Kelly and I stayed with her parents for three days because of the storm. According to Duke Energy, at its peak the power outage involved about 928,000 people in Cincinnati, and 1.5 million people from Louisville to Columbus. All of the homes on my city block are still without power, and it’s been six days since the wind storm. As of yesterday morning, there were still 130,000 people in the city that didn’t have electricity. I’ve personally seen dozens of large trees down and lots of property damage caused by the storm. Duke Energy has requested police protection for their offices because they’re receiving threats of violence from customers without power. Some of their field workers have been threatened too. Kelly and I were able to stay with her parents, so the worst part for us was the inability to buy gasoline. About 90% of the gas stations in the city were without power, so that left the remaining 10% to supply the entire city. The lines were long and the wait-times were sometimes hours-long. I waited for nearly an hour to get gas the other day. The few gas stations that had power saw such a high volume of customers that they began to run out of gas and were forced to close. That’s when it got really rough. I stayed home from work last Tuesday because I didn’t know when I’d be able to refuel, and I was running low. However, today is Saturday and I’m at Kelly’s. The power is finally back on and we’ve got, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” in the DVD player. My gas tank is about half full and, although there are still a lot of people without power, most of the city has returned to normal.

Today (Sunday, September 14, 2008) The tri-state area of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana experienced a terrible wind storm brought about by the remnants of hurricane Ike. I heard on the radio that wind speeds were sustained at 55 MPH, with gusts exceeding 75 MPH in some places. The state of Kentucky has declared a state of emergency. Numerous injuries and three deaths have been reported. These high winds have resulted in thousands of wind damage reports, downed trees, and over 800,000 electric customers losing power. The power company is saying it may be as much as a week before all service has been restored. I’m typing this from Kelly’s parents house because they are one of the few areas in the city that actually has electricity. The winds were so severe this afternoon that they damaged hangars and the control tower at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, resulting it it’s closure for a short time until the winds subsided. I drove around a good portion of the city this afternoon and saw dozens of trees of varying sizes that had been toppled. Some of the trees were exceptionally large, pulling a substantial amount of soil up when the tree was uprooted, leaving a hole large enough for a Mini Cooper. I saw one house on Shady Lane on the west side of Cincinnati that had a tree in excess of 100 feet high fall onto the roof, while two other very large trees in the front lawn had been uprooted. Cincinnati’s biggest AM radio station, 700 WLW, reported that all city lights within sight of the broadcasting offices on the hill are out, leaving a dark sight described as “eerie” and “disturbing”. Kelly’s parents have had many shingles torn from the roof, but no other damage. My friend and co-worker, Jeff, called to tell me he won’t be into work tomorrow because he has three trees down on his property. Two of them he thinks he can remove himself, but one is too large and will require professional removal. The large one is blocking the driveway. I’m just glad that the damage wasn’t worse that it is. I’ve never seen a scary wind like this before in my life, and I hope to never see it again. You can read the latest news about the wind storm at www.wlwt.com/weather.

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo. I found this on SlashFilm and had to share it. It’s creative, fun, and colorful. I love it!

I just found this Flickr photostream from a person in Houston. The images represent some of the damage they’ve experienced on the residential streets. This other Flickr photostream has only a few photos of the downtown area, but the windows are mostly blown out of a few of the buildings. However, the photos with the most impact are from MSNBC’s photo gallery. It’s amazing and saddening to see the evidence of the power of a hurricane. UPDATE: The Houston Chronicle photo gallery also has some revealing and dramatic photos.

I must admit that I have been terribly reluctant to switch from iTunes to … well, anything else. I’ve purchased a lot of music through iTunes and I had always appreciated the simplicity and speed with which I can get my favorite songs and albums. Why switch when things were going so well? Then I updated iTunes several months ago and I immediately noticed how the updated application runs very slowly. Navigating pages and scrolling through the content was extremely sluggish. Also, the iTunes download was ginormous and was bundled with junk I don’t want. I just found this article on Wired Magazine’s Blog that lists five reasons why that author will not be updating iTunes in the future. As I read it I started to realize how my own experience with iTunes has really been sucky lately. (more…)

Google’s new web browser, “Chrome”, is a nifty start, but I’ve encountered some rather severe problems with the way it renders pages. This article on CNET outlines 10 features they’d love to see integrated into Chrome, and I wholeheartedly agree. However, I’m more concerned with the rendering problems. Most of them have been annoying, such as images that only half-load, Flash elements that don’t display, or JavaScript buttons that don’t stack or align properly. But just as I was preparing to write this Blog entry, I discovered another slightly more annoying problem. I have a grouping of “Quicktags” in my Wordpress Blog administration window that allow me to quickly edit or create Blog posts. You can see those Quicktags in this screenshot from Firefox. Well, in Chrome those tags aren’t visible, as you can see in this screenshot from Chrome. Why? They’re just simple JavaScript. I’ve used IE 7, Firefox, SlimBrowser, and Opera, and all of those browsers display those Quicktags without a problem. In my opinion, any browser that fails to display portions of an interface is failing to do it’s most important function: properly render the HTTP interface for an application or website. If it’s going to fail doing it’s primary job, I’m not going to use it. Chrome may be a nice start and overall I love Google’s products (I love Google Documents), however, I think their browser is lacking core functionality. And, as that CNET article points out, it’s also missing some peripheral functionality that would just make it more useful. My opinion … it’s only a mediocre start for Google’s Chrome. It doesn’t always render pages properly, sometimes omitting images or portions of the interface, and it lacks many of the most useful features of Firefox. Hopefully they’ll fix the more serious problems first so that I can, at the very least, use it to browse websites.