Hurricane Screamer

I might have found out how to configure my WP to Facebook plugin correctly. The plugin can exclude categories from posting to my FB wall, but the how-to on that has always eluded me. And time is always pressing on other matters, so I never really followed through.

It needs a comma-delimited array of category ID’s to exclude, and I always thought it meant the numerical entry of the category within the blog’s SQL database. What’s always eluded me up to this point is finding the category numbers.

It’s embarrassing to admit how easy the category numbers are to find; simply hover the mouse over the “edit” link of each category in the WP category page. The ID is right there in the displayed link.

I’ve set the exclusions hopefully in the way it wants, and will see if this post is displayed on FB. If I can see it, I’ve failed.

Every year I try to add something to my coverage of tropical weather news. I’ve been playing with Twitter for about a year, and really like it. I’ve seen certain web sites reflect new postings with a tweet, and I thought “why not?”

So, this morning I have been researching how this might be done. I’m going to try several WordPress plugins until I find one I like. I’m starting with one recommended by WordPress called WP To Twitter.

If I don’t like the results, I’ll move on to another plugin.

It always seems as though I am apologizing for not writing posts. Er, well, sorry about not writing posts.

I will have more news on progress with the HUD-1 program later this week, but for now I have some news regarding my blogroll. My friend Kathleen has moved from the area and closed her blog so I am removing that link. If she wants, she can always blog from this site as she has an account.

I am adding a link to the blog of another friend, Katheryn Swann, who also has an account here. This new link can be found on the right sidebar under the “blogs of friends” category.

To start you off on her blog, here is a link to her latest post:
Virtual Connections–An Allegory of Reality. Enjoy!

No, I’m not going to say “Sparta!” at the top of my lungs. I just wanted to point out that this is the 300th post to this new blog.

According to the latest forecast from the NHC, Gustav is now due to a landfall at around 1 PM tomorrow, with winds of 130 MPH. The effects from the central part of the storm will be felt far earlier, starting at around 1 AM tomorrow morning. I have no idea how bad damage and flooding will be for New Orleans and the surrounding area. The NHC has also said that the storm surge could be as high at 25 feet in some areas. I did see in NOLA that a surge of 10 to 15 feet was expected for New Orleans.

Mayor Nagin thinks it will be very bad tomorrow, and is asking the entire town to leave town. Governor Bobby Jindal has canceled his plans to be at the GOP convention tomorrow, and so has President Bush. I’m sure assets and supplies are being moved into strategic locations, well away from storm damage, but close enough to be useful. And I would not be surprised to see the Mercy ships somewhere around, waiting for Gustav to pass before moving in.

I’ve checked NOLA for news, and did find one interesting link, to the state’s DOT Traffic Cams. The link will start you at Power Blvd and I-10. Use the other links to the left of the image. At the moment, I think they’re using the westward facing camera.

Now, to Gustav itself. The storm was indeed damaged by the passage of land as the NHC had anticipated, it was just delayed. Gustav is expected to gain strength within a few hours, eventually reaching winds of 145 MPH or more. Currently, Gustav has winds of 120 MPH and a central pressure of 960 MB. The storm is moving towards the northwest at around 16 MPH.

Cuba is going to get a double whammy over the next four days, first by Gustav, and then by Hanna.

Gustav has grown into a huge, powerful storm that will hit the United States early next week. Currently, Gustav has winds of 120 MPH and a central pressure of 955 MB. Hurricane force winds extend out 60 miles from the center, and tropical storm force winds 160 miles. To give an idea of its influence, the Florida Keys are under a tropical storm warning and the clouds we see in our sky is outflow from Gustav.

Gustav is expected to gain strength to category four status before passing over the western part of Cuba, and then gain even more strength as it moves towards the Gulf Coast. The storm may then be moving into an area that is less conducive for strengthening, but it will still be a major storm.

Gustav is now forecast to have a landfall about 60 miles southeast of New Orleans at around 2 AM Tuesday morning. The track has stayed stable for the last 24 hours, but that’s no real indication. It might change later. The effects of Gustav will be felt much sooner, starting about 24 hours before the center passes over land. At landfall, Gustav is forecast to have winds of 130 MPH.

The worst part about this is that the storm will be southwest of New Orleans, meaning that the northeast quadrant, the most powerful, will be directly over the city for an entire day. Just what they need.

You should read the New Orleans local newspaper to find out more about evacuation plans.

The track forecast for Hanna now shows that, after a fairly shallow southward turn, the storm will pass directly over the middle of the island nation of Cuba. Hanna is forecast to be a minimal hurricane or even a strong tropical storm so there won’t be much wind damage. But rain could be a real factor for Cuban residents.

The area far to the east of us I noted a few days ago may be forming into a tropical depression. A storm that forms so far to the east (it’s raining on the Cape Verde Islands right now) usually starts a northern turn long before it approaches any coastline.

This morning, I updated to the newest version of WordPress available from the PowWeb hosting service. I’m not sure I like all the color changes, and it will take a few posts to see if the workflow has been made better or worse.

Note to WordPress: moving a control cluster to a small icon might be better on desktop space, but not on ultimate workflow. We’ll see.

I will be offline for one day, either Thursday or Friday, as I plan on performing the yearly upgrade and migration of one of my three hard drives. This is a policy that I began many years ago, not because the drives were beginning to fail, but because my need for hard drive space increased so much. As it happens, this policy is a good idea anyway, because hard drives do fail eventually, and I put a great deal of stress on them, and on my computer.

This computer is up and operating for an almost constant 24-hour cycle. I can’t remember the last time I turned it off at night, but I know it must not be more than a dozen times since the start of the year.

I call this policy drive rotation. This year I will rotate out Drive E:, which was initially formatted June 15th, 2005. I have the replacement on order, and it should arrive Thursday afternoon. If it arrives early enough, I will begin the replacement immediately. If not, it will occur Friday morning.

After the rotation, my system configuration will look like this:
Drive C: 200 GB (split into two partitions)
Drive D: 500 GB
Drive E: 500 GB

This means that I will have a terabyte+ of HDD space on my system! Fantastic! I’m also planning on moving D to E temporarily and re-formatting it. I’ve had some misgivings about D for a while, as some operations I did on it last year ended up in failure.

For this reason, I will likely be offline for at least 12-hours, perhaps more.

I have upgraded my version of WordPress to 2.3.2. Apparently there was a data leak in the SQL database and a few security holes.

As I have in other posts, I apologize for not posting more, even if it is only about work. And that is something that I can post about; after all, this blog was established to post about tropical weather and the Form Foundation project.

In the future, I’ll post at least every other day about something, even if it’s personal.

My deepest apologies for not posting on local tropical weather conditions over the last few days, but apparently, residents in Glynn County have had tremendous problems communicating with the rest of the Internet. My own connection dropouts made posting to this blog an impossible task.

I talked with a number of people yesterday, and the broad range of service providers having problems leads me to believe that there was a cable cut somewhere south of us. It seems that both broadband providers (Comcast and ATT) and three dialup providers (DarienTel, AOL/CompuServe, and NetLink) were all having horrible connection problems.