Year: 2008

Categories
Photography Weather

The story, again

Update As of this afternoon, June 17, the predictions now place the crest of the flood in St. Louis on the 23rd of June, and 40 feet. The forecast is now for major flooding in our community.

Tomorrow or Thursday, I’ll grab my camera, as I head out to record yet another flood. It seems like I’m taking pictures of flooding every six months now.

A year ago the Missouri crept over its banks, sending the Mississippi higher, but not to the point of being a threat. Earlier this year, I watched as the Meramec flooded areas not two miles from my home. And now, favorite towns of mine further north—Clarksville, Winfield, Hannibal, Alton— are facing their worst threat, perhaps ever.

Flood of 2007

The main Clarksville city web site says it all, replacing the normal pages with just one picture of the downtown area, showing the river as it gets closer. First there was Wisconsin, then Iowa, now us and Illinois, as too much water drains off the land into the only place it can drain: the Mississippi.

The crest will most likely arrive on Friday for the towns up north, on Saturday for St. Louis. We’re not going to reach the same 1993 flood levels, as the Missouri isn’t as high as it was 15 years ago. It was high waters further north along the Mississippi and high waters in the Missouri, both of which converge just before the city that lead to such epic floods in St.Louis and down south. Still, we’re a scant four inches away from crossing the line from moderate to major flooding, as levees overtop up north, like dominoes falling, one after another; leaving behind a body of water that seems as surprised to see buildings in its midst as we are devastated to see it surround our homes and flow over our streets.

Meramec Flood 2008

The folks of Hannibal assure us that Mark Twain’s home is in no danger because of a levee built years ago. The same levee featured in the first story in Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America , which told of how the levee protected the business area and museums, but didn’t the homes of the poor, and how it is the poor who suffer the most in these floods. Mark Twain would not approve.

We knew this flood was coming months ago, as rains fell throughout the spring, and snow fell into up north and melted late. What can you do, though? Levees can’t be built in a month, and sandbags can only do so much. The water is the blood that flows through the veins of our land, and not only couldn’t we hold it back, we shouldn’t hold it back. All we can do is cherish the river in good times, and run for the hills in bad. Oh, and not build homes in flood plains.

I watched on TV last night as forecasters predicted that these floods will cause food prices to inflate an additional 6%. The waters have filled fields with muck and goo, unlike floods in the past that used to lay down clean, rich, top soil. We’ve contaminated the lands and the waters and the floods don’t bring the benefits the way they used to. Now, you have to have a tetanus shot just to go near the water.

Meramec flood 2008

The Army Corps of Engineers, who believe that we can engineer ourselves out of any problem, call these floods five hundred year floods because there is a .2% chance of them happening every year. I don’t think the experts really know how often these floods will come, though, because earlier this year the National Weather Service’s expert on floods in this area predicted only moderate flooding for 2008, even as we looked out the window at the rains, and one week before the Meramec floods began.

Flood of 2007

Categories
SVG

Robert: Applying SVG effects to HTML

A couple of people have kindly pointed out Robert O’Callahan’s wonderful exploration Applying SVG Effects to HTML.

I’ve held off on posting about it, as I wanted to create a longer writing trying out Robert’s work. However, I didn’t want to put off sharing this effort any longer. I’ll have more on this mix of HTML and SVG at a later time. In the meantime, if you’re a fan of SVG, you’ll want to check out Robert’s work.

Categories
Critters

Wary Eye

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I walk at the St. Louis Zoo early in the mornings a couple of days a week. If I get there early enough, I beat both the crowds and the heat. It’s an interesting place to visit, too, in the early mornings.

This week I reached the Red Rock region of the zoo just as the keepers were cleaning some of the habitats. In the Antelope Yards, the zoo creates mixed species habitats, typically combining one or two hoofed animals and a couple of different kinds of non-competitive birds. Big birds, too. In a couple of the exhibits, the birds are the largest animal.

When the keepers clean the habitats for some of the smaller animals, they don’t remove the animals or the birds. I’ve never seen more than one keeper at a time cleaning, either. However, in my last walk, as I reached the second of the Speke’s Gazelle habitats, I noticed two people cleaning rather than one. A few minutes watching and I discovered why.

The second of the Speke’s Gazelle habitat has two large Saddleback Storks in with the gazelles. I don’t know exactly how tall these two birds are, but they weren’t much shorter than the keepers cleaning the habitat. They also have very long beaks.

One of the birds was indifferent to the keepers, but the other one followed the keepers about the area, keeping an eye on what they were doing.

Wary Eye 1

As the keepers would clean, they would keep their fronts facing the bird. After a few minutes I had a hard time keeping from laughing, because the scene was incredibly comical⁚ bird oh-so-casually following keepers; keepers always maneuvering themselves so they faced the bird directly.

The bird never made any threatening gestures or sudden moves until the keepers were almost finished. While moving toward the door to leave the habitat, one of the keepers passed the bird and turned her back on it for just a moment. The bird whipped around so fast all I could do was capture a blur of movement with my camera. However, as soon as the keeper turned her front towards the bird again, the stork went back to its casual, seemingly unconcerned, but unnervingly persistent stalking.

Wary Eye 2
Wary Eye 3
Wary Eye 4

Categories
Browsers

Browser Buzz

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Browsers have been generating a lot of buzz this week.

Opera just released Opera 9.5, which I’ve already downloaded and installed on all of my machines. I’m also going to be downloading and trying out the new Dragonfly JavaScript debugger, since I’ll be covering it (and other JS tools) in the second edition of Learning JavaScript.

Now, it would seem that next Tuesday is the official Firefox 3 download day. Of course, if you even use Firefox on that day you’ll be downloading the released version on that day.

I’m particularly happy about Firefox 3, as I’ve had some SVG rendering issues related to Firefox 2 that made me hesitate in using SVG more completely in my various web sites. Now, I can go to town.

The IE team also released a new post about IE8 beta 2, out in August. Unfortunately, the news about IE8 isn’t as positive as the news about Opera and Firefox. What’s happened is that the initial use of a meta element in order to trigger “IE7” mode, has been proven to be problematical, and needing to be further refined. Now, developers are encouraged to use the EmulateIE7 mode, in order to emulate IE7 behavior, rather than enforce IE7 standards. This is going to be causing confusion, and doesn’t necessarily lead to a sense of warm and coziness that the IE team has their act together.

Unfortunately, no word on support for opacity. The IE team removed the MS proprietary opacity filter in IE8, which was good. However, the team did not put in place the standards-based opacity, which is causing a great deal of unhappiness.

I decided to check the browser statistics on my own sites, particularly my new ones, and my older Burningbird, which I’ve been cleaning up in Google. What I found is the following:

Only 10.5% of visitors to my new Just Shelley site use MSIE. Of the remaining, Safari users account for 8.9%, Opera users 4.4%, and Firefox users account for a whopping 65.1% of the user base.

At RealTech, MSIE 5.5 users account for 6.7%, 6.0 users 5.4%, and 7.0 users account for 4.6%. IE8 beta testers only account for 0.5% of the users. For the rest, Safari has 8.6%, Opera 4.5%, and Firefox, again, accounts for 53.1% of the user base.

For the Burningbird site, which has the oldest material and most visitors from Google, IE use increased to 25.9%. Firefox accounts for 16.2%, Opera for 4.5%, and Safari accounts for 6.6%. Who is the big winner at Burningbird? NetNewsWire, which accounts for 27% of file accesses at Burningbird. That’s a lot of feed reads.

Finally, for Painting the Web, MSIE only accounts for 5.8% of the users, Safari accounts for 10.3%, Opera users have increased to 9.9% (those Opera folks, they love SVG), and last but not least, Firefox accounts for 65.1% of users at Painting the Web.

What does this all mean? It means that active readers of my sites are using Firefox much more than any other browser, while IE users tend to come in via search results on older posts. Safari users have increased, helped along, no doubt, by Apple’s installing Safari on Windows machines, via a Quicktime upgrade. (Why on earth people would complain about Apple putting a standards-based browser on Windows, beats the hell out of me–would we prefer IE?)

Opera users form a good, consistent base at all of my sites, except for Painting the Web, which has double the number of Opera users. Again, I think people who like SVG also like Opera, which has been consistently a strong supporter of SVG.

In summary, at my sites at least, the number of people using IE is dropping. Most people who come to my site using MSIE do so through some Google or Yahoo search, seldom stay more than a quick look at a page, and then move on. Most are using older versions of MSIE, which implies (and the stats also bare this out) that they’re using older versions of Windows and the Mac OS. I frankly never get IE8 beta testers, while I’ve consistently received larger numbers of beta testers for Firefox and Opera.

In other words, MSIE users do not make up a significant portion of my regular readership. More importantly, their numbers have dropped almost 50% from the statistics I had last year.

Now, it’s true that the topics I write about tend to attract the tech community who, other than those who specifically work with IE, professionally, rarely use IE. I have two other sites opening later that cover non-tech fields, not to mention Just Shelley, which isn’t going to be focused on technology. I’ll check in about six months, and see how the statistics do at these and my other sites.

Regardless: Congratulations, Opera! Congratulations, Firefox!

Categories
Weather Weblogging

Storms

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dug out from a storm this week and the winds are still blowing, and the lighting still lighting up the sky and none of this has anything to do with the weather. Well, there was a storm earlier, which blew down the tree across from us. Lots of trees down online, too.

I emerged from various uninteresting things and went online this morning and found all these moods today. For instance, there’s an anti-intellectual/postmodern thing going on, links pulled together by AKMA, who attaches his own take on discussion.

I don’t know enough about postmodernism to be hostile about it, one way or another. I used to be insecure about this – now I’m glad. Ignorance really is bliss.

Jeneane’s leading the charge against the Jupiter Biz Blog conference – too many people attending too many conferences, and all of them are blogging about them, but what’s worse is their blogging about each other blogging about each other and I’m getting dizzy.

One more person writes “What’s a weblog” and I’m going to loose my cookies.

I found out I can’t use Plesk to manage accounts on the new co-op server because it’s dependent on MySQL 3.23, and we’ll be using MySQL 4.x. That’s okay, though, because we should use open source solutions like Webmin instead. Speaking of open source, from Ken’s posting today, sounds like there’s been a few trees down out in the Apache world.

Tom Shugart doesn’t think much of the heartland, or people with weight problems:

Each time I find myself back in the heartland, it seems to get worse. The food seems to get more and more tasteless and toxic, and the inhabitants more and more rotund. How can the food be so bad—and so bad for you, I wonder, in the middle of one of the richest agricultural areas in the world?

True, the small towns don’t always have the fancy cuisine, though you look about a bit and you might be surprised; and the people are just plain folks – many of them making little money because of unemployment, so they fill their diet with potatoes and pasta and Big Macs – cheap food but starchy and fattening. As Tom noted.

But one thing I’ll say about the midwest, which also include my beautiful new home, Missouri: I’ve never noticed a lack of courtesy in the people – something I found in short supply in California. Generosity, too, as several of us prepare for this weekend’s Race for the Cure, thinking how best to waddle around the 5K course.

I just had an exchange of emails with News is Free about linking directly to my photographs – that whirring sound you hear is my bandwidth being sucked dry.

Me: Don’t scrape my pages.
Them: Your RSS feed is hard to find.
Me: Autodiscovery.
Them: Human beings and handy little orange XML button.
Me: Your personal requirement does not make my courtesy into an imperative. Don’t like little orange button.

So, who is not in a pissy mood? Speak up.

At least nature always comes through: the fireflies made their debut last night. No photos – they’re camera shy. I’d send you all a bouquet of fireflies to cheer you up, but they don’t like the tiny little leashes and keep tearing off the bows. And FedEx said no way.

weeds.jpg