This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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Moving Connection Graphs!

This is pretty cool. Check it out. Try www.abulsme.com first, then look at other sites you may be interested in!

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(forwarded to me by Prem T. at work, thanks!)

Darkflash: No Subject

Time for another thing I would have posted if I’d had a blog at the time. This is from the runup to Hurricane Charlie. I sent this to family and friends at August 14th 2004 03:34:23 UTC. I was in such a hurry that I forgot to actually put in a subject line.

Well, at about 00:30 UTC (8:30 PM Eastern) out power went out. Some neighbors on one street adjacent to ours still had power, but most of the neighborhood was out. We lit candles and switched from TV news to radio news. This was around when the eye was in the Orlando area.

Note from Brandy: Sam can be a whiny brat when you take away his TV!!!
Back to Sam…

We got some wind, but never even close (I don’t think) to the predicted speeds. At Noon they were saying Melbourne would get 80 mph winds. At 3 PM they were saying 70 mph. At 6 PM they were saying 60 mph. Those were sustained. We probably got some gusts that were close to that for maybe a minute or two at a time, but nothing long term. And there were brief periods of a few minutes each when it rained pretty hard, but nothing that seemed much worse than the afternoon thunderstorms we get all the time around here.

Basically, it went to the northwest of us, and was much more compact than expected. So the really high winds were confined to a tight corridor which is within a 20 minute drive of here, but which is not here.

We did have a tornado warning that just expired a couple minutes ago for a likely tornado just south of us by a few miles. But once again, nothing visible here. Which I guess is a good thing. :-)

We are still without power though. I’m writing this on the laptop on battery power, to go out at some point in the future. We still have the land line phone, and my cell phone (which I can use to get online too) and I can charge the laptop in the car, so I guess I may send before we actually have power again. Maybe.

Anyway, looks like the actual storm part is over, but the radio is saying 100s of thousands of people without power, so it may well be awhile until we have power again. Dunno.

Just went outside a few seconds ago to walk the dog. It is clear. You can see the sky. There is a nice breeze, but not huge winds. But… the clouds… are moving really really fast. It is like watching a time lapse movie. They are really low and lit from the lights below (including our street light, which is still on). It is very neat looking. Although a bit creepy!

At August 14, 2004 19:16:48 UTC I sent an update, where I also forgot a subject line:

Well, we ended up having no electric for fifteen and a half hours, and some ice cream melted and we had to realign the satellite dish, but that was about it. It basically missed us. A normal thunderstorm this afternoon was almost worse.

Whelp, that’s the last update on this subject. :-)

Slightly Safer

I updated the State Department Warnings Graph again. Since last time the world is a little safer. Down to 28 countries with warnings from 29 before. The Turks and Caicos and The Bahamas are now safe to visit again. Guess they fixed their hurricane damage. Meanwhile though the Cayman Islands got hit by Hurricane Ivan and got added to the list. So wait a little while before you visit there, K?

Random Trip Page Updates

I just made some minor updates to my Random Trip Pages.

I used to live at each of the two overlapping blue diamonds.  Now I live at the red diamond.

Yes, indeed, I have updated the main map to show my new location. Woo!

I have also changed things to indicate that, unfortunately, the Chacchoben, Quintana Roo, Mexico Random Trip did not actually happen in 2004 Q3. With everything going on with moving down to Florida, and the fact we are trying to keep money in as much order as possible to buy a house, it just was not a good time. I’m putting the new target as 2005 Q1, but that may yet slip too. But we will get down there damn it! We will!

I also updated the Random Spot Generator so it now centers itself on the house we are renting in Melbourne, Florida rather than my old place in Yardley, PA. Of course, that is only the default center, users can change it to center wherever they want. Well, pretty much… I think it will get confused if you center yourself on one of the poles, I haven’t got the right exception cases in the code to deal with those sigularities.

So anyway, play around with the tool a bit and generate some random spots until you find a place you would like to take a trip to. It is a fun way to kill an hour!