Recently in Meteorology Category

I couldn't resist the title - sorry. I have now been running Fedora Core 5 for almost two months using VMware Workstation and it works like a champ. I had originally set the maximum disk size at 8GB which I thought would be more than adequate to grow into. Wrong! Now, that I have been finding more and more meteorology tools, I needed to double the size to do some testing on another data gathering process that I will eventually put up on the research server at school. So, after getting rid of the precautionary snapshot files, I used a nifty little wrapper for vmware-vdiskmanager to take it up to 16GB. So now I am off to configure the process to start using that new free space. It can churn while I continue purifying the pool.

While I am finishing up grabbing hourly METAR data for my professor, I also wrote some code to grab temperature data every minute from a selection of local stations. We are gathering a wealth of meteorological data. One area that I have always been interested in are the text products produced by the National Weather Service. Those are the severe weather bulletins, short-term and local forecasts that you will be likely to hear on radio and TV, as well as on weather web sites. They are not the usual endless strings of numbers and symbols that need to be decoded, but words and sentences understandable by humans. One way to get the data would be to screen scrape the wide range of NWS web sites, a boring task when you can get the same products pushed from several sources. I am working on getting such a server up and running - more details on that soon!

Shifting gears from writing an major upgrade to my high school alumni web site (not putting it aside, just a minor detour) to cranking up a major set of meteorological data into a set of MySQL tables, supporting one of my professor's research work. It is a far cry from working on billing programs for the phone company and much more rewarding. Maybe not financially, but it feels so good to do something that might actually make a difference in something other that a company's bottom line, a company could give a rat's about me or any of its employees. So, I am off to code up a quick and easy way to get the hourly temperatures for 2002 for Chatham Municipal Airport in Massachusetts along with about 7000 other weather stations for the past five years.

I feel like I will be on a random walk through the rest of the month. There are only nine days left, but still I feel like I have such a diverse group of things I want (and need) to get accomplished. Some are interrelated, but some are not. I feel like I have taken a long vacation since Election Day, basically recharging the body and mind from the numbing experience of 20-hour days, the one thing that I gladly left behind when I retired from the phone company. The major difference with these was the high level of satisfaction received from the hard work, something that was sorely lacking in the latter part of my IT career. So here is my to do list for the next little over a week:

• Pearl Jam - yes, I am going to see Pearl Jam live in Philly!
• Begging forgiveness on course #3 - yes, I need to take care of this issue tout de suite! I have been avoiding and now I will have to pay the consequences.
• Business stuff - making money is important if you want to eat and the good thing is that we have yet another new customer with three more potential right behind. Also, have to get working on the next level of one of our best customers. Sharpen the pencils and get to coding!
• Weather data - I have to get the cron processes running on our meteorology server at school so I can get all of our observational and model data pulls from NOAA up-to-date. I have been running them manually, but it is a pain when Linux can take care of it all for me.
• Weather tools - now that I have Fedora Core 5 running on my laptop under VMware, I want to get some of the nifty weather tools from UCAR running. Just in time for hurricane season...
• The pool - yes, this is always hanging over my head... I am going to get this started this week, dammit!
• The RV - ditto

And I am sure that there are a dozen other things that I need to get done, but I just don't want to think about them yet. They'll creep up like they always do. So, the hell with changing the blog template for now - actually like this one - and put it off until I can rip May's page off the calendar.