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Death is a giant, brightly-covered slug heading your way....

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Posted in Misc | Posted on 08-27-2008 | 2,368 views

A picture is worth a thousand words...

Death or cake?

This is from NOAA's hurricane strength prediction chart for Gustav. I've got a feeling it will continue to pull to the right. I was pretty impressed by the data services at NOAA, especially the use of RSS feeds. I just wish there was a feed/API to get the long/lat of Gustav currently. In theory you could look for:

THE CENTER OF TROPICAL STORM GUSTAV WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 19.1 NORTH...LONGITUDE 74.4 WEST OR 90 MILES...150 KM...SOUTHEAST OF GUANTANAMO CUBA

in the most recent RSS item and parse it out there. I think I may whip up a quick howcloseisraytodeath() method tonight to see how accurately it can track the distance. Of course, I've got a nice Flip video recorder now so I have no excuse to avoid filming the fun this time.

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Andy Sandefer said on 08-27-2008 at 4:26 PM #
@Ray,
I hope that this blows past you. I'm scheduled to take my family on a long overdue vacation to Destin, FL (panhandle) in a little over a week so I'm hoping that the town is still there after Gustav. I guess all you can do is put some supplies in your basement and hope it doesn't flood. Best of luck to you and your family.
Raymond Camden said on 08-27-2008 at 4:27 PM #
Um... basement? We are under waterlevel. No basements around here. ;)
Andy Sandefer said on 08-27-2008 at 4:30 PM #
Well sorry for being so stupid. I live in Indiana where tornadoes and republicans exert their will over everyone on a regular basis so I'm used to hiding underground until bad things blow over. I didn't stop to think about the "don't build underground" thing.
Shane Zehnder said on 08-27-2008 at 4:31 PM #
Yeah, looks like we both are potentially, shall we say, really wet? :(
Raymond Camden said on 08-27-2008 at 4:32 PM #
@Andy - Heh, hope you saw the wink at the end. Wasn't calling you stupid.
Andy Sandefer said on 08-27-2008 at 4:40 PM #
@Ray
I know that you weren't calling me stupid. I just personally felt stupid for not being aware of the whole below sea level thing. I watch a lot of Discovery so you'd think that I would be up on my natural disaster zones!
Albert Nurick said on 08-27-2008 at 4:59 PM #
Ray, I hope the storm keeps trending east and misses you entirely. Louisiana has had enough disasters.

If the worst does happen, you're welcome to head this way. We're located in Houston. Rumor has it that you're a pretty fair CF programmer, and we could put you to work. :)
Raymond Camden said on 08-27-2008 at 5:02 PM #
@Albert - Heh thanks. :)
Sean Corfield said on 08-27-2008 at 5:21 PM #
We keep telling Ray he's welcome to move to earthquake country instead...
Anthony said on 08-27-2008 at 6:24 PM #
Check the RSS you found. Some RSS feeds are geocoded. You can also look for KML feeds. Mapquest's latest API actually has a POI loader for these types of feeds. I thought we might have something, but everything we use is not real-time. For more depressing feeds you can also check out fema's and:
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/services.php?lang=eng...
Jim Priest said on 08-27-2008 at 6:28 PM #
I've been impressed with the maps at Weather Underground - they also have a "North Atlantic" feed on their site which has the coords but it's not a very clean file to parse through...
Kevin Benore said on 08-27-2008 at 9:05 PM #
Ha! That is great. But I rather think rayismorbid() would be good too.
Chris said on 08-28-2008 at 3:07 AM #
Hey Ray,

just move to (continental) Europe... no hurricanes, no earthquakes, and, a CF community that is always looking for reinforcements. ;-)
Lola LB said on 08-28-2008 at 5:54 AM #
A really good source to keep track of is Weather Nerd (Brendan Loy) at http://pajamasmedia.com/weathernerd/ . . . he provides excellent summaries of incoming reports of developing storms and hurricanes as well as notes on what the civilian authorities are doing on ground (and at times taking them to task for not doing what they should be doing). Of course - he's that infamous blogger who blew the lid off when it came to NO city gov't and LA state gov't incompetencies.
MattO said on 08-28-2008 at 9:47 AM #
Thank goodness a Cold Fusion job got me to move out of Hurricane Alley.
Rey Bango said on 08-28-2008 at 1:14 PM #
Just know you're not alone. Hanna just formed and the current path sends it straight my way. :P

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