So since the last time I looked the temperature has jumped from -8° F to -9° F but the “feels like” has stayed at -26° F!!!! And yet it still says “fair” on the report. But at least they are changing the “WInd Chill Warning” to an “advisory” until 10 AM tomorrow.
At least it’s bright and sunny out!!!
And for my foreign friends -9° F is -22 Celsius and -26° F is -32 Celsius. I’m not sure many of my Costa Rican friends can even comprehend cold that cold…
Tagged Costa Rica, Michigan, Weather
It’s been a week since the 6.2 earthquake in Costa Rica (Jan. 8, 2009) and while I’ve been updating my original post with info I thought I’d post another entry.
The death toll is at 23 people with 11 missing. Over 2000 people living in shelters and abut $100 million in estimated damages. This really sums up the whole tragic disaster.
There is a nice graphic of the area up at The Tico Times to give you some idea of location and details.
Speaking of The Tico Times, the latest issue came out today (it’s a weekly paper) and has a lot of information in it (they do sell a pdf of the paper on-line), they generally don’t publish very many full stories on-line other than by subscription but they’ve had a lot up there this week. The first 11 pages of the January 16, 2009 issue of the Tico Times is full of info on this earthquake, including a history of earthquakes in Costa Rica, info/diagrams of seismic plates in Central America a safety quiz and more. I’m not trying to sell you the TIco Times but it’s really got a lot on the earthquake this week and I do like The Tico Times.
I didn’t realize that this was the biggest quake in 18 years. Lately, I’ve heard mention of earthquakes, but I didn’t think I’ve heard much about them before a year or so ago. But I’ve spent more time there lately (4 trips in 12 months) and I’ve been getting The Tico Times delivered to Michigan so I’m catching more news that I would have missed before. I’m assuming it was my lack of information that led me to that misconception and not that they’ve had more in the past year.
There are volcanos in the area of the quake, the closest is the Poás Volcano which is about 10km from the center of the earthquake (about 90 km is the Arenal Volcano, the worlds most active volcano. Volcanos tend to follow fault lines and Costa Rica is right off of the one that becomes the San Andreas fault (if you follow it up a map you’ll see it). . Volcanos and earthquakes in the same place make me extra nervous but that doesn’t seem to have caused any issues. On a side note, the Poas Volcano National Park is closed through Monday due to some unrelated volcanic activity; it seems coincidental but maybe it closes all the time, but I haven’t noticed it in the paper before…
If you haven’t read it since I first put it up, I have added more links and news to my post from last week.
Tagged Costa Rica, disaster, earthquake, Michigan, Poas Volcano, R.I.P., terremoto, The Tico Times, Tico Times
I try not to speculate to much about gossip and things about people but Apple did release a press release on Steve Jobs health today. It was actually a letter from Steve to the staff with phrases like:
“In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.”
“I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.”
I hope everything turns out okay; he can’t be too happy that he’s needed to do this, doesn’t seem like that kind of guy (and I’m thinking he can’t be well if he’s doing this). Two, not having him in charge of Apple will shake things up a bit in the world (rumors do that enough as it is) for at least a few days.
Found at MacRumors.
Semi-Sidebar: I was going to make a comment like “and their stock didn’t do to good today, I wonder what time this was made public” but they did a heck of a lot better than Dell or Palm. It doesn’t look like the market as a whole did too good and Apple’s not that far off the curve.
Friday update – There is a nice “Get Well Steve Jobs” cartoon on Joy of Tech.
Friday update 2 – The Telegraph.co.uk has a health timeline for Steve Jobs, just click and take a peek at the pictures (the 6 mugshots at the top).
Tagged Apple, health, Steve Jobs
Registration for WordCamp Chicago is open! I don’t know how full it’s going to get so you better sign up quick. It’s a mere $30.99 for a weekend of WordPress goodness.
They haven’t picked a venue yet, I think it’ll depend on the number of people that sign up but that doesn’t mean it won’t fill up. A little more information is on the WordCamp Chicago blog.
They’ve already got some speakers lined up including Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress. And Matt has one of the coolest website URLs around it’s Ma.tt
Saw this at Lisa’s blog Just a Girl in the World; Lisa (author of WordPress for Dummies) is one of the organizers.
Tagged Chicago, WordCamp, WordCamp Chicago, WordPress
This is one of the shorts that I saw at the Montezuma International Film Festival. A very cool (stop animation) wall painted animation done on the walls of buildings on the streets of Buenos Aires.
More info at Blu’s blog.
Posted in Costa Rica 2008
Tagged animation, Blu, Buenos Aires, Costa Rica, film, Montezuma, Montezuma International Film Festival, movies, Muto, shorts
Spam isn’t anything I generally talk a lot about but this spam showed up a little differently. It’s a old internet scam but with some graphics and updated to try and get you to help them smuggle some money out of Iraq. It’s crazy that people still fall for these…
The next day: I got a much longer more generic version of this too, turns out I only get 30% and him and his buddy get 70%, that’s not even $3 million for me! What a rip off!
Here is a geeky history of the Internet in about seven minutes (and when I say “geeky” I mean technical). Pretty easy to understand as long as you aren’t afraid of acronyms like TCP.
Eventually all the icons in the video will be released under the creative commons license. It’s not clear when though. If you dig around the site you can find some here and there, it’s all part of the Melih Bilgil’s degree.
As a followup to my post on saving money for the holidays (over at WeLikeMoney.com) I’m going to talk about managing your utility bills, specifically your gas and electric bills.
Your electricity and natural gas bills fluctuate throughout the year: Air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter, filters for the pool in the summer, more lights in the winter and many other factors. Many utility companies offer something some kind of balanced budgeting billing (my company calls it BudgetWise® Billing). What they do is figure out what your average bill is, guesstimate what it will be over the next 12 months and start charging you this amount. Every so often they re-evaluate they amount (6 months) and every 12 they credit or charge you the difference.
This is great for those months where you get some outrageous bills, especially if they haven’t done any meter reading in a while. Mine is usually pretty accurate and I’ve never owed at the end. This is a saving feature I’ve never used before a few years ago, I was helping a friend with some really tight budgeting and we wanted a specific amount to budget to; when we set up his, I added it to mine and I’ve enjoyed having it ever since.
Pros and cons:
From a budgeting standpoint this makes all my utilities the same every month: cable, cell phone, gas and electric. My water is part of my condo association fees so I’m not sure if anyone offers budgeting on water bills since I’ve always lived in some kind of multi-person dwelling.
Hopefully this works out for you as well as it has for me. If anyone has any experiences on this (good or bad) please leave a comment.
Linking to our site, linking to posts or tweeting about this site counts as support too!
