I’ve mostly been hanging out indoors, but I did spend some time yesterday afternoon and then again today digging out the car. They plowed our street today, so we are no longer stranded. Our total accumulation was somewhere in the 18″ ballpark, easily ranking in the top three biggest snowstorms I’ve experienced. I love snow!
I took the snow-day opportunity to tie up the last bit of development and launch a minor revision to the site, bringing the version to 21.1. Visually this is just a small, incremental improvement, but I’ve done quite a bit on the back-end. There are a few little touches throughout that you will probably like. Here are some highlights:
Lots of other small (mostly-technical) changes are part of this release, so if anything isn’t working for you please let me know!
A major winter storm appears on-track to wallop the Washington, DC, metropolitan area with heavy snow beginning late tonight and continuing through much of the weekend. The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning for the DC metro area stating, in part, that ‘accumulations of 10 to 20 inches’ are expected.
The Capital Weather Gang, a group of weather bloggers with a solid, conservative [read: realistic] track record of accumulation predictions, estimate 8-16″ for much of the region with 10-18″ in some areas. They characterize this storm as a ‘Major Event’ for the DC area and predict widespread hazardous road conditions.
Those of us who have lived a long time in the DC area know that this area doesn’t handle snow very well. The various Departments of Transportation have an annoying tendency to spontaneously forget to treat major highways, and the MetroRail system was apparently designed to fail if exposed to winter precipitation (because they have exposed electronics [!] on train underbellies). Drivers in the region seem to fall into two camps: one, those that refuse to go anywhere at all even days after most of the roads are clear; and two: those (usually with SUVs) who believe you can drive on snow at full speed as if the road is perfectly clear. Reality, as usual, is in-between.
Off on a Tangent recommends the following: don’t be afraid of a little bit of snow, but don’t drive like an idiot either. 4WD and AWD vehicles are generally good in winter weather, but every car has 4-wheel braking and every car will take longer to stop than it would in clear conditions and any car can spin-out if you take a turn too fast on a slick highway. So, even in your 4WD and AWD cars, drive careful. If you don’t have to go anywhere, don’t. Make sure you have enough supplies at home to last you a couple of days.
Have fun and be safe!
I read an interesting story over at CNN.com about how Iraqi insurgents figured out how to monitor the video feeds from our un-manned Predator drone aircraft. There are a couple things that bother me about this article—one about how it’s written, and one about the content itself.
First, despite the gripping headline, the insurgents ‘hacked’ nothing. The video feed they were watching was broadcast over the airwaves without encryption. They ‘hacked’ the feed in the same way I ‘hack’ a broadcast TV feed by turning on my television, or in the way I ‘hack’ air traffic control communication by turning on a scanner I get at Radio Shack. If an unintended recipient receives a broadcast sent ‘in the clear’, they’ve simply monitored open communication—which anybody can do and, in fact, has a right to do barring any specific laws prohibiting it.
(An example of a specific law is this: most jurisdictions in the United States legally prohibit the use of police scanners to evade the police, so if a bad guy uses one to get away he gets an additional charge on his rap sheet when he’s caught.)
Second, and much more troubling than run-of-the-mill journalistic exaggeration, is the fact that the United States Air Force broadcasts Predator drone video in the clear. Billions of dollars invested over decades in defense encryption technologies, and they can’t even apply a trivial cipher to put at least a speed-bump in the way of the bad guys? In the clear? Come on guys.
I took the weekend off from unpacking, got a lot of sleep, and worked on my website. It was a nice change of pace to work with code instead of cardboard, and I made a lot of progress on a minor update to the site (which, when done, will bring the version to 21.1). I’m doing a lot of experimentation with the jQuery JavaScript library, which will allow neat effects and dynamic stuff I haven’t done much of before. It also let me clean up the code for my existing dynamic stuff (like the pinned menu) to be a lot smaller and more efficient.
All-in-all, expect the site to start looking and acting a bit more like a ‘Web 2.0’ site from here on.
Obviously I’ll have a lot more detail when I actually finish the thing and launch it, but I wanted to let you all know that’s what I’m up to. Since a fair amount of the [limited] time I have for the web site is going to the next minor update, I’ll have a bit less time than usual for . . . you know . . . writing posts. I’ll try to keep up with it though.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
