Here is a link to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) projections for the Atlantic Hurricane Season.  ther predict 14-23 named storms with 8-14 Hurricanes.  They have been badly wrong the last 3 out of 4 years, so below you can view the predictions of Dr. James Hansimian, a well respected meteorologist.

You can follow along through the season.  Hurricane Seasons runs from June 1 to November 31, that’s 183 days.  The NOAA prediction would mean a new named storm every 8 to 13 days.  So if you go 13 days without hearing about a storm they are way off pace.

Who got it right?  We’ll let you know here after the end of the Hurricane season.

Google wave rolled out today for everyone, including Google Apps domains.  I’m not sure what the heck it is, how to use it or why I’d use it.  But I like it and have enabled it for my Apps domain.

Google is making progress, its slow but its progress, on some of the issues I’ve long complained about.  First among these is the lack of drag and drop attachments for Gmail.  Lo and behold last week this feature was announced for users of Firefox and Chrome.  Google says that drag and drop picture insertions is working for Chrome users and should be working soon for Firefox.  Great.

The Google mandarins also announced last week that all of Google’s applications (Picasa, Buzz, etc.) would be available for Google apps domains by the end of the summer.  Laudable since treating paying customers like second class citizens seems silly.

While these announcements are appreciated they are way over due, not having drag and drop attachments and photo inserts is so 2002, not 2010.  What took so long? And not letting premium customers have all the neat features.  What were you thinking Google?

Now that those are out of the way (or soon will be) they need to implement their actual top requested features:  revamping the look and feel of contacts to something modern and permitting users to turn off threading in the mail application.

Get with it dudes.

What I really wanted was a piece of hardware that was as slim and light as a Mac Book Pro but ran Windows.  What I got was a Dell XPS 16.  Its not near as thin and light as an MBP and, though it is quite pretty in its own right, it is not as good looking either.

Here are the positives.  It has a slot loading optical drive an Intel i7 720QM processor (my understanding is that it has 4 cores but shows to the system as 8 due to hyperthreading) at between 1.6 GHz and 2.8 GHz with 6 MB of Cache, 8 gigs of DDR3 1333MHz ram, a Radeon HD 4670 video card with 1 GB of dedicated RAM, a 256GB solid state hard drive, and a 15.6  WLED screen.  Its actually pretty hard to top those specs in a laptop.

The disappointing features are related to the battery.  First the battery itself. I ordered the unit with a 9 cell 85 WHr battery so that I could get extra battery life.  What I didn’t know was that the thing is giant and sticks out of the back of the unit ruining its otherwise slim (but not super model slim like the MBP) profile and adding to the weight.  I have the 6 cell 56 WHr battery on order to correct the appearance problem.

However, despite its heft, the 9 cell battery delivers terrible performance.  I barely get 2.5 hours out of it.  Now admittedly my initial use pattern has been installing software and transferring files from my server, syncing up Dropbox, etc. but still, these hefty specs come at a price.

I will continue to tweak the power configuration to see if I can get better results.  I suspect between changing my usage and tweaking the settings I should get much better battery life, but I’m surely not going to get 3 hours on my deck watching high def streams from my Slingbox.

The other negative is the finish.  The glossy black looks great when you unbox it.  But after just a few minutes it is all smeary looking, like the screen of an old iPhone, from the oil in my fingers.  Ick.

I think this is going to be a good machine because spec wise it rocks.  But I will need to learn how to use it.

I’ve been trying to use Google Chrome as my primary web browser for the past week.  I really like the clean interface with the tabs on top and looked forward to the promised speed bump over Firefox.  I also really like two addons, Friends Mural for Facebook and Mail Checker Plus.  They are really slick ways to interface with Facebook and Gmail that are seriously better than anything I’ve found for Firefox.

So more speed, better addons, what’s not to like?  Several basic things actually.  While several adblock style addons have are available that actually use the adblock filterset, they do not work nearly as well as adblock for Firefox.  Even with the addition of the adblock element blocker they do not display and adblocked page as cleanly as adblock in Firefox and many of the ads appear briefly before being blocked.  To add injury to annoyance, adblock seriously slows down Chrome making it seem slower than Firefox.

Comments on the Chrome adblock download page indicate that the fault lies with the architecture of chrome.  There is apparently no way to block ads similar to the functionality provided by Firefox.  Bummer.

The other major issue is continual freezes and lockups.  This may be related to any of the addons running, I have not tested.  But I am using the stable version of Chrome with adblock, adblock element blocker, Friends Mural and Mail Checker running and get constant lockups and freezes.  This seems to happen mostly when checking mail, so I’m going to tentatively blame Mail Checker Plus, but that may not be right.

I feel that one day, over time, the adblocking and other issues will be solved by the addon devs and the possibility for tight integration of the browser with the Google services I use extensively will provide a compelling reason for me to switch.  But today is not that day.

Unfortunately my Bears did not have it in them to Beat the Blue Devils in the Elite 8 and I’m bummed.  But if you had told me prior to the start of the season that we would make it to the Elite 8 and lose to Duke, I would have taken that in a heartbeat.

So great job Lace, Tweety, Udoh, Lomers, et al.  Great job.  Can’t wait until next year.  Well unless the Football Bears make something happen this season.

Go Bears, beat the Gaels.  We’ll be there cheering you on.

Since the release of Windows 7, contemplating the release of Windows Mobile 7 has been pleasant.  I thought we’d be getting capacitive touch goodness in a slick interface that was currently missing from Windows Mobile on top of the good things about the system like removable storage, direct access to the file system, the ability to side load applications, and the ability to replace core apps with anything you like.

To say the revelations of the last several days have been disheartening would be an understatement.  MS has revealed that apps will only be available through an MS run app store, that there would be no removable storage, no Flash or even Silverlight in the browser (despite the fact that Silverlight is a core part of the apps on WM7), that the applications would be heavily sandboxed, there will be no access to the file system, and applications duplicating core features will not be allowed.  Then the coup de grace; no copy and paste.

Really?  Why the heck would anyone buy this thing?  Its an iPhone without the Apple magic; with Ballmer instead of Jobs and a non-replaceable version of IE instead of Safari (that really hurts).  If MS wants to sell me a phone they need to be clearly better than iPhone both in terms of capabilities and openness.  This is not nearly as good as the iPhone is today and there will be an additional iPhone release in June/July before WM 7 phones hit the shelves.

Windows 7 lead me to expect better but this product will be late to market and not as good as the phone I currently have in my pocket.  That’s too bad because I’d love to ditch those control freaks at Apple.  I just can’t see replacing them with the Redmond version.

Its really bad when Google looks like the last, best hope for sanity in smart phones.

Epic fail MS.

Best Bible Reader/Study program I’ve ever used.  It permits users to open two panes with custom sizes in each of which can be shown the users choice of a Bible translation or commentary (such as Matthew Henry).  If you’ve bought Strong’s you can display Strong’s numbers next to the text and link directly to the Strong’s entry.  The panes will sync, ie scroll together, or not at the user’s selection.  Book marking, highlighting and note taking on a per verse basis.  Best of all the notes can be synced back to my Evernote account and edited/expanded using the Evernote desktop client or web interface (easier than typing on an iPhone). Highly recommended.

Testing WordPress version 2.0. Hopefully it works well with my blog.