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Foggy Holiday

One photo and a photo-panorama from December 24th, just because I haven’t posted anything in a while…

Foggy Christmas Eve

The panorama was six photos originally, stitched in Hugin. The flat grey foggy background seemed to cause Hugin some issues – notice how obvious a few of the vertical join lines are in the centre of the image. Odd.

CYYJ Fog Panorama

I had someone email me a few days ago about my Nov. 25th F-Spot blogpost and it’s long discussion thread. I’d planned to do a followup post in early December, but holidays and reality obviously got in the way, and I’ve got WordPress set up to automatically close commenting after three weeks to frustrate the spambots a bit. I’ll do a proper followup F-Spot post this week!

Hope everyone had a satisfactory, safe holiday season.

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Exciting Olympic Links, Round 2

Apparently the City of Vancouver and/or VANOC (the Vancouver Olympic Committee) are gunning for anti-Olympic graphics again. More links on that BoingBoing story, but the ongoing efforts of the BC Civil Liberties Association during this runup to the Olympics have been heroic.

This collection would cause VANOC to collectively crap themselves, especially the VANOC logo redone with drug paraphernilia.

Over on the other side of the country, the Mounties in yet another attempt to quash more anti-Olympic sentiment. Because we’re all supposed to be happy and joyful that we’re hosting this corporate greedfest disguised as a sports event, haven’t you heard?

Previous Olympic excitement here.

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Seasonal(ish) Links

Tis the season, and all that…

The Big Picture started their 2009 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar back on December 1st. (I’m of the opinion that the Hubble Space Telescope is the greatest public art project ever undertaken. The science is a bonus.)

The HP Lovecraft Historical Society does excellent mock-carols on Cthulhuish themes. Here’s a Youtube vid of Death To The World.

Bartender/blogger Jeffrey Morgenthaler has a excellent eggnog recipe. Easy, quick and yummy. Suggestion: cut the amount of sugar in the recipe in half; it’s still plenty sweet enough done that way. I’ll be doing this at a couple of Xmas parties in the next few weeks, as I did last year, and I’m sure it’ll be a hit all over again.

Oh, and December 25th is also Newtonmas (birthday of Isaac Newton), amongst other things.

Last year’s post on approximately the same theme.

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First Winter Storm

Victoria Airport weather as of about forty minutes ago:

METAR CYYJ 190200Z 15028G36KT 3SM -RA BR FEW008 FEW016 OVC030 07/05
A2969 RMK SF1SC2SC6 SLP055

See that “15028G36KT”? That’s wind, lots of it. 28 knots is 50km/h, sustained wind speed, with gusts up to 38 knots, 70km/h!

Victoria Harbour – right down in the city proper, about 25km south of the airport – isn’t quite as bad, but still lots of wind:

METAR CYWH 190200Z 15018G28KT 12SM -SHRA FEW010 SCT025 OVC050 08/01
A2969 RMK CF1CU2SC5 SLP055=

18G28 – the harbour’s gust speed only just matchs the sustained wind speed for the airport!

We’ve had a constant stream of weather warnings for the last 24hrs, but it took until this afternoon for the wind to really start hammering us.

Nobody makes a proper METAR-widget for WordPress. Lots of weather plugins, but there don’t seem to be any to show proper raw METARs. Perhaps when I get my PHP skillz back up to speed I’ll attempt one, using the US NOAA/FAA API.

And the otherwise-awesome Gnome panel weather applet has had its location listings gutted recently, so I can’t get both the local airport and local harbour on my panels like I used to… hopefully this regression gets fixed for Ubuntu 10.04!

Now, though, I think I’m going to make something warm and alcoholic to drink, check my flashlights, and hope the power stays on…