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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Morning update as of the 9 UTC NHC report
Chances of TS force winds: 85%
Chances of Hurricane force winds: 20%
Right now outside it alternates between calm and not much going on to some pretty heavy gusts and strong winds. But not “you can’t walk” type winds.
The weather radio is going off every hour or so with new hurricane warnings in the county. The last one was about 20 miles south of us. The one before that was only about 5 miles north of us.
As of this very second, pretty calm. But not likely to stay that way.
We can now see the eye on local radar, but it isn’t at closest approach yet.
So today we were starting to move all the stuff in from outside and generally get ready for Wilma, whatever Wilma will turn out to be here in Palm Bay. We were testing the generator, when all of a sudden we realized out two 5 gallon cans of gas were gone. We kept them outside since when we put them inside they stink. But someone had taken them sometime in the past few days since I last filled them up. Grrr! There was nothing to be done for it, but Brandy filed a police report, just on the principle of the thing. The person who took their report says this happens all the time right before storms. Grrrr…
 Anyway, speaking of Wilma, it is supposed to hit Florida in just about 12 hours. Maybe slightly more, maybe slightly less. It’ll get us on the opposite coast a few hours later. Well… that’s when the eye will hit. We should start getting effects much sooner than that, and in fact we are already starting to get some outer band rain and wind. The center of the path is now a decent bit south of us, but we’re still in the bubble. Right near the top edge of it, but still in it.
 Things have been moving around and the odds have been going up and down with each update. The early morning update had us at much higher risk, then later updates moved the path further south and dropped our risk. Right now, as of the 21 UTC update, in terms of tropical storm force winds, we are right in the middle of the darker orange band, which puts us at about a 55% chance of sustained tropical storm force winds. And even on the 45% chance of not having tropical storm force winds, it is still going to be a bad storm with lots of wind and some gusts which would be TS level.
 Hmm. The weather radio just went off. We’re now under a tornado warning in Brevard county as well as the hurricane warning we were already under. So I guess we are starting to get some effects already. Fun, fun. Anyway, on the odds for hurricane force winds, we are in the middle of the middle green stripe, which puts us at about a 15% chance of hurricane force winds. But even if that happens, it should only be a Cat 1 by the time it gets here. We shall see though.
Anyway, guess it is about time we hunker down and start watching some DVDs or whatever. We’re as ready as we are going to be this time. We even got some wood. Although we weren’t really able to put it up properly this time. Should all be fine though. This one ain’t like the ones last year. At least that’s not what is expected right now. We shall see.
Brandy is still very mad someone stole our gas. We got new gas though, so we’ll be able to run the generator if we have to. :-)
So, 18 hours since the update when we went into the 3 day bubble. The forecast has changed a bit. Wilma not spending quite as much time over the Yucatan, and speeding up a tad. Etc. The predicted path is a bit further south, but our odds of trouble have never the less increased. Here is where we are as of the 15 UTC update today:
Chances of tropical storm force winds: 45%
Chances of hurricane force winds: 8%
Probably Monday morning rather than Monday evening.
By contrast where my friend Ivan lives, it looks like this:
Chances of tropical storm force winds: 55%
Chances of hurricane force winds: 15%
Those are approximate of course.
We’ll keep watching. But we have no plans to evacuate or anything at this time. Probably not even board up, although we are thinking about it.
Finally, days after initially expected, as of the 21 UTC update from the National Hurricane Center, we are in the three day bubble for Hurricane Wilma:
We’ve been in the five day bubble for what seems like forever, but this is the first we’ve been in the 3 day. We’ve been thinking “surely we’ll be in the three day by the next update” since Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.
Not that we like being in the bubble or anything, but it has been “coming” for like a week now. Of course, one of the reasons it is late coming here is it is absolutely pummeling the Yucatan, which looks like it will be horrible for folks living there. They are predicting for Wilma to basically sit on top of Cancun ALL WEEKEND. And it already has been having major effects most of the day Friday. That will not be good.
Anyway, I’ve found two new charts at the NHC that I like a lot better and tell more I think. They were there for the last few hurricanes too I think, I just didn’t pay any attention. These reflect the actual odds of given places getting certain amounts of winds.
So for instance, in this one covering from now until 18 UTC on Wednesday you can see what the chances are of hurricane force winds in that time frame at different places:
So looking at our approximate location, and doing a little eyeball interpolation, the chances of us getting hurricane force winds here in Palm Bay are about 5%. So not zero, but not all that high either.
For tropical storm force winds, our odds are a bit higher:
For our location I guestimate about a 35% chance of tropical storm force winds.
Of course, the way odds go, as the time of the event approaches, it either moves to 0% or moves to 100% since quantum effects aside, it will either happen or not.
But the long and short of it is that we will probably (65% chance) get absolutely nothing of note. But there is a decent chance of getting some tropical storm force winds. And even the 1 out of 20 chance of hurricane force winds is nothing to sneeze at. It could happen.
So we’ll of course be watching carefully the next few days.
I’d like to point out that we are almost exactly on the centerline of the new official projected path. This is one of the reason I like the ones based on probability a lot better. It better reflects the total uncertainy about the path and what may happen. The fact that we are right on the center line is concerning, but really not of much more concern than if we were anywhere else in the bubble. There is enough of a chance of trouble to pay close attention, and make basic preparations, but not for panic.
Like they keep saying on TV, don’t just pay attention to the centerline. Look at the whole bubble.
We postponed Amy’s birthday party from this weekend to next weekend because a couple days ago when we had to make the call it was more like a 60% chance of TS winds and a 30% chance of hurricane winds, and right on Saturday to Sunday when the party/sleepover would be. We had to make the call in enough time to let all the invitees plan accordingly. But still… now Amy is all disappointed by the delay in her party and it will probably be a beautiful day tomorrow. Sigh!
But we did let her open her big present though. As I am writing this she has the new kareoke machine cranked up and is singing “Mony Mony”. So I guess that is all OK. :-)
Since this is me, I have of course accounted for the fact that a year is not an integer number of days, time zones, leap years, and all other relevant factors… well, aside from relativistic time dilation… I must admit I didn’t account for that… I also have assumed that the clock they used to record the time of the initial event was accurate, which is probably not a good assumption, but in any case…
At 15:43:40 UTC today Amy will be exactly ten years old.
That is 11:43:40 AM Eastern, 8:43:40 AM Pacific.
So, be sure to wish her a happy birthday and all that!
Happy Birthday Amy!!!!
I’ve been waiting to blog about Wilma, but I had determined that I wouldn’t do that until we were actually in the NHC’s three day cone. It looked like that would happen at the NHC’s 21 UTC update, but it didn’t. I thought surely it would happen at the NHC’s 03 UTC update. But once again it did not. So screw it, I’ll talk about something else. At least until the 09 UTC update. Maybe we’ll be in the three day bubble by then. Anyway… other topic…
I blame Erica. A couple weeks ago she emails about her Tivo suddenly not starting up. It was a dead hard drive. So what happens this weekend? The exact same thing happens to my Tivo. It was probably sympathy, since the Tivo we used here was once a brother and housemate to the Tivo of Erica’s which died. It sensed the departure of its long lost friend, and decided it had to go with it.
So anyway, we discussed if we should replace it with a stock DirecTivo, or an upgraded one. The deciding factor ended up not being cost or anything else like that, but the fact that to get a pre-upgraded one we’d have to order online and get it shipped to us. And it was Saturday night by the time we were making decisions, so even with overnight shipping that meant we wouldn’t have it until Tuesday. Which meant that it probably would not be fully set up and recording until Wednesday.
Now, we knew we could hijack Amy’s Tivo and use it to record some of our shows in the meantime (and we indeed did that over the weekend). But Brandy decided she absolutely could not wait. So Sunday we went to Circuit City and walked out with a new DirecTivo. It has less hours than the one that died, but we’ll manage. We’ll probably end up getting a third one in a couple of months so each of us can have our own Tivo and not have to share. :-)
In any case, the new Tivo was all hooked up Sunday evening, and had collected and indexed all its initial guide data and so was fully up and running by mid day Monday.
And all was once again right in the world.
Except for the fact that we lost about 100 hours of programs on the old Tivo that we hadn’t gotten around to watching yet. That made me very sad. :-(
But aside from that, all was good!
I am really so not sure what I think about this. It could end up being really good, but somehow I am filled with a sense of dread. I really was not a fan of Captain Jack. He was funny if the first episode he showed up in, but at least for me he wore thin pretty quickly. Oh well, of course I will watch it.
BBC to screen ‘Dr Who for adults’ as new spin-off show
The BBC has commissioned the Doctor Who scriptwriter Russell T Davies to make an adult post-watershed spin-off of its most famous sci-fi show. The new programme will be called Torchwood (an anagram of Doctor Who) and will follow a crack team investigating alien activities and crime in modern-day Britain. It will feature in its starring role John Barrowman, who played Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and who will play the same character in Torchwood.
(via GallifreyOne)
 As folks might have guessed from what I said about the Firefly DVD, we went to see Serenity, the Firefly movie. I’m way late posting again, we didn’t see this over the weekend that just ended, but rather the weekend before.
In any case, it was awesome. Took everything that was good about the TV series and upped it a notch or two. It tied up some things from the series and threw in a few surprises. I had manger to stay almost spoiler free, and at least one thing really caught me by surprise. In any case, all three of us really enjoyed it.
The theater we saw it in, at the time we say it, was actually pretty crouded. But apperantly that was not average. The word was that if this grossed $80 million at the box office, there would be sequels. Things do not look good. As of it’s third weekend, it dropped off the top 10 down to 12 and had only made $22.1 million. The number of theaters it is in is dropping rapidly. So if you want to see it, you’d better go NOW! Or you’ll have to wait for the DVD in a couple months.
Anyway, even allowing for international box office and DVD revenue, looks like the chances of a sequel are dim. Which is a shame, cause it is a great series. [By the maker of Buffy and Angel, blah, blah, blah.] But he did get a chance to wrap up a bunch of what was brought up in the series, so if this has to be it, at least there is a feeling that between the TV show and the movie there is a begining, middle and end and you are not left hanging.
But sequels would be nice.
So go see it damn it!
If this guy can buy $2,500 tickets to this movie to help the quest for a sequel, you can all go out to buy three or four, right?
This is for you Al!
Thing a Week 5 – Baby Got Back
This week is a cover of Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot (note: he is not an actual knight). Had to activate the whole team for this one – guitar, mandolin, banjo and even some shakers and tambourines and other things lying around the house. I’ve wanted to cover this song for a long time, because it is excellent – there’s a wonderful message in there for those of you who have big butts. In the proud tradition of many white Americans who came before me I hereby steal and white-ify this thick and juicy piece of black culture. Watch for my album “Jonathan Coulton Sings Songs by Black People.”
(via BoingBoing)
 When it was first on TV, I’d watched a couple episodes, but never really gotten into it. And it was a busy time, so I just plain didn’t get to a bunch of them. Of course, as it turned out, Fox had scrambled up all the episodes and shown them out of order so they made no sense, to the point of what was supposed to be the first episode that set the context for everything else was actually the last one they showed. Urgh!
Anyway, this summer SciFi started replaying all of them, in the correct order, from the DVD versions, which had been fixed up to be back the way they were supposed to be, both in terms of what order they were in and in adjusting a few scenes that were changed around because they were shown out of order.
Well, given all the hype about how good the series had been and with the upcoming movie and all, we had been watching it. And getting into it. Of course though, by the time the movie came out, we hadn’t quite watched all of them, and we missed a couple on the Tivo for whatever reason. So we got the DVD set. Where we left off via TV was actually in the middle of Disk 3. We watched two episodes from there, but it wasn’t a full disk, so I didn’t post here. Disk 4 was the first full disk we watched. It had three episodes. Two of which hadn’t aired on TV when it was on the first time.
The highlight was the third episode “Objects in Space”, which was also the last episode of the TV series. (Although it was not aired last.) A bounty hunter came on board, and River outsmarted him. I thought about seperately talking about each episode, but I don’t feel like it.
In any case, we finished up the TV series. It was great. A real shame it was canceled before they had even aired all the episodes that had been filmed. We had a blast watching them all summer though.
And the extra features on this DVD were fun too.
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