Sidebar!

One of the most enjoyable parts of blog-keeping hereabouts is the curating of the sidebar. That stuff over there on the right, adjacent to the primary content column. The process is fun and it leads to places.

For example...my recent review (rant?) of the biography of Lawrence B. Sperry started out down there in the depths of the sidebar. I had decided to "enhance" the entries on my favorite designers with an appropriate quotation from each, revealed on mouse-over using the HTML abbr tag. A significant amount of Google-aided research failed to provide me with anything memorable from young Mr. Sperry, so I decided to obtain his biography where a nice quote was found. And if you've read the review you know the rest of the story.

I add things now and then. A recent inclusion is the panel showing five recent tweets (or retweets) sourced from my Twitter account. (If you feel like following, that'd be most welcomed.)

So, you're invited to slide on over to the right and poke around the sidebar. If you're moved to offer any comments or suggestions I'd appreciate hearing them (perhaps in a comment on this post). And as always, thanks for stopping by.

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Time Flies!

Amazingly enough (to me), today marks the first anniversary of this blog. A whole year! This post was the start of it all, last February 25th.

Now, 141 posts later, it's still fun. I've gotten to interact with a bunch of really knowledgeable people and my circle of online friends has grown. I plan to keep doing this, chronicling the adventures of N631S and hoping you don't find my other observations too tedious.

Thanks to all the "regulars" (you know who you are). I appreciate your ongoing interest and I'll try to deserve the attention.

Post #100

As it happens, I put up the first post on this blog eight months ago - 25 February 09. This being the 100th post, I seem to have been holding forth 12.5 times each month.

According to data collected by statcounter.com, there have been roughly 14 visits/day over the last two weeks. A sizable percentage of the visitors are responding to search-engine hits (mostly Google).

A few posts in the archive seem to be "best sellers", as they keep getting Google-inspired visits. In order of "popularity", these include:

• Is a 100LL Replacement Really Coming?
  
• Landing Light Switches
  
• Circuit Breaker Safety
  
• I LOVE Air Traffic Controllers
  

Statcounter.com also provides the geographic location and IP address of visitors. You get to know the folks who come back more than a few times. I seem to have "fans" in (among other places) South Bend, IN (someone who works the midnight shift, judging from the times he/she visits), Stillwater, OK (possibly two folks, one of whom logs on from OSU), Overland Park, KS and Hammond, IN. To these folks and others who have taken the time to stop by and read the blog, I'd like to say, "Thanks!"

Brief Writings

Occasionally I've written brief items that may be of interest, but that aren't really fodder for blog posts. So I've collected some in a link list in the sidebar, under the title "Brief Writings". If you wish to comment on any of these, please feel free to use email. My address is accessible via my profile.

"Frontal Weather" Blog Images

Being fairly new at this "blogging" enterprise, I was perplexed when the images in my recent post describing Frontal Weather did not proffer an enlarged view when clicked -- since the images in older posts had behaved thus.

It turns out that cutting and pasting images within the Blogger editor risks severing the link from the image that appears in the post, and the "parent" image that resides somewhere in the Cloud on a Google server.

In any event, all of the images in that post are now enlargeable with a click. All fixed.

Archival NEXRAD Images

In putting together last night's post describing last Friday evening's flight I wanted to include some images of the weather situation in certain areas at certain times of interest. What I needed was archival images from the NEXRAD weather radar system. Turns out that it's easy to obtain them and I thought others might like to see how.

The whole process starts HERE at the NEXRAD National Mosaic Images site. Click on the "Get/View" menu item to go to the Radar Data Access page.

Click the link to NOAA's Weather and Climate Toolkit, which you will need to download and launch on your computer. It's a Java application and it will check to ensure that you have an adequately recent version of the Java run-time environment available.

Now, back at the Data Access page, click the link for the Nexrad Inventory Search tool. You'll be presented with a map showing the locations of all the NEXRAD sites. Click on the one that interests you. On the next page, select the date of interest (available dates range from about 1992 to "the day before yesterday". It takes about 48 hours for the system to crunch all the data and archive it.) Then in the list box, highlight the product of interest (one of the COMPOSITE REFLECTIVITY images is a good place to start). Then click the "Create Graph" button.

Now you are presented with a graphic that displays the population of available images for the date being examined. Below the graphic you can enter a time range (say, the time of interest plus/minus an hour) and your e-mail address. Then click on the "Order Data" button.

In a few minutes the system will send you an e-mail with a link to a dynamically-generated web page that will list the images available during the time period you've specified. The links will be in a format like this: KLWX_SDUS51_NCRLWX_200905292200. The first part is the station identifier and the last part is the date-time group. Click on the one(s) you want to keep and save them to your local drive.

Now, remember when we downloaded the viewer application a few paragraphs ago? Fire that up. It will present a graphical interface window. Pull down the Data menu and click Load Data. This will bring up a Data Selector dialog. Click the Local tab and browse to the data file you saved a minute ago from the web link in the e-mail.

The app should load the data and, Presto! There's your archival NEXRAD image. You can save it locally as a *.png file and manipulate it with any of the usual graphics software.

A useful tool set.

An experiment in mobile photo blogging...

This is an experiment.

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The above photo and line of text was posted directly from my mobile phone (I'm adding this comment in a later edit). Ain't technology wonderful? Now as I wander around and see neat aviation-related stuff, I can immortalize it here via a post-on-the-go. The method involves creating a "picture message" and sending it to an e-mail address specified by the nice Blogger folks. I think I like it!