Victory!

A well regulated Warning System, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and hear Alarms, shall not be infringed --Poon, LJWorld forum poster

Better sense prevailed at the city council meeting on Wednesday night. Now, when the "meteorologists" who are "experts" at "reading radar" (as opposed to some tool that listens to the radio and looks out the window) issue a tornado warning, the sirens in Douglas county will sound. No longer will they require sighting of a funnel on the ground--if the NWS says "warning," the guy hits the button.

I was a bad citizen, I'll admit. I ranted impotently at the internet but did not attend the city council meeting or write any emails. What I did do, however, was subscribe to weather.com's text message alerts. Steve did too. We also moved the weather radio to where it would more reliably get a signal. I turned the weekly test tone back on too, even though it's annoying.

I am really happy with this outcome. Now everyone please cross your fingers that we can get into a house with a basement before The Big One hits.

Pretties

My dwarf Korean lilac is blooming! When you open the house up, it makes the whole inside smell nice.

Incandescent.

I'm pissed.

I slept through a tornado warning last night. Part of it was my fault--in my sleep induced haze, I got up and shut the weather radio off without listening to it. I also thought, as I was going back to sleep, that if it was that serious the sirens would be sounding. Except...

Emergency officer: ‘It never crossed my mind to activate the tornado warning sirens’

Apparently, in Douglas County, a NWS-issued tornado warning isn't enough to sound the alarm. No, we have to have an eyewitness account by a "trained spotter" to blow the horns. I'm sure even those of you who do not live in Tornado Alley have an idea of how difficult it would be for anyone, trained or not, to see a goddamned funnel at 1:15 in the goddamned morning.

What. The. Fuck. 70-80mph straight line winds are not enough. Roofs ripped off buildings, trees knocked over onto homes, signs blown out of the ground on to the streets? Not enough. They didn't sound them* for the microburst in 2006 either, and that little non-event did $6 million in damage to the KU campus alone.

What's it going to take? Another Greensburg? (Here's a hint: they sounded the sirens in Greensburg and saved hundreds of lives. Lawrence is just a tad bigger.) An EF5 here could cost hundreds of lives; thousands if we wait for a trained spotter to see it. The average person probably couldn't make a tornado that massive out at night. Many might even have trouble during the day--funnels that big don't look like funnels. They're just roaring walls of death. Sound the fucking sirens. I will never, ever make the mistake of relying on those things or the people in charge of them again.

If you live in Tornado Alley (especially if you live in Douglas County, the Land of No Sirens) you need to stop what you are doing and go buy a weather radio right now. No, not later. Go buy it now and come back and finish reading my drivel in a few minutes. It'll set you back about $30 (more if you want something fancypants) but it will give you peace of mind. I have a Maxon WX-80, which is discontinued. (Turns out they merged with Midland.) I've seen these Midland WR-100B radios everywhere this season. The WR-300 is pricier but does more stuff. Everything comes with SAME technology these days so you don't have to wake up for alerts eight counties away.

Now that you're back...

I haven't quite decided what my next steps are. I've already gotten "raging impotently at the internet" done. I think I'm going to find out who my city commissioner is and give him or her a piece of my mind. Probably with fewer f-bombs. This policy has to be changed. There has got to be a happy medium between "blowing the sirens every time Bob Newton gets a hangnail" and "not blowing them unless Jesus Christ himself tells you there's a funnel on the ground."

* That's not quite true. The sirens did sound. For most Lawrence residents, they sounded a good five minutes after the storm blew through. Helpful, eh? And those funnels reported by eyewitnesses? Straight-line winds. Yup. No tornadoes here!

My summer plans.

First off, shocker of shockers, I decided to put the Lollygaggers on hiatus (after consulting them, of course) after the spring/summer season. We'll play through the end of June and then not pick back up in August. Parks and Rec splits the season into two, so you play April-July and then August-October. For reasons known only to them, they put all the doubleheaders in the August-October season, and most of them are in the mid-afternoon. Those games are the closest I've ever come to throwing up from exercising in the heat. Anyway...we're losing a bunch of girls, I am too busy at work to spend a bunch of time recruiting, and $4 gas means my out of town players are less enthusiastic about driving in to play ball. I don't blame them. I drive a Ford Focus hatchback and I am a whiny bitch about gas, and they all have bigger cars than me.

The jury is still out on my women's team. I don't manage it (bonus!) but the aches and pains of softball are really starting to catch up with me. I'm leaning towards continuing on, but it's only about a 60/40 split at this point. It could change. I like women's softball because at my level o f play it's a slower game and the people are generally easygoing. On the other hand, it's a weeknight and that can be kind of a pain in the ass.

I am definitely planning on doing Dog Days again this summer. Those workouts are about the only kind of early morning workout I can take. Forget step or kickboxing at 6am--too complicated. But putting one foot in front of the other or doing basic calisthenics? I can do that, especially if someone with a bullhorn is telling me what to do and when. Before it gets too hot I even enjoy the afternoon workouts enough to occasionally pull two-a-days. I am going to have to take it a little easier this June, though, because my gut tells me (both literally and figuratively) that I am a little deconditioned at the moment. Going balls-to-the-wall at Dog Days at the beginning will be a bad idea.

I'm going to continue to play a lot of racquetball. I bought myself a fancypants racquet that I figure I need to use to get my money's worth. I have some coworkers that love to play, so 3-4 days a week we head over to the rec center and work out our frustrations on the court. As usual, I'm the only female, but I don't mind. I even hold my own with them most days, which feels pretty good.

Aside from that? I don't know much about my summer plans. I wouldn't mind a vacation. Work is going to be weird this summer. I just moved out of my office yesterday in preparation for the 1st floor renovation project which is projected to take three months. I'll be doing a combination of telecommuting and sharing an office with two or three of my colleagues. I may find other places to squat too, but everything is still kind of up in the air at this point.

On lacking the A in the C-I-A triangle...

For my non-geek readers who want to know what the title is about, read this. :)

I'm burning off excess vacation hours today, so I figured "what the hell, I'll write a blog entry." Where to start...

...okay, I'll start two weeks ago with the Great Crash of 2008. Back when I got my new laptop in November, I was all hot to trot to start using it. It was a shiny new laptop and besides, the power supply in my desktop had died so I wanted to hurry up and get back to doing things like updating Quicken. I know how to party. One side effect of being in a hurry was I never rebuilt the OS the way I generally do when I get a new computer. I just went with Dell's install, replete with all their crapware. I then proceeded to install all my own crapware over the top of it. Things got progressively buggier and slower (on boot, the Windows XP splash screen displayed for up to 10 minutes) until finally the thing just would not boot into Windows about two weeks ago.

If you are me, this is not a big deal. I fixed computers sicker than this for two years, I can do this, right?

So I fished a hard drive out of Steve's stash of parts, grabbed the IDE-to-USB adapter thingie, and used Helix to dd an image of my laptop's hard drive over to the external. I grabbed my work laptop, plugged the external in, and verified that the backup worked. I then set about rebuilding my OS. I got most of the way done, but we decided to watch some Top Gear so I decided to put off moving my files back until morning.

The next morning, I grabbed the still running (stupid, STUPID, STUPID, never move running hard drives!) hard drive to move it to where my laptop was. I heard a "BZZZZIIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPP!" sound and smelled ozone. (If you've ever fried the starter motor in your car, you've smelled this. It's not a good smell.) I unplugged everything and waited. Plugged everything back in, and no joy. The laptop would load drivers for the adapter and the hard drive itself, but the drive wasn't spinning up. Steve swapped out the controller boards and stuck my drive in a ziploc bag with a couple of dessicant packets into the freezer. The old controller board had a big black melty place where one of the chips should have been. Not good.

Long story short, nothing we tried with the drive worked. We finally gave up and pried the top off the drive, only to discover that the actuator servo that makes the heads move across the drive platters was dead. All my files were gone. The good news? I had a lot of shitty music on my iPod that I won't miss, and now I have another story for my security awareness talks. (It may be that my sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.) The bad news? All the hours and hours of work lost amassing stupid pictures, recipes, softball schedules, Quicken data, and what-have-you.

I did have a three week old backup of my Quicken files, which really saved my bacon. I wound up buying a new copy of MasterCook (I had CD installers with my old MC cookbooks on them), and I was able to beg Apple and Sean at Cardio Coach to let me re-download my purchased music. (Coach Sean, if you read this, thank you thank you thank you. Again.)

I've got to say, though, that even though I didn't lose anything truly serious, it was still kind of a traumatic experience. I am accustomed to being able to fix these things, and my backup plan failed miserably because I was using an old drive that I did not know to be good and I only had one copy of my data. It's not a mistake I'll make again. To that end, Steve and I are standing up some Network Attached Storage--this D-Link unit with a couple of big fat drives in it, to be specific. I've also got a 4GB Corsair stick that I'm using for temporary storage.

If you're not backing your stuff up, expect to lose it. Hard drives fail. A lot. Those little USB sticks fail too, and they're easy to lose--so they shouldn't be the only pillar of your backup strategy. If a NAS is overkill for your situation, how about an external hard drive? At the very least, you should be backing up the stuff you care about to DVDs. While they're not as capacious as a nice big external HD, they are cheap and if stored properly will last a very long time.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a half full iPod that is just begging to be topped off with some crappy dance techno or maybe some teenybopper pop. Shut up.

Lollygaggers, epsode 2a and 2b

The episodes in which we get our asses handed to us twice, but also in which we find out my husband is a decent slowpitch hurler.

Also, OMFG IT WAS COLD. I don't think the temperature ever rose above 53 or so. I had a 2 RBI base hit, a double, and a triple yesterday--even managed to pull hit once. I can go opposite field all day (I bat right), but whipping that bat around to pull a ball to left field is something I struggle with. I even used to pull hit in fastpitch but it got lost somewhere in between high school and now.

We got run-ruled in the first game and ran out of time in the second.

Speaking of softball, I get to go freeze my ass off tonight in a doubleheader with my women's team. I am getting too old for this crap.

Lollygaggers, episode 1

Drawing inspiration from (and offering apologies to) Al's SF Giants blogging project...

The Lollygaggers coed slowpitch softball team (managed by yours truly) faced its first opponent on Sunday afternoon on Clinton Lake Softball Complex Field #1. The weather was in the low to mid 60s with the temp dropping during the game. With our lovely and talented shortstop at the Final Four in San Antonio, we brought in one of my coworkers as a sub...

...okay, so we lost 14-9. We had a great time, there weren't any arguments, and I played fairly well in left field. Well enough that when I caught one of their guys out a second time, he was heard to utter "Son of a BITCH! How did she GET to that?" So that was pretty awesome.