To All in the Gulf Coast - God Speed

The more and more I hyperengage myself in research about Hurricane Katrina, the more I am truly frightened, awed and stunned at its power and force. I want to take a moment to wish the best to those unable to leave the areas of New Orleans, LA, Biloxi, MS, and possibly even Mobile, AL. If the damage and loss of life that is currently being predicted occurs, I will be greatly saddenned. Therefore I send as much positive energy, love, and comfort as I can to those trapped by this horrid storm and their loved ones throughout the world who no doubt have these people in their hearts. Be well and be safe.

Hurricane Katrina Weather Geeking

I know - I am due to do a few informational posts. Later. I've been doing some weather geeking on Katrina - currently about to hit New Orleans/Biloxi/Mobile as a Category 5. Only 3 other Cat5s have hit the US and there's a lot of stats saying this is one of the biggest in a long time.

I've been playing with Google Earth and grabbing sat and radar info, webcam overlays and other contextual data including where the various newscasters are reporting from so when watching them, people have a better idea. See my recent posts on Google Earth/Keyhole BBS for details.

One of the coolest bits of data thus far is the Army Corps of Engineers live flood gages in New Orleans and Louisiana. Granted, you have to take into account that they're already below sea level. I wish the graphs reflected ground level for the areas they are in so you can tell what is and is not flooding.

Geek away.

Seeking a robust, full-featured RSS/Atom Reader

I'm a poweruser. It's no surprise that I am an early adopter who likes to test out the newest and coolest software applications. I'm struggling finding a really good Syndication Reader/Manager.

According to a recent check of my OPML file, I have over 400 feeds I track. I don't remotely read every single feed as soon as there is a new item posted, but I find aggregating all the information there makes it much easier than checking 800 pages every day. In some respect, it's bookmarks that tell me when a site has new info.

I've been using SharpReader for the longest time, which is tied to the .NET framework and while being mostly perfect, development on it has ceased, it hasn't changed in over a year and it tends to eat up CPU.

Things I liked about it:

• Updating: Despite having over 400 feeds to manage, it used multithreading to update all of the feeds in a matter of 1-5minutes. I tried using FeedReader earlier today and it took almost an hour to go through all the feeds.
• Timing: SharpReader let me update my feeds as recent as every 15min. I believe an "hour" is a set standard but a lot can happen in the world in that amount of time. I don't abuse it - and I actually do make use of the more frequent updates.
• The Little Things: Being able to do things like easily open threads in new windows, mass move, sort, copy and filtering threads.....searching all the aggregate news.....spotting similarities between feeds....were all very important. This is why I'm reluctant to move on to another reader

Another item that would be nice would be something that is a Web-based application with these features. I'd like to be able to access my news anywhere like my email, IM, del.icio.us links etc.

So.....what do other people use? Any advice for a power user?

Google Earth - Coolest. Toy. Evar.

Yes, yes. Crappy grammar/spelling/punctuation alert in the title. But....I have so much excitement to impart! For the last few days, much to my wife's () chagrin, I have been playing with Google Earth. Formerly known as Keyhole, it is probably one of the largest free collections of satellite imagery data made available as a fully-interactive globe to manipulate and zoom to at your whim.

After an intense session of early-morning email volleyball with our work Support Team, I decided to unwind during lunch and try my hand at an Image Overlay. Basically, taking some sort of satellite data and lining it up based on its GPS coordinates on the virtual globe.

At first I tried to do a nice, detailed image of the massive phytoplankton bloom in the Baltic Sea but the image didn't match up well with the globe and I didn't have the lat/long coordinates. So I settled with a much easier image of low-oxygen areas in the north-central Gulf of Mexico.

I've also done a "tour" of Balad Air Base in Iraq where my brother Jon, () is due to be stationed later this month. That will come later.

Imagine if everyone "geocoded", (the process of putting GPS location information of where the picture was taken inside the picture's metadata), their photos they place on the Web or news organizations included GPS coordinates for the exact location of their stories in HTML pages. You could view the Web using this massive, interactive, realistic virtual Globe.

I strongly recommend those of you geo/semantic web/gadget geeks check out Google Earth along with some of the sites spring up around it: GoogleEarthHacks.com and Keyhole BBS.