National Weather Service Radar Image
March 31, 2005 3:57 p.m. Central Standard Time
2005.03.31
Spring has arrived in the Florida Panhandle. . . This is a weather doppler radar image of northwest Florida made at 3:57 p.m. CST. Fort Walton Beach is located on the coastline, about one-third of the way in from the right edge of the image. As you can see the best is yet to come. Lots of rain, lots of thunder. In short, springtime!
2005.03.27
Happy Easter! It rained all weekend here in Florida, keeping me off the golf course and giving me the incentive to work on my PHP-MySQL skills. I figured out how to build a dropdown list by querying the database and then displaying an image selected by the user. It isn't much, but it's a lot more than just displaying the current time and date in Florida.
I loaded ten images into the database. Right now you can only select them by their filenames, which sometimes aren't very descriptive except to me. But that should make it more fun for you.
Enjoy!
UPDATE: When you click on the button, the page will reset to the top. I'll fix it when I figure out how. Until, then - sorry!
rect4825
Created by J.A. Coulter, March 23, 2005 with Inkscape 0.41
2005.03.23
I found another free tool - Inkscape 0.41.
It's a "scalable vector graphics editor". It's powerful and it's cool.
And of course I'll never learn half its capabilities. . .
Mt. Saint Helens VolcanoCam Image - Johnston Ridge Observatory
Updated Every 5 Minutes
Provided by the USDA Forest Service
Note: No image will be seen during nighttime and periods of inclement weather
2005.03.23
Forgot to provide a link back to the Mt Saint Helens' VolcanoCam page. Check out the VolcanoCam movies of Saint Helens' most recent eruptions here.
2005.03.22
Not much going on here or at Mt Saint Helens. . .
I miss the mountains. I miss the snow too, but only for a moment or two. I check the webcam on Johnston Ridge about once a day. If the weather is clear, I get to see a mountain (okay - volcano).
Someday I'll make it back west.
Fox Fur Nebula
© 2005 Russell Croman, www.rc-astro.com
2005.03.14
I found the above picture on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website.
It was easier than digging through my own collection.
I am still taking nibbles at PHP and MySQL. I set up a test database on my home development server and wrote a very crude PHP script to select a record. It works, sort of. And no, you can't see it.
Not much else going on. Started troubleshooting a problem with Oracle JInitiator not passing through firewalls. I can't believe I get paid to do this stuff. But I am such a newb it's embarassing.
And that's all that's going on. The only other thing in my life right now is golf, and I know you don't want to hear about that.
That's it for now. When something exciting happens I'll let you know.
Don't hold your breath.
Grand Central Station, New York City, USA.
October 2, 2004
2005.03.11
I dug this image out of my New York City file. Gina and I visited NYC for the first time last October. We only spent one night in Manhattan before catching a train to Cold Springs in the Hudson Valley, but it was long enough for us both to fall in love with the world's greatest city. Can't wait until we go back again.
Mount St. Helens Dome Webicorder. Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network
March 6, 2005 0100 - 1200 UTC
2005.03.09
The image above is from the webicorder readings from sensors planted on Mount St. Helen's dome. This is a twelve-hour snapshot of the seismic activity on the volcano's dome on March 6, 2005 from midnight to noon, Universal Time (4:00 p.m. - 4:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time)
Mount St. Helens is acting up again, with a short eruption yesterday afternoon that sent a plume of ash above 30,000 feet. You can see what's happening on Mount St. Helens right now.
So what's the big deal about a little eruption on Mount St. Helens? The last big one was almost twenty-five years ago at 8:32 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, 1980, right? Yeah, and a hundred and twenty-five miles north of the greatest volcanic eruption of the 20th century, I was asleep in my bed. I didn't know the mountain had erupted until I did my usual stagger down the stairs and into the kitchen to find my mom and dad sitting at the breakfast table asking me excitedly "Did you hear it? Did you feel it?"
Uh, no. I didn't. So now because of the guilt I feel for missing one of the greatest geologic events of my lifetime I like to bring up the volcanocam every now and then hoping I'll catch another eruption to make up for the one I missed. . .
Thanks to this post on Slashdot, I downloaded the very cool and very handy HTML-Kit. It is free and it is by far the best HTML editor I have used to date. It even let's you set up FTP access to your servers so you can open a file on the server, edit it, and then save it back to the server without any intermediate saving and FTP'ing. I've been using it for less than twelve hours and I think it it's the neatest thing since sliced bread.
HTML-Kit also has a built-in HTML and CSS validator, so you can make sure your code is up to W3C specs. After running this page through it, I went ahead and used the W3C's HTML and CSS validators. If you scroll all the way to bottom of this page you'll find two buttons in the Left Box. Press them and you'll see if my HTML and CSS makes the grade.
Not much else going on. I added some more free stuff in the Left Box. Check it out - it's all cool.
Waikiki Aquarium, Waikiki, Hawaii, USA
July 2003
2005.03.04
So much for Feburary.
I've been busy at work writing step-by-step Oracle database installation guides (with screenshots of every step) for our customer as well as slogging through the nightmare that is Oracle Notes (technical support notices) as I attempt to upgrade our databases and application servers to their respective current security patch level. After eight hours of that the last thing you want to do is spend another two or three hours in front of your computer at home. So I've been watching a bunch of Law and Order instead.
The PHP has suffered, as well as learning the GIMP. But I did update this page with some new music picks in the Right Box. It's good stuff. Thank God for Groove Salad on Soma FM, or I'd go nuts. You can listen to the great down beats and trip hop offered by Soma too with the free iTunes player from Apple. It doesn't play video, but I think for music it beats the Windows Media Player and that hunk of crap spyware called RealPlayer hands down.
Not much else going on here. Playing golf on Sundays and trying to stay out of trouble with Gina. The usual stuff. Until the next time, check out the tunes in the Right Box - they're all linked to Amazon.com, where you can get a free taste.
Cheers!
I finally archived January. You can see it here.
Sorry, no Feburary. I was too lazy to make any entries.
