As is often the case when I have these little ‘unplanned hiatuses’ on Off on a Tangent, I’ve been accumulating random photos that have just been aching to be posted. Many of them have seen the light of day on Facebook, but none have been featured here yet. Oh well.
So as I start to get back into a swing of things (especially now that the No-Nonsense Weather update is out the door) I took some time to go through and pick out some random photos for your enjoyment. More substantive posts are in-progress too, so stay tuned!
No-Nonsense Weather—the weather web application I launched back in August—has been updated to a new 0.8 beta. The big new features are support for international weather locations, an improved precipitation map system, support for nautical miles and knots, and a ton of bug-fixes from the 0.7 series.
I soft-launched 0.8.0 last week and have been finding and fixing any showstopper bugs. Right now we’re at 0.8.2 and things are working pretty smoothly. There are some performance issues with the non-U.S. precipitation maps, and noticeable slow-downs when the U.S. National Weather Service and/or OpenWeatherMap.org are having performance issues. I try to get around that with caching, but the benefits of that only come to pass if lots of people start using the site. I will continue making improvements in this area as I go forward, and the 0.9 series (whenever I get around to starting it) will add more weather sources so we have good fall-backs when performance issues happen.
Now, No-Nonsense Weatheris still a beta. It still has some known issues, and probably a bunch of unknown issues too. Please don’t rely on it as your sole source of weather information (yet). But I hope you will give it a try and continue to provide feedback and bug reports. You can use the ‘feedback’ link on the site itself to send your comments and bug reports, and if you’re technically inclined you can log in to the Intersanity bug tracker and file them into the system yourself.
For the last few years now, the automotive industry has been on a roll. Most of the new car introductions have looked great, and one by one the ugliest cars in the market have been discontinued. For 2015, there has been a true bloodbath of ugly cars. Four cars that were on last year’s list have been put to a well-deserved death: Honda Insight, Toyota FJ Cruiser, Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet, and Nissan Cube. And none of the new or redesigned models for 2015 are really ugly enough to make the list.
As such, the four ‘new additions’ at the bottom of the list are cars that have been around for one or more model years, but were edged out in previous lists by uglier (but now-discontinued) cars. The fact that the ‘average ugliness’ across the list is much less than in previous years should be seen as a commentary on the positive direction of modern auto design.
The criteria for inclusion is the same it has always been. I don’t include models that aren’t sold in the United States. I don’t include models that sell in low volume (and volume is defined completely subjectively based on how many I see on the highways in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area). I don’t include exotic, military, or special-purpose vehicles—so no super-cars, tanks, or postal trucks. I also don’t include vehicles reserved exclusively for the commercial market, such as the truly horrific Ram Promaster.
This list is entirely my personal opinion. I encourage your comments—whether they be nominations of ugly cars I may have missed, or impassioned defenses of the ones I didn’t. And if you own one of the cars on this list, well, don’t take it personally.
Part of why I have been relatively inactive here on Off on a Tangent lately is that I am continuing to devote a good amount of my free time toward developing No-Nonsense Weather. The live version right now is still 0.7.4, but I am hard at work on developing the next big beta: 0.8.0.
In addition to bug-fixes and performance improvements, and support for nautical miles and knots if you prefer them for distance and speed measurements, I am planning two really big feature enhancements for the 0.8.0 beta:
First, No-Nonsense Weather will support international locations (the 0.7.x series only supports U.S. locations). Severe weather watches and warnings will still be U.S.-only, but you’ll be able to get current conditions and a seven-day forecast for pretty much any location in the world. This is feature-complete and working in my testing instance (see screenshot), but I am still working on some performance issues. It turns out that searching a MySQL database of practically every named location in the world takes much longer than searching practically every named location in the United States. I have it optimized to the point where many world-wide location searches are even faster than U.S. searches were in the previous version, but I’m still having performance issues in some cases that I need to resolve before I can roll out a release. In the end though, I expect location finding to be much faster in 0.8.0 than it is today, no matter where you are.
The second big new feature is that I am making major improvements to the weather radar view. Right now, I just grab the appropriate U.S. National Weather Service radar image and pop it into the No-Nonsense Weather interface . . . but this is not particularly flexible. I am going to make it much nicer and easier to use in 0.8.0. You’ll be able to pan around and zoom in and out like you do in Google Maps and other similar services. At the moment I am planning to offer radar world-wide (well, in places that have weather radar, at least) . . . but fair warning, I might reduce the scope to just the U.S. depending on how big a project this ends up being. I’ve just started working on it, so I don’t have a good idea of how much time it will take just yet. If the 0.8.0 radar feature ends up being U.S. only, I’ll still come back (probably in 0.9.0) with world-wide support.
If you have used No-Nonsense Weather and experienced any bugs or problems with the current version, please either submit a bug or use the feedback feature on the site itself. I might have already fixed it in my 0.8.0 development efforts, but if not, there’s still time for me to get fixes in before the next release!
Some time around 2004, I obtained a completely legal ‘educational’ version of the Adobe Video Collection (as a hand-me-down from my then-future wife). The package included Mac versions of Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, Premiere 6.5, and After Effects 5.5—each of which was then a version or two outdated compared to the newer Creative Suite offerings. I made good use of Photoshop in my web development efforts of the day, but most of the other software sat mostly dormant and unused.
For some reason, in 2005, I decided to start messing around with some of the other products. I used Illustrator to re-create some old characters of mine . . . first, I recreated a hand-drawn cartoon ant named Antzoid. Then I created a new version of an inexplicable character named Peter Spoo, who happened to have been an accidental combination of two royalty-free Microsoft clip-art images (a man with a broken leg and a flower). And once I had nice vector versions of my two characters, I could bring them over into After Effects and animate them. So I did.
I posted a repeating Flash animation of Antzoid dancing, and then later a short Quicktime movie of Peter Spoo walking off a cliff. They were completely stupid, pointless animations that I threw together just to prove that I could make a semi-coherent animation if I ever wanted to. A few months later, I needed to make an ‘easter egg’ (hidden page/joke) for my web site, so I created a third stupid animation . . . an intentionally badly-drawn panda doing an intentionally badly-animated repetitive dance. It appeared on a blank white page that just said, in stark text, “GOD HATES PANDAS.” I figured that was a good explanation for why they are so bad at breeding.
Anyway, eventually my Adobe software stopped working. It was, after all, Mac software from the PowerPC era. Once I upgraded to a Mac with an Intel processor, I couldn’t use it anymore . . . and the cost of a new copy of the Adobe Creative Suite was more than I needed or wanted to spend for software I didn’t really need. Instead, I bought a standalone copy of Adobe Fireworks to do my web design work and went on my merry way. When I switched back to Windows, I transferred that Fireworks license from Mac to Windows and bought the Adobe Photoshop and Premier Elements bundle so I would have some basic photo and video software to do the jobs that iPhoto and iMovie had done on the Mac. Then I started taking a lot more photos, and bought a standalone copy of Adobe Lightroom to manage them. I upgraded those four Adobe products now-and-then in the years following.
Well, Fireworks got discontinued (ugh!) and the two Elements products kept getting more dumbed-down with each ‘upgrade’ . . . so I needed to evaluate my options, and it turned out that the most cost-effective way to get the four products I wanted (Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere) and keep them up-to-date moving forward was to bite the bullet and become a full-fledged Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber. The subscription also includes the final version of Fireworks, which ensures I’ll still be able to open and convert my Fireworks files (at least for now). And because I had current versions of a few Adobe apps, they gave me the discounted ‘Creative Suite users’ price for the first year.
But let’s get to the important part: for the first time in many years, I have a working copy of Adobe After Effects (which I didn’t really care about, but it comes included with the Creative Cloud subscription). So that meant that I could go back and reopen my old animations, tweak them a bit, and remaster them in stunning high resolution for posting to YouTube . . . because . . . why not?
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.
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