Storm Haven

9/11/07.  The video camera has stopped working.  I don't anticipate getting it running any time soon.

5/26/07.  Because of bandwidth problems I have turned off the video feed.  I hope to have it on again in a week or so.

5/7/07.  Communication between the onsite equipment and the Internet has been spotty recently.  It will go offline for several hours, and then re-appear.  Remote rebooting of the equipment does not help.  I suspect a Comcast problem, but cannot diagnose further until I go on-site.  In the meantime, my apologies for the intermittent service.

4/16/07.  LBI oldtimers who remember the 1962 storm get very concerned when they hear "nor'easter" in the forecast, but we got off easy yesterday.  Today the lagoon is full to the brim, but with the winds out of the west now the water should start going down, and no harm done.

3/27/07.  Weather station will be out of commission at least until April 1.

10/3/06.  The site has now passed the 50,000 mark in visitors since inception.  Wow!

9/26/06.  The humidity sensor is malfunctioning again.  Ignore the humidity and dewpoint readings.

9/5/06.  There was another outage today, which required a reboot of the cable modem, router, and computer.

8/29/06.  The onsite weather reporting was down for much of the last day and a half, but all appears back to normal now.

7/19/06.  Back to using the hurricane feed from Weather Underground, which appears to be working OK now.  I really like their data presentation better than the National Hurricane Center's.  I may be switching back and forth between the two feeds over the next few weeks, without necessarily noting every switch in this space.

7/9/06.  The hurricane headlines in the left column are taken from an RSS feed.  I had been using a feed from Weather Underground, but it turned out to be unavailable much of the time.  (Some of the information was mangled in a way which caused my feed-reading software to choke.)   I am now using a feed from the National Hurricane Center.  This feed pertains to the Atlantic basin only (including the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico) so you will no longer be seeing information about typhoons in the western Pacific.

6/26/06.  I have replaced the humidity sensor, so the humidity and dew point readings should now be correct.

6/23/06.  Do not believe the humidity or dew point readings.  Something has gone wrong with the humidity sensor.

6/8/06.  The #2 feed now updates every 10 minutes on My Yahoo!  For several days now I have been running a script which pings the Yahoo! servers every 10 minutes, and it seems to be working well.

6/4/06.  The Fort Dix, NJ, radar was down for maintenance but is now back to normal.

5/26/06.  When you click Radar in the left column, the experimental Lightning Strikes feature is now turned on by default.  The lightning strikes which appear on Weather Underground's radar page come from the StrikeStar network, which includes data from my Boltek lightning detector.

5/24/06.  The content feeds are now working more or less the way I want them to.  Check it out.  I am discontinuing the FeedBurner feeds which were up here briefly, so if you subscribed to them you will have to re-subscribe.  The feed URLs are now set, and shouldn't be changing again any time soon.

I have to say that the content feed technology isn't really geared to updating content every ten minutes.  The best way to get up-to-the-minute weather from a number of stations is to go to Weather Underground.

5/21/06.  The weather summary in the upper left corner of this page is now clickable.  It gets you to the same place as the Current Weather link below it.

5/20/06.  I have removed the orange icons, but I am still experimenting with RSS feeds.  The trick is to get them to work acceptably in a range of readers.   I think I am almost there -- more to come soon.

5/14/06. I have been experimenting with the RSS feeds (linked by orange icons in the lower left corner of this page) for the last few days, and am still tweaking them.  I'll post here when the situation is stable.

5/8/06.  On this page, added abbreviated current weather and an RSS feed.

5/4/06. The width control on the camera page was broken for Firefox users, as a result of the change made on 4/18 (see below).  This has now been fixed.

5/1/06.  The visitor graph has been updated through April.

4/18/06.  The image on the camera page is labeled, "Right-click image to zoom."  Recently I noticed that right-clicking didn't do anything, unless I left-clicked first.  It turns out that Microsoft recently changed the way Internet Explorer handles "active content" such as that camera image.  (The change was implemented as a result of a patent dispute with a company called Eolas.)  Adobe has published some Javascript code which makes active content work the way it is supposed to work, even in Internet Explorer.  Today I implemented that code on the camera page.  If it isn't working for you, let me know.

4/2/06.  The camera appears to be back to normal. The visitor graph has been updated through March.

3/29/06.  The camera will be down for a while because of technical problems. I don't know how long that will be -- hopefully only a day or two.

3/2/06.  The visitor graph below has been updated through February. The month of February had a surprising number of visitors, considering that the site was not being updated during the entire month.

2/28/06.  After five weeks of inaction, I finally was able to get on the site and restore service. It turned out to be problems with the cable hookup. Weather continued to be recorded locally, and weather history is now on the website with no gaps.

2/10/06.  The weather reporting and camera have been down for over three weeks now, and I apologize. Whatever the problem is, it cannot be fixed remotely. I have been hoping to get on the Island to fix the problem, but the pressure of other commitments has prevented me. I anticipate that I will not be able to fix things until approximately February 20. Thanks for your emails of concern. I am fine, just haven't been able to devote any time to this.

1/03/06.  Happy New Year, everyone. The visitor graph below has been updated to cover all of 2005.

12/03/05.  I have updated the visitor graph through November.

11/04/05.  Today the site received its 20,000th visitor. The graph below shows monthly visits, from the site's inception in July 2004 through last month. The big spike in October is probably due to the fact that visitors to the webcam page are now being counted. [Later note: This is not thle whole story, however, since November numbers dropped back down.] Previously, the webcam page was hosted on camerawebpage.com, so that visitors to that page were not counted in the site statistics.

10/26/05.  Everyone loves a storm. Yesterday this site had 664 visitors (the average is 104 per day).

10/25/05.  The nor'easter which began yesterday and continued for most of today gave us a high wind reading at 4:10 am of 43.5 knots (50 mph). This is the highest reading since the station went into service in July 2004.

10/24/05.  I am on site. The rain collector was plugged up with gull guano, and partly full of water. When I cleaned it out at 9:17 pm, the gauge registered 0.25 inches within a few seconds, and a calculated rate of 96 inches per hour. I left the 0.25 inches in the archive, but erased the 96 inches per hour.

10/20/05.  After four days the slow-shutter quit working again. Oh well!

10/16/05.  After months of not working, the Toshiba slow-shutter feature has suddenly started to work again. Moonlit pictures as bright as day -- check the live picture at night-time.

10/12/05.  At 7:02 pm the wind registered 40.9 knots out of the northeast. This was the highest reading so far in 2005, and the second-highest since the intallation of the current weather station on July 1, 2004. (The highest wind speed recorded was 42.6 knots on December 1, 2004.)

10/12/05.  The rain gauge does not appear to be working correctly. I will get it fixed as soon as I can.

9/28/05.  At least one user was having problems seeing the camera image on port 18080, so I switched it to port 80. Camera control is now on port 18081. Let me know if that broke something for you.

9/26/05.  I have added a "save default settings" capability to the webcam page.

9/24/05.  I have a few paragraphs here about how and why I rewrote the webcam page.

9/12/05.  I have created an entirely new page for viewing the webcam. Dial-up users can now view and control the webcam for the first time, and broadband users will benefit from increased resolution. Please let me know how it works for you; I will be tweaking it for some time to come, I am sure.

9/7/05.  Yesterday this site received its 15,000th visitor.  Over 33,000 page loads.  Whoopee!

9/2/05.  All is back to normal, and it's a beautiful Labor Day weekend on LBI.

8/30/05.  Today at 3:57 am the station stopped sending all data, including weather observations, lightning data, and webcam pictures.  I have not been able to establish a connection remotely, so resumption of normal operation will have to wait until I can be on site.  I hope this will be Labor Day weekend at the latest.

8/21/05.  Those of you on a dial-up connection should have a better experience with the home page now.  The still photo from the webcam is now buffered by ImageSalsa.  Previously, the Toshiba camera was timing out before you could download the picture at a slow connection speed, so that you always saw just a part of the picture.  That shouldn't happen now.  Also, ImageSalsa adds a timestamp, and reduces the size of the picture to reduce download time.  Live pan-tilt-zoom is still not feasible with dial-up, but I will be trying to fix that soon.

8/18/05.  Lightning detection is back.  Hardware is working.  (Replaced old Gateway computer with a Compaq running Windows XP Pro.)

8/16/05.  I had to remove the Lightning Detection feature because of hardware problems.  I hope to have this up again before thunderstorm season is over.

8/7/05, 10:00 am to 11:35 am.  Another power outage.  Guess I'll have to get a whacking big UPS.

8/5/05, 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm.  System was off line for about 3 hours due to a power outage associated with a severe thunderstorm.

8/5/05.  Installed lightning detection.  Very experimental at this point.  I haven't yet calibrated the system.

8/4/05.  Installed WeatherLink 5.6 Beta 2.  Annual summary reports now blank out precipitation data for months with no data.

7/24.05.  Many of the bayside homes on Long Beach Island, including mine, are situated on "lagoons" -- man-made canals lined with bulkheads.  This use of the word "lagoon" does not appear in any of the dictionaries I have consulted, and I don't believe I have ever encountered it off the island.  How widespread is this usage?  If you have encountered the word "lagoon" used in this sense somewhere other than the vicinity of Long Beach Island, I would appreciate hearing from you.  I would also appreciate hearing what other words are used to denote the same thing.

7/15/05.  Computer hung up this morning.  Did a cold restart.

7/3/05.  This site went public just over a year ago, on July 1, 2004.  I started tracking visitor stats on July 22, 2004.  Since then, the site has been visited 11,700 times, where all pageloads by the same browser within the space of an hour are counted as a single visit.  At least 140 people have visited the site more than 10 times, and 30 of you have visited more than 100 times.  I am having a lot of fun, and hope to keep the site going for a long time to come.  Thanks for visiting!

7/1/05.  I am experimenting with the look of the site.  Don't worry.  No matter how ugly it gets, the information will still be good.

6/28/05.  Problems with camera, fixed by cold restart of camera.

6/25/05.  Turned on privacy mask for webcam.  Changed colors and link styles on home page.

6/24/05.  Warm restart.

6/24/05.  Upgraded from WeatherLink 5.5 to WeatherLink 5.6 Beta.  Adds Inside Heat Index and Inside Dewpoint to Archive table.  Adds Moon Phase and Forecast to All Variables table, and also adds calculated average windspeed and high windspeed for the past 1, 2, 5, and 10 minutes.

6/6/05.  Added climatological summaries.

5/27/05.  Changed URL for main picture on home page. 

5/23/05. Warm restart.

4/25/05. Warm restart.

4/25/05. On Sunday, April 24, there were problems with the service that hosts this website, resulting in outages and intermittent updating of weather. Everything appears to be back to normal now.

4/4/05. The Weather Underground link now brings up Barnegat Light instead of Harvey Cedars. (Loveladies does not exist for Weather Underground). This makes a slight difference in the list of neighboring stations, etc.

2/22/05. I have installed a Toshiba camera, which includes remote pan and tilt. For now, I am making that feature available to all users. Enjoy.

2/20/05. Weather reporting will be down until about 9 AM on Monday, 2/21.

2/1/05. Weather reporting was down for about 8 hours this morning as a result of WeatherLink hanging up. The computer has been rebooted.

12/13/04.  Finally! The system is up and reporting correctly again.

11/22/04. My apologies for the extended outage. Attempts to re-start the system remotely have failed, and I won't be able to go on site until after December 3.

11/11/04. Communication with the weather computer went down yesterday, and I have not been able to restore it. It will be at least several days before I have time to devote to this.

11/3/04, 3:30 pm. Another hang up by WeatherLink. This time I just logged out and in again. If this keeps up, I might have to try a cold restart.

11/2/04, 8:30 pm. Another warm restart was necessary. This time WeatherLink ran for over two weeks before hanging up. No problems with Windows 98 or Radmin.

10/18/04. Warm restart.

10/11/04. WeatherLink hung up about 3:30 pm, after running continuously for 5 or 6 days. System was still available, so was able to do a warm reboot at 4:15 pm.

10/5/04. Added day of week to headers of weather pages.

9/29/04. Reduced archive interval from 15 minutes to 10 minutes. Made minor layout changes to the Current Weather and Weather History pages.

9/27/04. I have made a number of changes to the hardware -- for details see "About this site."  The changes make it possible for me to diagnose and fix problems from a remote location.