August 2011 – PenguinSix

Chesapeake Bay wind speed maps for Irene

WeatherUnderground shows the potential wind speeds from Hurricane Irene. Starting from the hurricane icon off the coast of Ocean City, those in the closest rings will have hurricane force winds. As you’ll note they are stronger on the right side than they are on the left. What I’m talking about below is for the circle WHEN the hurricane is in the position in Ocean City area, not when it is moving up to that area. The next ring is tropical storm winds > 50 knots per hour but less than 73 knots. This includes parts of the Eastern shore just about to Cambridge. The next ring, the largest ring, is tropical storm winds > 34 knots and < 50 knots. This includes basically everyone East of Bethesda, East of Woodbridge, East of the Mixing Bowl. Please note the storm will be moving, which is why toward the bottom you see the remnants of other circles drawn. There you will see a large swath of hurricane strength wind to the right of the storm when it the hurricane icon (not seen) is south of Newport News. In this ‘circle’ you’ll see hurricane strength winds extending over nearly the ENTIRE Eastern Shore. What does this mean in English? Check out the Washington Post’s story on Wind Speed and what it means for your home and trees. Direct link to map:

You can monitor the wind speeds on the various bouys in the Chesapeake Bay if you so desire, all from your mobile phone. http://buoybay.noaa.gov/ http://buoybay.noaa.gov/observations/mobile-apps.html ]]>

Smart glass to control your life

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Hurricane Irene on the Chesapeake Bay–time to get nervous.

During Isabel, we lost a few dozen roofing shingles along with having quite a bit of water flood into our house through the ceilings. All told I think it was about $10,000 in damage after FEMA and the insurance companies finished arguing. I also lost quite a bit of soil on my seawall, which spent hours underwater. The nearby towns of Chesapeake Beach and North Beach were heavily flooded, with 4 feet of water heading inland a few hundred yards and National Guard troops called out to control security. We were also without power for 7 days.

: The posts are normally 6 feet above sea level

So how will Irene stack up to this storm? It’s slower moving, stronger, but also further away than Isabel. The most similar track was that of Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which caused considerable rain and flooding along with some tropical storm level winds. As you can see from the pictures, I’m not really worried about a storm surge taking my house. That would be basically a biblical level Tsunami to get up the 40 odd foot cliff to my actual house. I do anticipate my seawall getting another battering from this storm, which means I might need to rearrange the rocks (again) before the coming winter squalls. The rain is going to be a big pain in that the soil is already pretty wet in the area. The super saturation along with the winds will likely result in a number of trees falling over in the forests just North of my property. I just have to hope they don’t come to rest on my roof. They are a shallow root trees and even a good thunderstorm takes out more than a few, dropping power lines in the process. For much of the other areas around me, I anticipate some pretty heavy flooding in Southern Maryland mixed with near hurricane force winds. Tropical Storm winds that will hit the middle Bay will be annoying but many homes there are built with hurricanes in mind (we have hurricane struts in our roofing). Still, I’m plenty nervous. This will be a very long weekend staring at computer screens and the weather.

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Mr. Taxi video. My Korean-pop education continues

Girls Generation, a K-Pop group is composed of nine members. They sing in Korean and in Japanese, and their current album is on heavy rotation on MTV over here. It’s not like we get FM radio over here after all. Gotta make do with what you can…(here’s the lyrics) ]]>

Fixing Evernote in OSX Lion. The simple way.

One of the first conflicts I noticed after install Mac OSX 10.7 was the total failure of the popular cloud storage program Evernote. I got a message saying Missing Plug-In when trying to view PDFs in Evernote. The solution, published by Evernote’s support staff, involved reseting the Java preferences or drilling down into the library to remove some Adobe PDF thing. Yeah right. My solution, and one I recommend for you as well, is just to reinstall Evernote. It’s free, it’s in the App Store, and once you reinstall it runs just fine. Sometimes simple answers are often the best.]]>

PenguinRadio is no more. Phoneradio.com is where it's at.

Nearly 12 years ago I was working as an attorney for the US Congress. Boredom does not begin to describe my life back then. I was writing a memo on a health insurance case we were investigating in Japan, when I happened to realize that Arsenal v. Manchester United in the FA Cup was on the BBC online stream. Our rather moronic office policy forbid speakers in the office, but as a lawyer who really didn’t care about bureaucratic rules I brought in some headphones. No one ever challenged me. Anyway, I was listening to this game…yes–it was the Giggs goal game of 1999, when something annoying happened. My stream from the BBC started to sputter as the computer couldn’t handle my working on a memo in MS Word and running Real Player at the same time. I thought to myself, as I closed the MS Word file :-p “What I really need is a bigger computer.” But then, as lightning bolts off do, it hit me. “No, I don’t need a computer. I need something that just does Internet audio–no PC needed”. And with the pain of listening to that game (Arsenal lost in extra time) was relieved by the thoughts of a really new hot idea. Internet radio, no pc needed. The PenguinRadio. The next 12 years have been a roller coaster. I got angel funding, I got VC funding, I got an office and staff, we built prototypes and websites, we tried raising more money in the US and UK and then, 9-11 hit. As you may remember the dot.com days were dying before the World Trade Center was attacked but those incidents put the kibosh on any new VC funding for a few years. I put PenguinRadio on hold and concentrated on some other things. PenguinRadio was basically brain dead for a bit. But then I came back to the idea a year or so later. Prices for parts had come down. Everyone was listening to streams. The idea of Internet radio, and more particularly, of .mp3 audio was growing larger and larger. With a new round of funding I launched a few radios, rebuilt the website, and then attracted the interest of some folks in the UK who were thinking much the same as me. So PenguinRadio was reborn into a new company, that, unfortunately, managed to reach the prototype stage of a really neat player device at basically the same time as Apple introduced the iPhone. This meant that there were suddenly several million devices out there that could do Internet radio without a PC at a cost just about the same as our device, though with the marketing and support of Apple Inc behind them. Thus PenguinRadio died a second time. The website stayed up for a few years after this latest adventure, but the new new owners of the domain recently completed the sale of PenguinRadio to another party (hint: they also have Penguin in their name). As I sat on my couch in Hong Kong at 1:00 am in the morning watching, guess what, Arsenal once again (a nil-nil disaster against Newcastle) I went to check the PenguinRadio site and got a DNS error. The transfer of the PenguinRadio domain name had taken place. It was no longer there on the web. Truth be told the site died a long time ago, but the site was out there as a reminder of my first startup and the great adventure. It’s a tad weird to think it’s no longer there. That the logos and t-shirts and links have all turned to dust. I have other sites, such as PhoneRadio.com that continue to host radio streams, but the closure of the site is like the end of a large chapter of my life. On to new and more interesting things I guess. RIP my Penguin. *PenguinRadio is (now) a registered trademark of Penguin Publishing.]]>