Slashdot Mirror
Geek CAM watching Hurricane Floyd in South Florida
Gregory F. Maxwell gave us the
link-up to a South Florida Geekcam. The house has been evacuated, apparently, but the Cam must go on. I'm looking forward to watching Floyd make landfall.Update: 09/14 11:31 by H :There's a back-up site up. And for record, I regret damage done to property and life-but the power of Nature is still amazing.
I'm sorry...but I think it is kind of funny for millions of people to live on a sand bar that gets hit over and over again by hurricanes and the Federal Governemnt keeps giving them money to rebuild there.
No it's not funny when people die from a hurricane...but it is funny that people will move back and wait for another one. And for people that will ignore an evacuation notice and ride a 150 MpH hurricane out on a boat...two words for you. Natural Selection.
Man I hope KSC doesn't get damaged...all four Space Shuttles are there.
Why is the Space Center in Florida again?
What the hurricane couldn't bring down, the Slashdot effect has/will. Poor little web cam, so bravely facing the onslaught on the storm, only to be blindsided by hordes of geeks clicking it to death.....
Never ask a geek why, just nod your head and slowly back away. -Rob Malda
Hurricanes are terrible. Scary. Very Dangerous.
People who don't evacuate (i.e. "ride it out") are VERY STUPID. The geeks left and set the cam up to stay behind. They were smart.
BTW Meteorologist like to see things like this because they might produce some interesting data to let them better understand and predict these things.
Everyone who is in the path of this storm has my sympathy, until you refuse to evacuate. Please be safe down there. Just remember that my tax dollars will help you rebuild that beach-side condo afterwards anyway, dumbass.
OK, so the humour icon might be a little tasteless. However, to me, this really shows the power of the internet (if not the power of the host computer and its internet connection!), and the way that current affairs and news coverage is changing (although admittedly this probably wouldn't make a terribly interesting TV program).
Top 20 Things Iain M. Banks Would Name Hurricane Floyd
20. Hurricane Mild Inconvenience
19. Hurricane Looter-Friendly
18. Hurricane Net Congestion
17. Hurricane Wildly Overrated
16. Hurricane So Much For Subtlety
15. Hurricane This, Too, Shall Pass
14. Hurricane Flying Shrapnel
13. Hurricane We're Not In Kansas Anymore
12. Hurricane Rotating Cow
11. Hurricane Huddling In The Basement
10. Hurricane Hissy Fit
9. Hurricane That's It, We're Moving To Wisconsin
8. Hurricane Doing Unto Others
7. Hurricane The Movie
6. Hurricane Hurried Evacuation
5. Hurricane I Didn't Know My Car Could Swim
4. Hurricane Slashdot Effect
3. Hurricane What I Did On My Summer Vacation
2. Hurricane We're All Going To Die
1. Hurricane Warrior Princess
We want endless gardens of data, where the bits can flower, flourish and reproduce. -- Andy Mueller-Maguhn
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
You can be sure there will be dozens of live reports on television; so why not a webcam? If anything, it makes me care for what happens more than some phoney journalist dramatising the whole thing on national television. I hope I won't see anything on this webcam and that the house stands.
This is only technology at the service of communities, people. If anything, it makes us seem to live closer to one another. The Slashdot category chosen may be weird, but I think it's comic in a tragic sense. The poor webcam faces the uncoming storm long after the people have evacuated. Beyond that, there is nothing funny about it.
So, cool, people. The day they put a webcam in a concentration camp I'll scream. For now, I'll watch and hope things are alright.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I do not think that this is the correct category for such stuff. The following message came around yesterday evening on the PHP-Slashdot Developers mailing list:
...
From:
Date: 13.09.1999 01:46
Subject: [PHPSLASH] The big blow
To: "PHPSlash"
Well, we are under mandatory evacuation orders here in Hollywood, Fl. where I live. There is a major storm about to stomp us. They are not sure if it is going to come ashore here, or somewhere north of us, but as it's less then 400 miles away now and is over 400 miles wide, that puts the leading edge less than 200 miles away. Tropical storm force winds (35+ MPH) are due in a matter of hours, gale force (about 60+ mph) by 10 AM. The storm is expected to last all day tomorrow and most of Wednesday. What fun. Currently it is a
category five storm that is described as capable of doing catastrophic damage. Love that word, catastrophic. Everything three and above is
considered deadly.
As most of you possibly know, I live on a sailboat about 500 feet from the Atlantic Ocean. If my home (boat) is destroyed, or S. Fl. looses power/telephone/water, then god only knows when I will be back online, might even take weeks/months. If everything survives all right, I'll be back online Wednesday night or Thursday morning.
The good news is that the storm center is thinking the hurricane force winds (155+ mph in this case) will miss us. By about 10 miles. Nothing like
cutting it close.
Currently, I am ignoring the evacuation orders, as nothing much will actually happen for another 10 hours or so, but after that...
So, wish me luck and if you are so inclined, say a prayer....
Best always,
...
Still thinking this is funny?
I have pics of the house at http://ralph.cx/page.phtml before the storm....
:) Now i wish i had more than a 256 Frac-T.....
As I read some of the responses here i would like to point out, we took all of the important stuff out of the house (like our main server with 40+ gigs of mp3s) and have dat backups of everything else, so we are just trying to make light of the situation. Hurricanes are a fact of life in Florida and we understand the risk living on the water... I think it was really cool of Hemos to put it up, thanx
Almost everything in our house runs linux... (except for the HP-Apollos running HP-UX, the NeXt box, and my Amigas....)
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
Here is a live cam from Miami Beach, several North Florida cams and a link to a whole page of weather cams for the US.
Don't kill them all at once! Spread it around.
In case something somehow happens to the main site, a backup site is set up. In case the site is too busy, the view is looking out a window at what looks like a river. I was hoping for a view which included the computer so we could watch the water rising...
Perhaps this mail should be sent to CNN, Reuters, AP, UPI, and the major networks instead -- groups which are encouraging hapless freelance paparazzi to deliberately risk their lives to film the storm themselves.
All the testy objections to publicity of one little linux-cam taking footage of the storm, which apparently all of you have forgotten has been standard media fare in every disaster for the past 20 years at least, are ignoring one significant point here.
How much does a cheap Linux box cost? 500, 600 dollars, if that? And a little color webcam comes to 100 - 150 dollars? And no one has to be there. So not only do you come up with a remotely viewable camera that costs MUCH less then your average news camera, it doesnt require anyone to risk their life filming a dangerous situation.
To me, that's much more preferable than people driving themselves off of torn-up causeways and dunking into turbulent water just to film swaying trees and floods on a Florida barrier island. It's not worth anyone's life. THAT is something to be thankful for.
Romulus
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
You know, whenever a natural disaster, or a massacre, or whatever occurs, a few of us refuse to see it as a serious life-changing event. Then, people on message boards like this, or Usenet, or editorials in your local rag, get on us because "this isn't funny! Remember all the people who were hurt/died/homeless!" Know what? If I wanna find humor in this, I will. Nobody freaks when my county gets a tornado warning. Or a tornado. It affects you, not me. It'd be really shitty of me if I made these jokes around someone who had lost home and family, but you know what? I don't really give a damn. What affects you doesn't affect me, and be damned if you're gonna try to make me feel bad because you got property in a hurricane zone. I hope your home and family survive OK. But don't expect me or