Brett's Blog

…didn’t happen. Anticipating some severe weather for Sunday and Monday.
Parts in bold:

INITIAL TSTM ACTIVITY WILL LIKELY OCCUR MONDAY INVOF SURFACE LOW AND
IMMEDIATELY TO THE S ALONG OCCLUDING PACIFIC AND POLAR FRONTS OVER
PARTS OF NEB/KS. WHILE HAIL WILL BE THE PRIMARY SEVERE WEATHER
THREAT…SETUP WILL BE FAVORABLE FOR LOW-TOPPED SUPERCELL
DEVELOPMENT NEAR OCCLUDING SURFACE LOW OVER NEB WITH ISOLATED
TORNADOES POSSIBLE. RAPIDLY BACKING DEEP-LAYER SHEAR VECTORS WITH
TIME ACROSS NEB INTO KS SUGGESTS THAT STORMS MAY EVOLVE INTO A
LINEAR SYSTEM WITH THE THREAT FOR HAIL AND DAMAGING WINDS.

FROM CNTRL KS INTO THE RED RIVER VALLEY…MORE NORMAL ORIENTATION OF
DEEP-LAYER SHEAR VECTORS TO THE PACIFIC FRONT/DRYLINE AND GENERALLY
WEAKER LARGE-SCALE FORCING MAY BE MORE FAVORABLE FOR BROKEN LINE
SEGMENTS OR DISCRETE STORMS MONDAY AFTERNOON INTO EVENING. WHILE
ENVIRONMENT WILL ONLY BE MARGINALLY UNSTABLE…THE PRESENCE OF
RATHER STRONG LOW AND DEEP-LAYER SHEAR SUGGESTS THE THREAT FOR A FEW
SUPERCELLS CAPABLE OF DAMAGING WINDS…HAIL AND PERHAPS TORNADOES.

Yep, spring is finally here! Potential for tornadoes, lots of wind and hail with these things to come. Earlier this evening there was a tornado warning out for some remote county in Colorado. At this point, not sure if i want to take an entire day trip out to Great Bend, KS and chase the storms back to my area or not. The one thing I hate about storm chasing at night time is that “slight potential for a tornado” bit. Last thing I want to be in, is a tornado.

But hopefully that won’t be the case if much of i70 has some sort of wireless internet, if indeed i do decide to take the drive out there.

Here’s an image of the red bulls eye around the greatest potential for the severe weather:

Make note that the western Kansas redline of 30% is right around great bend, KS, stretching down to Wichita, KS over to Topeka, KS.

Last night my Instinct bot sent a message into the #Stargate-Worlds channel. Normally it is just normal spoiler junk that makes everyone in the IRC channel rage. However this time, it was quite different. Stargate SG1, if I read correct the first of the seasons of the series are now on hulu! They have it noted on hulu that there will be more additional seasons of the show to “come soon”. Head on over to http://www.hulu.com/stargate-sg-1 to start watching!

So today was the bi-state, state-wide tornado drill. And with my little hobby/interest of Civil Defense sirens… I recorded the only electronic siren in my county today! You can hear (and watch) the thing going off by clicking here.

On another note, I do see a lot of red! For the drill today, NOAA/NWS enabled the EAS for both states. This is what that looked like:

Mind you all, I find that quite funny.

LAN parties are pretty fun, but they aren’t very fun when you get over charged for an entry fee then have to pay even more just to compete in a tournament. While I do know that many lan events around the globe do this, I feel it’s a way that scams gamers out of what a LAN party actually is.

LAN parties are about games, and the fun of those games. Needless to say, if you bring on a team or friends with you. the result can be quite the fun outcome. QuakeCon for example is a perfect example. Despite the hotel cost for a near one week stay. It’d actually pretty fun.

In the coming months, I would like to get something like that running around Kansas city one day. Free to play and game event, however charge a fee to play in tournaments. It seems pretty fair to me. In addition to that, I would like to have sponsors come to the event and have booths to show off their products. However, the sponsors would cover the costs of any additional fees for the event and if desired to add funds to the prize pots for the tournaments.

Feedback would be appreciated on this.

My thoughts about the irc network ReplayIRC and Stargate Worlds.

In all honesty, IRC in general is a dieing internet protocol. The Internet Relay chat system in general is actually just as old as I am, 20 years old in case you were wondering. I hope SGW and future games by gaming companies will use ReplayIRC or IRC in general to embrace some power of how great IRC actually is.

A lot of people over time have said some pretty horrific things about IRC. Needless to say those users went to IRC networks either serving warez, warez filled with viruses or IRC networks with quite a large amount of script kiddies. Over my years of using IRC, I’ve seen users in various communities say things that are not true about IRC unless you yourself goes to said bad IRC networks. Most of the time the most common one was “Don’t hack my computer” or “You can’t ddos me!!”. The latter is funny in regards because that normally is the users own idiocy opening them self up for attack.

IRC in general can be pretty well secure or looser then a shoe string bow-tie. Newer irc networks, as well as some older ones now support the use of SSL connections. SSL is the Secure Sockets Layer protocol. As far as I am aware, it is not in any RFC for IRC. It was added on to add to security. To help add to security, many networks offer the use of a NickServ account to be able to use your nick and no one else being able to impersonate you with an account not belonging to them. SGW if you ask me is decently secure, it does the average grade security, nothing all too fancy, but good enough to stall the crackers out there (This is by speculation). I’ve seen quite a few video’s out there posted by idiots violating NDA’s posting up SGW stuff.

SO yeah, I’ve rambled on about nothing too spectacular now. However, please do see my point I hope more companies over time will reuse the older protocols out there rather creating something that’s already been done many years ago.