c o l l i s i o n b e n d . c o m

I understand that East 21st Street next to the Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University is snarled with snow and satellite trucks. The weather is nasty, and the city is pretty quiet save for the debate.

The newsroom here at WKYC is busy, but quiet, with an interesting tension as they go live with an 8:00 p.m. debate special; WKYC staffers that met with us all looked slightly edgy as the clock rolled around to air time. I guess this was a really big deal here.

They’re proud, and they should be: they’ve done a heck of a job setting this up.

Rita Andolsen, WKYC’s News Director, had this debate plopped on her lap virtually at the last moment, and the level of organization here is impressive. The relative quiet of our meeting room, right off the main news room, is vibrant with conversation as Paul Thomas prepares for broadcast from this very room.

Right now.

Look alive.

Post.

Now.

If you know me, you know that I’m a weather buff. I love studying weather, looking at the radar, and trying to figure out what’s going to happen before it does.

If you’ve been reading my site, too, you’d also surmise that I’m either too busy to write, or that I’m too bored. Both assessments would apply: I’m excruciatingly busy, and I’m terrifically bored with the Internet — it’s the same-old, same-old…

Today at lunch, however, I was reading last month’s copy of MacWorld, and I found the coolest Web application yet developed: the Weather Channel has a new AJAX-based radar map.

Lookee here:

This is über cool: it’s actually something that you can use to determine the weather as it applies to your local region. You can zoom in, zoom out; you can change the transparency of the clouds; you can put the map in motion; you can move from frame to frame in the animation; you can glean valuable, up-to-the-minute information from this map at a moment’s notice.

Severe weather heading your way? Go no farther than here: you can find out what’s happening at your home, office, or your company’s far-off headquarters with the flick of a mouse. It’s based on Google Maps, with the interactive satellite and radar images superimposed. It’s quite cool.

In saying this, I also think that the service is still somewhat limited: there are a few things they haven’t included, and the time loop is limited to only 10 minutes currently.

A few things I would add:

1. A longer loop, say, about 3 or 6 hours;
2. A larger image size to accommodate wide-screen monitors;
3. An RSS feed, complete with warning sounds for impending severe weather alerts;
4. An interactive surface analysis map, showing the isobars and the fronts, perhaps the temperatures as well, moving in real time with the images;
5. A radar summary to lay on top of it all, for weather geeks like me.

Other than that, it’s still a pretty informative device, one that I will bookmark and view again and again.

Tell me this isn’t the slickest thing to hit the Internet in the last 10 years….

Back in August, I wrote two posts about my MacBook having problems with narcolepsy.

The actual problem was the Random Shutdown Bug, which affected about 15% of white 1.83Ghz MacBooks, 12% of black 2Ghz MacBooks, and 8-10% of white 2Ghz MacBooks.

So this morning I received a comment from someone in Milton, Queensland, Australia about narcolepsy, linking back to AskTheSleepExperts.com, an apparent site dedicated to sleep disorders.

To explain, my use of the terms “narcolepsy” and “narcoleptic” were a literary device, a simile, similar to the old Winston cigarette ads on television, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” More correctly, grammatically, in Winston’s case, “like” should have been “as”; in my use of “narcolepsy,” I was actually referring to my MacBook acting as if it had narcolepsy, or as if it were narcoleptic.

Suddenly, I feel like I’m in a GEICO “Caveman” commercial, in a way: no matter what you write, there’s always someone there to remind you…

And I’m not complaining. Many among us have serious sleep disorders, narcolepsy being one of them, and they are not trivial: according to the University of Maryland Medical Center, sleep disorders cost close to $16 billion in terms of lost productivity annually, as well as an additional “$50-$100 billion in indirect costs (accidents, litigation, property destruction, hospitalization, and death),” for a combined total of $116 - $166 billion annually. Add unemployment, therapy, other medical treatments, and more, to take the costs well over $200 billion annually.

Compare this with the cost of drug use in the US, which hovers around $134 billion annually, give or take a few bucks. Granted, drug use takes a huge chunk out of our GNP on a daily basis — but sleep problems actually take more. At the Maryland site listed above, search on “drug addiction” and take a look at any of the pages in the result; then check out what they cite as the root causes: depression and sleep loss.

I would submit to you that employers should test for sleep disorders as well as drug use, for it actually costs us more in the long run — and is far more prevalent in our society.

Myself, I had sleep apnea.

I say “had,” because it’s exactly that — past tense: I had sleep apnea. It’s now gone, thanks to my losing close to 80 pounds: I no longer sleep with distorted portions of my body shoving themselves into my stomach and forcing stomach acid to climb up my esophagus, making me choke on my own fluids; I no longer sleep with distorted portions of my body forcing other portions of my body to relax into unnatural positions, shutting off my airflow, making me snore — and threatening my life.

Today, I have no issue with falling asleep or getting drowsy mid-day, and my head is clearer now than it has been for 17 years (to be precise), because I no longer wake up for split second every 10-20 minutes or so because I (physically) can’t breathe.

That same sleep apnea probably led to my separation from Optiem, truth be told, for I spent many a day there, sitting in my chair in front of my computer, fighting sleep: I simply wasn’t sleeping at night. I couldn’t dream, I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t function. Hell, I couldn’t even see.

Well, the past is the past: today, I work elsewhere — as well as for myself, I own a MacBook Pro in place of the “narcoleptic” MacBook, and I’m no longer referred to as “Goodyear” (as in the blimp).

And I have more energy and more stamina — every day, all day — unless you look at me late in the day that Mother Nature decided to dump 2 feet of snow on us…

OK, having lived in Cleveland for almost 50 years, I think I’ve just about seen it all when it comes to winter stupidity.

I took the long way home from my weekly small business networking meeting this morning, as the weather last night whomped Mentor with about a foot of snow in places, making the roads a bit of a mess.

My usual route home from the Panera Bread on Mentor Avenue east of Heisley Road is up through the back streets past Mentor City Hall and Mentor High, then straight down Lakeshore Boulevard deep into Euclid, iPod on all the way. It gives me time to think creatively without the distraction of my Inner Editor.

My route this morning, instead, was straight down Mentor Avenue through Willoughby (where it becomes Vine Street) to Lakeshore. And, on my way home, I saw this:

I must add here that this was not the first car I saw like this. Neither was it the second, nor even the third: it was the fourth in a 12-mile stretch. Each one of them was driving like a bat out of hell, too.

Now, this should be illegal.

In fact, I think it is, but you never see a policeman detain someone like this and write a ticket.

They should: people who don’t take the time to clean their windows and license plates shouldn’t be allowed behind the wheel, as they are a hazard to the rest of us: they can’t see, their hearing is impaired (the snow actually muffles outside noise), and if they dodge between lanes enough, people will get hurt.

And worse yet: they don’t care, either.

What if an emergency vehicle were to come up behind them? They wouldn’t see it to get out of their way. Just imagine the guy in the back of the ambulance having a heart attack, on his way to the hospital, dying in the truck because the ambulance driver couldn’t get around this stupid fool.

Does a vehicular homicide charge make sense?

But, then again, I remember one event quite clearly: about 20 years ago, I lived in Berea and worked in Lakewood. Traveling down the Berea Freeway one snowy morning, I watched in horror as some chick (sorry, but this one is warranted) in the car behind me was busy donning her makeup in her rearview mirror — at close to 60 miles an hour on a slippery roadway, in the high-speed lane — with only a 15-inch round opening in her windshield directly in front of her, the rest of her car under at least 8 inches of snow.

A real brainiac, no?

She never saw the truck that cut her off, sending her to the left, spinning into the barrier in the median, then over to the guardrail on the right, and eventually rolling her over two or three times. Fortunately, she missed every other car on the highway — no small feat during rush hour.

Her car ended up as flat as a pancake; I’m sure she was, too.

And it served her right.

I was fiddling around last night, looking for a couple of new twists for the site, and I couldn’t get over how hot it was — 94 degrees at the time — so I decided to find a weather plugin for WordPress.

I found WeatherIcon, a nifty, little doo-dad that takes up about 3 lines of code, is modifyable both through the WordPress Dash and your CSS file, and it displays weather information from whatever site you select.

In this case, it’s getting its information through METAR data from Burke Lakefront Airport in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.

It slows the page just a tad, though, which is something I’m not totally happy about; it’ll do for now, however.

So, as I write this, WeatherIcon is telling me that the current tempurature is 94 degrees, with a heat index of 105; the humidity is only listed at about 53%, which I know is incorrect: it’s actually more like 72%, according to the National Weather Service’s Cleveland reporting bureau — which is what all of the local media outlets use.

Otherwise, however, I like this new thingy; the only thing I might change is the icon style. We’ll see.

(71.8 — 65.4 — 6.4 — adjusted by WW)