about the weather

yes, both relevant to this post, and a musical reference (song by 10,000 maniacs). anyway.

this post is, actually, about the weather. this past christmas, carrie gave me an Oregon Scientific WMR968 Weather Station. those of you who know me might remember that i’m a weather geek. or you may have glazed over that detail, because it’s mundane. anyway.

like any competent weather station, it measures: temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, wind speed and direction. but the geekiest feature is that the base station connects to a computer via serial cable. i’ve got it hooked up to my server at home, and it’s logging meteorological data 24/7.

there are various open source packages to interface with this data, as well as to submit it on intervals to sites like weatherunderground.com.

i will be developing a widget to embed the data on this site and my other sites, so keep an eye out for that. why do you need to know what the weather’s like on my back deck, exactly? that’s for you to decide. i’m just enjoying the programming challenge.