Author: Eugene

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2007 NHC Hurricane forecast

The NHC‘s forecast for this year’s hurricane season came out today. Looks pretty similar to the forecast by the Tropical Meteorology people in Colorado. 13-17 named storms, 7-10 hurricanes and 3-5 strong hurricanes. It’ll be a busy season if the forecast is on track this year.

From the press release:

Experts at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center are projecting a 75 percent chance that the Atlantic Hurricane Season will be above normal this year–showing the ongoing active hurricane era remains strong.

“For the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season, NOAA scientists predict 13 to 17 named storms, with seven to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which three to five could become major hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher,” said retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Ph.D., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. An average Atlantic hurricane season brings 11 named storms, with six becoming hurricanes, including two major hurricanes.

“There is some uncertainty this year as to whether or not La Niña will form, and if it does how strong it will be,” said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center. “The Climate Prediction Center is indicating that La Niña could form in the next one to three months. If La Niña develops, storm activity will likely be in the upper end of the predicted range, or perhaps even higher depending on how strong La Niña becomes. Even if La Niña does not develop, the conditions associated with the ongoing active hurricane era still favor an above-normal season.”

Time to get the hurricane kit tuned up and restocked.

hurricane-season-2007-outlook.jpg

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Writer’s block

In a couple of weeks I’m headed off to Providence, RI to attend the SIIM meeting and to give a talk there.

The SIIM people encourage people who submit talks for the meeting to also submit a companion paper for publication in JDI. I’ve been working on mine for the last couple of months, but now I’ve reached that point where I can’t think of what else to say. I know there’s more I need to write about, but can’t think of how to put it down. I know part of the problem is caused by the fact that the material is so familiar by now. Sometimes I can get through the block by re-reading everything again and pretending I’m looking at it for the first time. Another way I get a fresh perspective is to ask someone else to read the paper and comment. That’s always a good way to get new ideas.

I’ll let the paper stew in my head a little bit longer while I ruminate some more.

Here’s the abstract for my paper:

The 11 year history of the PACS archive at the Medical University of South Carolina was used to investigate the impact of changes in technology for various modalities on PACS storage requirements.

A Unix shell script was used to perform queries against the PACS archive database to extract statistical information for the various modalities. During the time period investigated, major changes in imaging technologies were implemented, including shifts from single slice CT to dual/quad slice and on to multi-detector 16 and 64 slice Multi Detector Computed Tomography (MDCT).
The number of images stored on the PACS archive increased by over an order of magnitude (from 131000 per month to 1.7 million images per month), mostly from MR and CT studies. Total storage requirements increased by two orders of magnitude from 48 GB/month to 1.2 TB/month. Increases in PACS storage has been driven primarily by the introduction of MDCT and digital mammography, currently accounting for 47% and 17% of the total storage requirements at the expense of CR (down from 70% to 18% of the total).

Traditionally, PACS storage modeling has been driven by CR storage requirements. Current experience with our PACS has shown that this has shifted away from CR to CT, MR, and digital mammography being the primary drivers behind increased PACS storage requirements. Knowing how different modalities impact PACS storage requirements is important to the archive planning process.

The ending for the abstract needs work. Not quite happy with it yet, but I usually leave the abstract for last anyway.

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Broken auto-save

Been using the Auto-Save plugin by Patrick Benny for a little while now. It was pretty cool when I first installed it, but for some reason now it just times out when the auto-save kicks in for the first time. The entry still gets saved by MT, but the browser doesn’t seem to get any notification of it. If the entry is saved before the first auto-save attempt kicks off, then the plugin works fine.

Just another thing I need to dig into that I think may have been related to the server upgrade. I’ll get to it one of these days.

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Bitter about gas prices?

Gas prices around here are about as high as I’ve ever seen them. A few of the cheap places that I drove by this weekend on James Island were selling regular for $3/gallon ($2.999/gal). Most were around $3.06/$3.07 per gallon.

If it makes anybody feel better, back home I hear gas is selling for $1.22/liter. Factoring in the exchange rate ($0.92 USD/Cdn this morning) that comes out to about $1.123/liter or $4.24/gal.

At that price, it would cost me an extra $15 to fill up my empty Camry.

I don’t think I’ll be making too many road trips this summer.

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Time for a new camera

I managed to get most of the covers off the camera to have a look inside. i wanted to see if there was a way I could get the lens unstuck and avoid having to get a new camera.

There were about 8 teeny tiny screws that needed to be removed to access the inner guts. The lens assembly was all enclosed and attached to the main board, so there wasn’t anyway to access the mechanism and get it unstuck. Without any other moving parts to deal with, there wasn’t much else I could do to the camera without risking irreparable damage (i.e. not being able to get it back together), so I decided to put everything back together.

Apparently I put a screw into a place it didn’t belong because I ended up missing one of the screws for the outer panels, and I know it didn’t skitter off on me at all. So somewhere inside the camera there’s a tiny silver screw filling a spot that it doesn’t need to be in.

Have to start saving up for a new camera now I guess.