Hurricane Wilma, more like Betty.

Yup, I'm fine.
Slept through most of it. Went to bed at 2 in the morning as the hurricane was just starting to build up, got woken up around 8ish by the computer UPS thingy beeping at me that the main power had gone and I should back up everything.
Kicked it off.
Looked out the small front window to see a world of grey with rapidly moving bits in it I think.
Was just a wall of wind and water.
Kicked the laundry into the gap at the door and noticed it wasn't too damp; or rather I wasn't up to my ankles in water.
Went back to bed, safe in the knowledge that I had 3 days of cookies just in case.
Woke up late in the afternoon. Couldn't do any work, no power.
Ate first days supplies of cookies.
Went back to bed.
Woke up 10ish (nighttime, all dark, Ooooo! scary). Went outside to chat to the neighbours how bad had it been etc. The bloke next door had gone into downtown Miami and stayed in an Hotel as he thought it'd be safer than being on an island only a couple of feet above sea level. He had to get a friend to come and collect him as his car got flooded in the Hotel car park, he spent a restless night hearing windows being blown out, no lights, no elevator; and didn't take too lightly to me sleeping through the whole thing on the island without noticing a thing. Downtown Miami got hit quite bad, lots of flooding round the trendy bars, all the posh Condo's have had some serious damage, lots of trees down, windows gone, cars destroyed. Drank all the beer/win we had as emergency provisions and had quite the community party round the flashlights. Tried to inspire the Dunkirk spirit and all that. Was just about to launch into the 'Hitler, has only got one...' song, but police kept patrolling past, but it'd of ment climbing over the wreckage in the street and getting their feet wet, so they just flashed their lights at us and drove on. Pretty laid back area, and not like there wasn't anyone who'd not evacuated who wasn't there drinking with us.
Went back home, finished off emergency supplies of Cookies. Started thinking about what one does when one needs to start looting? Is there an etiquette to this sort of thing? Should I leave an IOU note or something? WHAT IF THEY'VE RUN OUT OF COOKIES!?!?!? Calmer mood took me, went back to bed. Woke up in the morning to full power, everything between my 4 walls back to normal. Found one more packet of Cookies that I'd not noticed in the dark. Bonus.
My place just looks like it's been pebble dashed with bits of leaves.
With Wilma safely in the mid atlantic, if anyone see's my doormat that I forgot to bring in, I'd appreciate if you could send it back. You'll know it's mine, it's got a bit 'Welcom' on it (dunno what happened to the 'e', was like that when I moved in, I should of mentioned it to the landlady, oh well).

The air surges fierce, but it's taken a long time to reach this.
Today has been a beautiful day, sun, gentle warmth and a breeze that has kept a constant flow from the SW. There's a wierd undercurrent to everyone's mood, calm panic.
Most of the shops are well boarded up, the local chemist has wood covers nailed up, the supermarket pull-down shutters, the pizza chain place aluminium shielding, the sandwich shop has cardboard sheets sellotaped to the windows. Guess which one has my money to not do well. All the shops have notices they were shutting early to let their staff get safely home to prepare, no-one appeared too bothered apart from the numerous teenagers filled with nervous excitement as though they were hanging around a mall with security guards on the prowl for them. There did seem alot of people out for a Sunday night pushing trollys filled with water bottles. I've stocked up the fridge and freezer with water, I estimate I've 3 days worth, but without air-con, hard to say for sure. Hopefully won't need to start drinking my own wee till Wednesday night, not sure if I should eat/drink stuff now to give it a better flavour.
Powers the first thing that pops with a strong breeze around here, and effective as the local power company is around here, if it goes down, looking at the scale of the problem, I'd understand if it took them a while to get it back on again. Got a few candles, BBQ brickets, matches, lighter, fully charge moby phone/gameboy/psp. Lighting shouldn't be a problem.
I saw cars parked in the same semi-underground car parking spot as the last hurricane that filled it, destroying a few cars that had water up to nearly the roof. Guess people don't learn too quick.
The initial reports of it being a cat 1 storm heading far to the north of us have now turned into a cat 3 hurricane passing very close. It's 2:50am now and the storm is just starting to hit. The winds that have been a steady push all day are now gusting and there's a sound of something banging against something else in the distance. All the buildings are locked down tight with shutters only allowing a small peek of light through, the island seems unusually dark and forboding.
Storm surge, whilst expected to be 10-15 feet on the west coast, should be around 5 feet on this side of Florida, it's rain and blocked storm drains that messes things up round here, not really the rain, I'll keep popping out to make sure they stay clear of debris. Estimated to get around 8inches of rainfall. Katrina was 13 inches as it passed over, but how this'll work with the storm drains being raised in water level, I've no idea how it's going to be. Katrina did hover over us for a fair time dumping water, Wilma should move over us alot quicker, so I'm hoping we don't see the flooding we did last time.
I'm going to try and get a bit of kip earlier than usual, think our customers will understand if we're not quite as responsive as we usually are. Got the UPS/spare servers raised a few feet off the ground, hopefully it's enough. When Hurrican Andrew came in, apparently there was fish in the parking lot and the high water mark was up to my shoulders on the wall of my appartment block. With it coming in from the SW, everything /should/ be a lot less.
After power pops (and it will), I've got enough charge in UPS/phones to pop on once an hour to check email for about a day, so will continue posting hurricane reports as it filters in. I'll try and get a few pics of the post damage, but it may take a while to get them uploaded somewhere.
Taken me 15 mins to type the above, and now I can hear thAe wind starting to howl past the window. It's picking up noticeably.

See you all soon.
Rob

Uh oh

Earlier reports showed it heading ALOT further north. Every update I see is bringing it down 50 miles south, getting closer and closer to hitting Miami head on.
It's not looking good so far. All the reports show it dipping to a cat 4 briefly with a very, very good chance getting back up to a strong cat 5. See what the reports are like in the morning. If we're getting a cat 5 inc, then seeing what a cat 1 was like, I'm outta here.

Named and Shamed, US Style

So, is there a sex offender near you Robo?
mapsexoffenders.com

Although its quite odd to see a few women in there as well. Probably all the schoolteachers having sex wiht 15 year old boys. Now, depending on the teacher, I don't think this should be a criminal activity, or not at least when I was 15. :)

Wilma's on the way to Florida

Are you going to be evacuated Robo?

The best Ebay auction ever!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=8706890812&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT

Read the questions aswell. Hurry you've only 6 days to view this once in a lifetime offer!

OOh, catch up of the weeks news

Morning.

Dan, Canon camera's have a fault on the ccd. Linky
Ah, it doesn't matter to you now does it? :)
The CCD manufactured by Sony is in plastic and not ceramic, and in extreme conditions can fail quite easily, but not only do they have the component in their own camera, other manufacturers such as fuki and canon both use them! 1 word.

And, I wonder what its like to drive a GT40 round laguna Seca, in real life compared to GT4...I wonder

and I was going to buy an ipod nano, but I think I'll wait

More PSP fun

I got one last week (ordered it 2 days before the 2.0->1.5 hack was announced, turned up just in time!). Bit miffed the Mame and Snes emulaters aren't up to decent speed. GB/GBA, well, got a real one of them, though the Megadrive emulator works a treat.
As for real games, got Untold Legends (top down Everquest/Gauntlet thingy, usual stuff, kill stuff, kill more stuff, cast spells, get better gear, blah blah blah). Well, that does it an injustice, it's a pleasent enough game, few things remind me of the EQ mechanics (which makes sense as it's from SOE), but nothing overly amazing.
Burnout Legends.
omg, omg, omg, love it to bits! Got to play the original burnout a few years ago and spent the event giggling making big crashes, loved it to bits. Not seen the later versions on whatever platforms they ended up on, but on a PSP it's awesome. REALLY good stuff, thought the analogue controller wouldn't be enough for controlling drift, but didn't take long to get the hang of it. Lotsa races (durr), pursuit (Chase HQ but more), Crash Event (hurr hurr hurr, *giggle*), road rage, time events, lots of different classes of vehicles.
Not normally into these sorts of games, but when it's done as well as this, works for me. Load time is a little bad, everything needs a load, even hitting retry has a 5 second pause, but it's verging on being that little bit too much.
SERIOUSly good game.
More thoughts about the PSP.
I need one of those handgrip thingies to drop it into. 3-4 races and my left hand is starting to hurt badly using the analogue control. It IS a good design overall, but my hands just overreach that little bit too much to make for relaxing play.
In 2 minds on the hacking for it, true, Sony DO need to make money off not only the console but the games too, piracy is bad, mmkay?
But all the features it has that are hidden away that are only reachable by hacks? Shows they've created an amazing piece of hardware, but deliberately set out to limit it's functionality. Now, the thing I don't understand is, why did they ever allow code to be exectuted from the Mem card in the first place? When the first versions started to be used for pumping out exe's that ran, was anyone in Sony really that surprised?
Shame there isn't a legitimate way of doing this, stop the Iso players to be able to play full ripped games, but still allow someone using gcc to crank a bit of code out and access most of the functionality (guess once you've done one, they'll take that and use it to run the other). It's funny, but apparently the unofficial SDK can access more of the iron that the official sony one. Makes sense in that they want people to code to libraries so they can update the device when parts get cheaper, but once again, shows they've deliberately knobbled the device in many ways.
Still, love it to bits. Only thing I can think of that would of made it perfect was blue LEDS.

George is a failure

Googlebombing 'failure'

9/16/2005 12:54:00 PM
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.

Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.