Welcome!

Welcome to my new website. This will be my new home on the web, but I will still post on sites that I usually post on, such as Wunderground. You are currently reading the section of the home page which will host my latest blog entries, which will usually contain both text and an embedded video. The site itself is not WordPress, but this blog structure is. Thus, as you can see, comments are possible, and encouraged. Please leave suggestions and feedback, positive or critical, on this blog entry, to help me improve this website. We are far from the 2012 hurricane season, but now is a good time to start fine-tuning the site before the season overwhelms us. Feel free to look around before posting your thoughts. A couple of the pages on the navbar contain dynamically-updating content that you will not find anywhere else on the web, though some of it will be empty until we actually have a storm in the Atlantic. Something for you to look forward to :)

This site was designed 100% by hand, except for some of the embedded wordpress blog structure, and this is my very first time learning and using HTML/CSS. Thus, there are sure to be some bugs and compatibility issues with some browsers. I have done my best, but I can’t be bothered to deal with the quirks in old Internet Explorer versions. If you are using IE and don’t have IE9 or higher, some elements of this site won’t display properly, and even in IE9, one or two aesthetic effects are not supported. This site utilizes HTML5 and CSS3, and some of those features are not supported by older browsers. Firefox 4+, Opera 10+, and all versions of Safari and Chrome should not have any problems. If you do encounter an issue that isn’t because of an old Internet Explorer version, please let me know either in the comments section of this entry or via email at levicowan@tropicaltidbits.com

Regarding comments, WordPress requires an alias and an email address to be given for unregistered users to leave a comment. The email addresses go into a database that is tied only to this site. To make it easier to post comments, you can register and login, thereby giving yourself a permanent alias. After registering, you can change your password by visiting your profile (accessible by clicking on “settings” at the top right of the home page) and near the bottom is a new password field.

Note about the satellite page: What I hope will be a favorite among bloggers, the Satellite GIF Loops page, serves up GIF loops that are generated on my shared server by a script that demands more CPU time than I would care to admit. I get constantly throttled for it by my host provider, and by myself I haven’t experienced performance issues, but that might change immediately once more traffic comes in now that the site is going live. If this becomes an issue, the satellite page may have to be removed pretty quickly. I hope that won’t happen, but if the site seems annoyingly slow, please let me know.

I have been working on and off on this site for many months now. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it. This is only a small home-base for now, but it can be expanded at will, for obviously I control it. I have no idea how much it will grow, but we shall see what happens.

More on the winter and recent model failings

Here’s another video talking about the winter and how the models have failed so far during the first week of December, and why the month overall should end up a lot warmer than was forecasted by many. I have never been in on winter forecasting, and I’m only talking so much about the winter this year because of all of the cold forecasts I have seen, which I find puzzling, so I’m trying to show that they should be wrong about this winter if the pattern continues. We shall just see what happened after it’s all over in March.

We shall see what happens!