In reviewing the page stats for the SLOweather lightning page last week I ran across a link from the Condor Lookout.
Cal Poly and other partners have renovated the old Hi Mountain fire lookout for condor and other research. The Lookout is off Hi Mountain Road between Lopez Lake and Pozo. If you’ve never been there, it’s a heckuva view, and a nice way to spend an afternoon.
Check this out: NWS Graphical Forecast Page.
Mouse around on the text on the left, and watch the graphics.
It threatened all day today and spat a bit. This afternoon we heard a few rumbles of thunder in the distance while we were done in the woods having a fire. At 5 PM, the wind from the southeast really kicked up, gusts to 35 mph, and then the wind died and it started to rain. As of 7:30 PM, we’ve had 0.15″ here at SLOweather. And it sounds great on the roof…
It was October and the Indians on a remote reservation asked their new Tribal Chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a Chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the sky, he couldn’t tell what the winter was going to be like. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect firewood to be prepared.
But being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, “Is the coming winter going to be cold?”
“It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold,” the meteorologist at the weather service responded. So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared.
A week later he called the National Weather Service again. “Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?”
“Yes,” the man at the National Weather Service again replied, “it’s going to be a very cold winter.” The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find.
Two weeks later the Chief called the National Weather Service again.
“Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?”
“Absolutely,” the man replied. “It’s looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters ever.”
“How can you be so sure?” the Chief asked.
The weatherman replied, “The Indians are collecting firewood like crazy.”
You may have noticed the RSS icon in the lower status bar. Being new to blogging, I never really understood Really Simple Syndication (alternatively, Rich Site Summary).
The October 18, 2005 PC Magazine has a good explanation of RSS, how it works, and how to use it here.
You may have noticed a new link on the SLOweather home page, for GeoURL.
GeoURL is a way to look up sites based on their geographic location as latitude and longitude. To become GeoURLifed, as it were, you put a meta tag for your latitude and longitude in the html code for your webpage, register with GeoURL.com, and add the GeoURL html link code to your page. Anyone visiting your page can click on the GeoURL link and see a listing of other sites registered with GeoURL that are geographically close to you.
I’ve been collecting the URLs of other web pages that link back to SLOweather. Some were collected from Google’s URL search, but most were gleaned from the statistics collected by my StatCounters. I just finished and posted a page of all of those links here, and there is a lik on our home page menubar.
It’s interesting to see the variety of other pages that find SLOweather interesting enough to link to, pages from all over the world.
If they are that interested in linking to SLOweather, the least I can do is return the favor.
If you know of any other pages that link toSLOweather which I have missed, please let me know.
You’ve probably noticed the new look at SLOweather. Let me know what you think.
After many years of hacked up pages and no consistency SLOweather now has a uniform look and feel. And now that that’s done, there’s more content coming as well.
I’m working on a new look for SLOweather. You can preview the work in progress here.
It’s a work in progress, so looks, links, and features may come and go. If you bookmark that page, keep in mind that that URL will go away when I’m happy with it and make it the new homepage.
Comments are welcome, either here or to chris at tbo.net.