Cave Country Weather Blog

Lately I have been busy building an addition onto my house. The project is winding down so I hope I can work on some issues with this site. I had been getting the “blue screen of death” lately, so I took the computer into the shop on Dec 2. They could not find anything obvious but think it may need to have Windows reinstalled. This required them having the computer for a few days, so I passed on it for now. They did turn off many processes that run in the background & I reinstalled the weather display software. So far, 4 days with out an issue.

Back when the construction started, I pulled up the wire running from the sensors to the weather station so it would not get damaged. The units can run wireless but data is received every 16-128 seconds. Yesterday I re-ran the wire and now data is received every 8 seconds. It work well until 4:30am than stopped. I checked it out and the plug came out of the sending unit. Easy fix! All is working now. 

The full moon Friday night will be the biggest one of the year as Earth’s natural satellite reaches its closest point to our planet.
Earth, the moon and the sun are all bound together by gravity, which keeps us going around the sun and keeps the moon going around us as it goes through phases. The moon makes a trip around Earth every 29.5 days. But the orbit is not a perfect circle.
The moon’s average distance from us is about 238,855 miles (384,400 km). Friday night it will be just 221,560 miles (356,567 km) away. It will be 14 percent bigger in our sky and 30 percent brighter than some other full moons during the year, according to NASA.

Info form MSNBC

I would like to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving. God has certinly blessed my family this year and I am thankful.

You probably noticed the Thanksgiving theme added the other day. I am hoping to do this a few times a year to brake up the monotony of the site looking the same all the time. For future holidays I will probably only have the themes up for a week or so. That way we don’t wear it out. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

The Weather Display software I use has upgraded the FTP upload module. This allows for uploads from my weather computer to the web server 4X faster. It also allows me to upload larger files. So taking advantage of this, I have added another video. The all day video from yesterday. The video will be updated each day at about 10:33pm. There is a link on the “Web Cam” page. Hopefully this will also let me capture some other cool all day videos for my archives.

My new webcam is up and running and I think this one gives me the best picture yet. It is a Logitech QuickCam 9000 pro. I hope this one will last for sometime. If not I will have to break the bank and get a real outdoor camera.

When posting here or other on-line blogs or forums, you may have notices “Smileys” or Emoticons” used. These are very helpful in conveying emotions that would normally be communicated using body language, but is lost when writing. While most posting area have an area where you can just click on the smiley to insert it into the post, I haven’t figured out how to add it to this blog…yet. So here is a cheat sheet that shows what to type in order to get the desired smiley. Be sure to put a space before and after so the smiley text is not mixed into the message text. These are standardized so they should work about anywhere. I have also noticed that many email programs are also allowing smileys.

We have had our first cold temperatures this week. This morning it was 28 and I think it froze my webcam. It stopped working sometime last night, so I hooked up another one that I have. It doesn’t have as good daytime picture although the night time is better.

I brought in my potted trees last night so they wouldn’t freeze. I guess I need to plant them one of these days. I had planted 6 of them already, but the rabbit ate 2 of them. Good thing I have backups. Should be back in the 70s this weekend so maybe I will get a chance.

Today Cave Country Weather joined the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP). Basically it is a centralized database where weather stations from the country up load data. Then this data is available to organizations. They word it much better “The Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) is a private-public partnership with three main goals: 1) to collect weather data contributed by citizens; 2) to make these data available for weather services and homeland security; and 3) to provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality. In fact, the web address, wxqa.com, stands for weather quality assurance.”
Information about this program can be found here.

We are going on 20 days with out any measurable rain and only .43″ total for the last 30 days. Last weekend I had a few drops on the deck, but not enough to do any good. I planted 6 trees 2 weeks ago & I have to water them every other night. There is a chance of rain on Monday night into Tuesday, but only 20%.