David Herrold

Hurricane Gustav

Posted by Dave | Filed under Journalism, Personal, Science

UPDATE (8:30AM Monday, Sept 1st): Gustav made landfall on the central coast of Louisiana and has dropped to a Category 2 hurricane.  Nearly 100K people without power in the New Orleans area

UPDATE (2PM Saturday, August 30th) : Gustav has been upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 145mph.

The latest tracking model of Hurricane Gustav has it making landfall in Louisiana’s central coast with a “cone of uncertainty” stretching from Houston to the Mississippi/Alabama coastal boundary.  Right now, the margin of error is 250 miles east of west of that point (a pretty wide margin of error).  The closer Gustav gets to the Gulf Coast, the more narrow this cone will become as the landfall prediction becomes more accurate.

A couple of Justine’s friends are evacuating from New Orleans and headed to Houston to stay with us for a few days as the storm blows through.  Better safe than sorry.  We’re glad they decided to join us for a few days.

We have plenty of food and water (and alcohol) to weather the storm if it drifts our way.

I almost hope the storm hits the Texas coast instead of Louisiana, because I think we could take the hit much easier than they could.  All the official quotes I’ve heard about New Orleans say the levees are built back up to “pre-Katrina” standards.  Which means they still suck.

New Orleans government may call for mandatory evacuations sometime today or tomorrow (if they haven’t already).  This will mean access to contraflow lanes to move everyone away from the Louisiana coast much faster, in theory.  I hope all my friends and family in the New Orleans area have gotten out before that happens.

On a personal note, I’ve been pretty disgusted with local news coverage of hurricanes ever since Hurricane Rita.  Because of this, I usually rely on national sites like NOAA or the NHC for my hurricane data.  I prefer to get my news from sites that simply display the weather data without interpretation that you get from reporters trying to speculate the details of the hurricane.

Hurricane reporting that uses words like “might”, “could” and “possibly” is simply speculation.  I’d rather get the statistics from the original source and make my own judgment of the direction and severity of the storm.

That being said, I think we do a better job at the newspaper than most other local news outlets, but we still have room for improvement.

I find it fascinating (but not very enlightening) to make note of which local TV station uses the “best” spinning hurricane graphics and the most ominous hurricane “theme” music.  Someone should do a Youtube montage of these some day to show the ridiculousness of it all.

Regardless of the news coverage, I hope everyone on the Louisiana coast is safe from harm this weekend.

Take care, folks.

Tags: gustav, hurricane, media, news coverage

MuxTape no more?

Posted by Dave | Filed under Music

Apparently the music industry goons at the RIAA have caught up with Justin Ouellette at Muxtape and temporarily forced him to take down his very cool digital mix-tape service.

Muxtape provided a modern version of the cassette mix tape you traded with your friends 10-20 years ago.

I hope this is only temporary, but knowing the RIAA, it will be down for a while (if not forever).

(Thanks to Chris Denbow on Twitter for the heads up.)

Tags: Music, muxtape, riaa, sharing

BarCampHouston3 recap

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design, Development, Marketing, Mobile, Networking, Social Networking, Software, Technology

Justine and I attended BarCamp Houston at the Houston Technology Center yesterday and had a great time. A big thanks to all the organizers (Marc Nathan, Kelsey Ruger, Josh Tabin, Scott Stolz). You guys made the event a smashing success for everyone. And thanks to all the sponsors for helping to make BarCamp Houston possible.

For those who don’t know what BarCamp is, here is a brief explanation:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. – Wikipedia

This can be simplified to “day camp for nerds.”

I watched some great presentations and participated in some interesting discussions throughout the day. BarCamps are only as great as their participants, and we had some great participants this year.

Ed Schipul’s presentation on PR and social media was sharp. His creative use of a green laser pointer kept the crowd in line (as much as possible) as he explained how to “put the relations back in public relations” using social media. It’s a pleasure to watch a pro on stage engage the audience as well as Ed does.

Josh Tabin spoke about how start-up funding works. I found his discussion about the ins and outs of financing to be pretty enlightening. I left the discussion knowing a lot more about how start-ups make that initial leap into businesses.

Tracy and Imelda whipped up an impromptu discussion on digital photography and social media. I’m pretty sure there should have been a cover charge for the room and IDs checked at the door. Tracy had the room in stitches for a solid 30 minutes, while feeding them great advice for managing their photos in Flickr.

Katherine Druckman also jumped into the mix with an impromptu presentation about Drupal, the open source content management system. The crowd had lots of questions and she fielded them like a pro.

Wynn Netherland and Jim Mulholland from Squeejee.com gave a great presentation on virtual collaboration tools. I’ve gotten used to keeping much of my work “in the cloud” and Wynn and Jim did a nice job of rounding up the most useful tools for working with teams spread across the globe (they even did their presentation live on Google Docs. Cool.)

Here’s a photo of the schedule board in the lobby. A little something for everyone.

My own presentation about mobile web design & SMS went pretty well (at least I think so…it’s hard to gauge while standing behind a podium). I used a live SMS poll to determine how the crowd used their phones the most (talking, email, text messaging or mobile internet). Email and WAP came out on top, which isn’t surprising given the technologically savvy crowd at BarCampHouston. (Screenshot of the BarCampHouston3 mobile poll results.) I also posted some photos on Flickr yesterday.

(Update: I just found out my presentation deck was featured on the homepage of Slideshare today! Woot! Here’s the screenshot.)

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

P.S. – Bill Shirley posted a nice BarCampHouston update, too. Check it out.

P.P.S – Steve Evatt also recapped BarCamp Houston and took some cool photos as well.

Tags: barcamp, barcamphouston3, conference, houston, Technology

Edouard schmedward

Posted by Dave | Filed under Personal, Science

It looks like Tropical Storm Edouard will hit Houston tomorrow around lunchtime.

All things considered, I think Edouard hitting Houston is much better than Edouard hitting New Orleans.  I think we can take the blow to the chin much easier than they can right now.

Tomorrow should be an interesting day.  If past performance is any indicator, the television media will do its best to whip the public into a frenzy of worry and panic.  Do we really need 3D spinning storm graphics pounding our TV screens in high definition?

We’ve stocked up on olives, vermouth and vodka – just like we did for Rita a couple years ago.

What are you doing to prepare for the storm?

Tags: edouard, hurricane, storm, weather