly sunny skies and a brisk northwest wind
