Events

The data transfer from Weather Now v3 to v5 continues in the background. Before running it, I did a simple SQL query to find out how many readings each station reported between September 2009 and March 2013. The results surprised me a bit: The v3 database recorded 162.4 million readings from 4,071 stations. Fully 75 of them only have one report, and digging in I can see that a lot of those don't have any data. Another 185 have fewer than 100, and a total of 573 have fewer than 10,000. At the other end...

Sunday night I finished moving all the Weather Now v4 data to v5. The v4 archives went back to March 2013, but the UI made that difficult to discover. I've also started moving v3 data, which would bring the archives back to September 2009. I think once I get that done then moving the v2 data (back to early 2003) will be as simple as connecting the 2009 import to the 2003 database. Then, someday, I'll import data from other sources, like NCEI (formerly NCDC) and the Met*, to really flesh out the...

I won't belabor the point, or even inject my own opinion about Will Smith's Oscars meltdown Sunday night, except to say I'm amazed at how many articles, columns, and Tweets have appeared about it. I guess nothing else in the world matters right now?

I took Cassie for a 40-minute walk around Lexington's historic district on the way back from Berea: The light really wasn't great, so I didn't take a lot of photos. Plus Cassie has a way of adding motion blur to every photo I shoot. Two weeks ago I attended a conference by the Chicago River, which had dye left over from St Patrick's Day. Add a passing fire boat and it's Christmas in March:

Editing photos on my phone doesn't always produce the best results. Faster, cheaper, better, pick two, right? Fortunately I have Adobe Lightroom at home, and deploying software yesterday took a long time. Here are my re-edits. Better? Worse? At the very least, they're all correctly-proportioned (2x3) instead of whatever I guessed on my little phone screen. Thursday's sunrise at Nicura Ranch: Berea College: One of the ranch's permanent residents: Down the road from the ranch: Cinnamon, who rather...

I've just switched the DNS entries for wx-now.com over to the v5 App, and I've turned off the v4 App and worker role. It'll take some time to transfer over the 360 GB of archival data, and to upload the 9 million rows of Gazetteer data, however. I've set up a virtual machine in my Azure subscription specifically to do that. This has been quite a lift. Check out the About... page for the whole history of the application. And watch this space over the next few months for more information about how the app...

We're about to get back on the road for our 700 km drive back to Chicago. Before leaving, I just wanted to highlight Ravinia Festival's upcoming 2022 season. In particular, note who they're partnering with for these performances of La Clemenza di Tito and Don Giovanni. Oh, yes, I will be there.

The day started like this: Then it became this: And returned to this: But because of this: It is now this: As for the horses and goats on the ranch, I had some challenges introducing Cassie to them. The principal challenge was Cassie barking her head off at all of them, which two of the horses and both of the goats wanted nothing to do with, but one of the horses looked ready to teach Cassie the formula F=ma in a direct and possibly painful way. Now that I've downloaded 12 hours of email and figured out...

Cassie and I are at a lovely ranch in Kentucky where tomorrow she'll meet goats and tonight I've met a 1990s-era Internet connection. Well, I didn't come here to surf the Web, so I'll just deal. Meanwhile, I'm sitting outside listening to frogs. Lots of frogs. And a hound somewhere down the road.

I'm about 18 hours from taking Cassie on a long road trip, and I have two problems that may cause headaches (one of them literally). First, trees and grasses all over Chicago have started having lots of sex, causing really uncomfortable stuffiness and sinus congestion for me. Second, one of the tires of my car has a slow leak. The first one will work itself out naturally, with the help of several boxes of tissues. The second one requires a trip to the local tire center, which I'm glad to report is about...