Pleasant morning at the Aquarium

Had a pleasant morning at the Aquarium. Today was the first chance we had to go there in a while, so there were a few new exhibits to check out. Spent a nice relaxing hour and a half cruising around checking out the fish and animals. Much fun. I love going to the Aquarium just to hang out.
This is a lionfish that was hanging out in one of the tanks in the Unidentified Floating Objects display.
A lionfish at the aquarium
In other news, the 5 day track from the NHC shows Isabel turning more towards the North Carolina coast. Better for us if it stays on that track, but that means it’s headed to where my wife’s parents live. Still not good.

Getting ready

I figure by the end of the weekend, we should have a pretty good idea if Hurricane Isabel will be a problem or not. So this evening, my wife and I decided to avoid the rush and start assembling our hurricane kit. I think a lot of other people had the same idea, but earlier. The Walmart down the road was cleaned out of water, D batteries, and mostly cleaned out of flashlights. But we managed to get most of the things on our list (except water and D batteries).
Next, back up the road to the grocery store before they closed. They had all the food items we were after, but they were pretty much cleaned out of water too. One of the employees told us “They were even grabbing the expensive stuff”, but that they would be getting some more in the morning. At least they still had some D batteries in stock.

Changing looks with stylesheets

I’ve taken the 7 default style sheets that come with MovableType and added them in as alternate stylesheets to the template for my main page.
So, those of you with browsers that can deal with alternate style sheets like Mozilla or Firebird (don’t know if IE or NS do alt style sheets) can use the little Style button at the bottom right of your status bar (Firebird) or the View/Use Style menu (Mozilla) to switch between the different styles and see what the different CSS styles look like.
One of these days I’ll get around to learning enough CSS to create my own styles.

Multi-function Camcorder

This is pretty cool. DVStreamer turns your DV camcorder into a tape drive and lets you back up 8.7GB of stuff off your computer. There were still a few bugs and glitches with the software according to the Tom’s Hardware Guide review, but it seems like it could be a really cool bit of software once the problems get worked out. And with DV tapes being relatively cheap, it could become an easy (albeit slow) way to backup your computer.

Hurricane Isabel

Aside from September 11, much of the discussion around here is centered on where Hurricane Isabel will go. The current forecast path is not encouraging, even though it’s still a few days away from any sort of reliable forecast about impact in this area.

According to the National Hurricane Center’s 5 AM 12-SEP-2003 discussion,

THE GFDL WHICH HAS BEEN PERFORMING QUITE WELL…TURNS THE HURRICANE MORE TO THE NORTHWEST AND NORTH-NORTHWEST…AND DEPENDING UPON THE RUN YOU PICK…THE TURN OCCURS FARTHER TO THE WEST OR FARTHER TO THE EAST. ON THE OTHER HAND…THE UK MODEL WHICH HAS HAS BEEN MORE CONSISTENT …MOVES THE HURRICANE FASTER AND BRING ISABEL DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO THE U.S. COAST IN 5 DAYS. THE GFS WHICH HAS BEEN CHANGING ITS TUNE FROM RUN TO RUN…IS MUCH SLOWER AND IN 5 DAYS PLACES THE HURRICANE ABOUT 450 N MI FROM THE U.S COAST. THE GFS EVENTUALLY BRINGS THE CENTER NEAR THE COAST OF NORTH CAROLINA IN SEVERAL MORE DAYS. FINALLY…THE NOGAPS IS VERY SIMILAR TO THE GFS UP TO 5 DAYS.

In short, I think it’s time to start assembling our hurricane kit. Even if it turns out to miss us, it’s better to be prepared than to be trying to scramble at the last minute (which everyone else is bound to be doing).