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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…

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blogtrivia

Over to WordPress MU

In the interests of running most of my webspace with one system, I installed WordPress Multiuser a while ago and started experimenting with it.

This evening I exported all my posts from my old Pivot-based blog into a new WPMU blog, cleaned the imports up, adjusted my Planet Ubuntu feed, and should be up and running on the new WPMU version of Turned Skyward.

Comments didn’t survive the export/import process, so if you said something especially erudite, you’ll have to go over to the old blog and have a look at it there. Note that the old blog is read-only from now on; comments are closed. A couple of older posts of mine had interesting comment threads; I might edit those posts here to link to their counterparts over on the old blog.

Onward and upward (or something like that) with WPMU; I’m liking it a lot and looking forward to moving more of my web content to a centralized CMS.

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Nov. 11, Reprise

On Guard For Thee

Just about the only photo of mine that turned out from the Remembrance Day ceremony downtown a few days ago. It was sunny, fairly cold, and well attended – the paper said seven to ten thousand. Lots of kids & families, which is good.

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Uncategorized

November 11th

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The poem itself on WikiSource; about the poem on Wikipedia.

Base image for the graphic above courtesy of Veterans Affairs Canada. And I should note, in passing, that my text on the image recreates perhaps the best-known error possible with this famous poem…