The Distant Librarian

Fire Weather - links

I just finished reading Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast by John Vaillant, and wanted a place to keep the links mentioned in the epilogue.

This is not a review, but this really is a book you should put on your to-read list, especially if you live in Alberta. It tells the story of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which is currently the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history. Lots of history of the area, of the science behind our current reality, and of the petroleum industry that wags the Canadian dog.

The links:

• Koch Docs: Hard to find documents about Charles Koch and his agenda all in one place.
• Canadian Energy Centre - oh, it's actually still alive and online?!
• The Climate Investigations Center
• DeSmog
• Smoke & Fumes
• The Discovery of Global Warming
• Inside Climate News
• Climate Files
• Some terrifying video from YouTube, in case you've forgotten all about that wildfire

My highlights from the exhibits floor at ALA11

I'm here in New Orleans for another night, finishing up a visit to ALA. I was here primarily to participate on the Summon Advisory Board, but also spent today in the exhibits hall. If you're reading this in time to take advantage, here are a couple booths you should hit while here, depending of course on what you're looking for :-)

1. Overlooked Books, booth 457. Looks like you'll have to create a free account on their site to follow these links, but they had some wonderfully irreverent titles available at their booth, but I ended up getting some T-shirts and 2 Walter the Farting Dog stuffed toys for the kids. Yes, they do. Lots of fun stuff at their Librarian Gift Store. 
2. Archaia Entertainment, booth 1654 - If you're in to graphic novels, they're practically giving them away with a buy 2, get 3 free deal. Definitely not for everyone, but I was able to find stuff for every member of the family.

More generally, I was very impressed with what I saw of Springshare's new Mobile Site Builder and LibAnalytics modules. Yes, I know I can do both of those things myself, or with open source tools, but damn they make it easy and affordable. So much less hassle just to use their tools. Mango Languages just released an iOS app, which is the full content from the website. A no-brainer if you subscribe to their service already. There was one other vendor that I wanted to post something about, but it's completely slipped my mind. :-(

So I guess with that I'll just leave you with this NSFW summary of the weather here over the past few days:

The Inevitable

Choose your poison, C or F, it's just gonna be damn cold!

Going down...

Just in time for the weekend, of course.

Brrrr

That's C on the left and F on the right.  Wind chill on the way to work was reported as -49 C

Actually not complaining; it's been a very mild winter until right about now...

A weather report

It's been a while since we've had a local weather report from the Distant Librarian.  don't take this as any kind of complaint, 'cause up until about a week ago it's been positively balmy up here.  This is the place you're going to want to be when global warming really hits!  But right now, the report in one word is: Cold.  Here you go in Celsius and Fahrenheit:

It's coming...

Too busy to blog about anything substantial these days, but I needed to pop on and note that flurries were spotted in the air this AM.  Mark the date - September 19, first "snowfall"...  Might try a linkdump later in the week.  Until then...

All clear here...

I hereby do solemny swear to abstain from complaining about the weather in Calgary for the rest of the month.  I went to grad school in Buffalo and only had to deal with a couple of big winter storms.  Nothing this early.  Buffalo was hit overnight with as much as two feet of snow by some reports.  Wet lake-effect snow.  Yuck.  Here's a news page, and here are (currently) 268 pictures uploaded to Flickr. 

Happy Friday the 13th, y'all


Technorati Tags: SNOW!, Buffalo

Yay, no snow down here

Well so far the forecasters have been wrong; while it's damn chilly and we did get rain all night, so far there's no snow here in Calgary.  Took a peek at the webcams on the ski hills in Banff, and they did indeed get some snow.  You know what though?  I forget that of course it's actually quite pretty:

That one was taken at 7:50 this AM at the Banff Gondola.

The all-important end-of-Summer weather update

Gosh it was a nice day today.  Sure wish it was going to last.  Here's the forecast for the next few days, presented in both C and F for your horror:

I'm not sure what that icon for Saturday is - it's either ghosts or blowing snow.  Either way... shudder.