a weblog

Woody Guthrie had the right idea about copyright even back in the 1940's:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

-> creativecommons.org

10 years ago Kurt died. I remember fairly vividly that my mother told me that he died, and I just assumed that she didn't know what she was talking about.

My mother later passed on, and it is somewhat a fond memory being near my mother. I guess the significant event helped remember too eh?

For detailed documents, check out thesmokinggun.com.

-> thesmokinggun.com

UPDATE:

Susanne points out -> justiceforkurt.com
Donewaiting.com points out a NY Times Op-Ed piece -> nytimes.com
... and their forum discussion about kurt

I've been hooked on a challenge that I presented myself: Figure out a cool way to combine weather data into the most useful raw data.

There are TONS of great weather-related resources in a recent Ask Slashdot article! Most data is provided by the National Weather Service (NWS) for free on the Internet. The only major exception I’ve found so far is NLDN lightening data, which even the NWS has to purchase from Global Atmospherics.

The most useful raw data for forecasts is available from the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD). Using the command line utilities, I’ve been able to extract an 8 day forecast in 3 hour increments in CSV text format! That’s tons of things like percentage chance of precip and wind direction and speed. (Yay, kite flying!)

Essentially data is data is data. Current the NWS makes NEXRAD radar data publicly available as well! It looks to be updated about every 10 minutes or so, with an archive.

I’ve been looking into the GRASS GIS package as well in order to visualize fly-through animations. Scott Shipley at George Mason University has created a tool in order to convert NEXRAD into Shape files needed by GRASS (and other GIS systems). Shape files are actually just raw longitude and latitude with a value, so his utility would provide the needed information to figure out if it is raining (or going to rain soon) in a text-based format.

I’ll keep you informed!

This site tracks recitings or references to "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges..." in film or in print.

-> darryl.com/badges/