ugh, weather station errors

So it seems like my rain gauge likes to stay at its last rate above zero. the last thing it reported was 0.59in/h, its since been dry for a couple hrs. I know its not rained 0.59inches the last hour. wtf gives? I call OS customer service. The tech tells me to reset the base unit and the gauge. I tell him its on a 2 story roof and we are in a tornado watch. he said just do the base unit. sure enough, its still reporting 0.59. I call back, this tech says the lightning in the area might have effected the sensor. I ask how common this is, because I don't want to have to climb a 2story house to reset a sensor, after unscrewing 8 tiny screws from a ladder. I got something like "after you reset the rain unit, monitor it if it still has problems, we will send you a replacement"

crap, maybe I should've dropped a little more and got that Davis Vantage Pro 2, ugh!

Guess I'll try and reset the rain gauge tomorrow morning before it gets stormy again!

MTSpeling plugin... update!

As many of you have seen, my spelling is, well, horrid. So I found a spell checker for MT, called MTSpeling. It had one HUGE disadvantage:

MTSpeling provides support for a personal dictionary of words that it will treat as spelled correctly, stored as a cookie on the user�s web browser. The only support in the plugin is to be able to read and parse the spelling-dict cookie as a colon-seperated list of words.

How friggin lame is that? I have direct access to my server, why can't I just read a local file? well, now you can, heres the hack...

The line after "$Lingua::Ispell::path" add:

my $personaldictfile = '/path/to/personaldict.inc';

Now do a search on cookie, you should end up at around line 34. after this cookie check, add this to line 41:

open (FILE,"$personaldictfile"); my @personaldict = ; close FILE;

foreach my $word (@personaldict) {
chomp $word;
accept_word($word);
}

Come on alex, its that simple, why'd u make it seem so hard?

There is no current support in the plugin for dictionaries stored anywhere other than as a cookie in the browser.

There is now! muahahahaa. This new file works with one word per line. none of that colon stuff the cookie had to use.

UPDATE:
So I finish this entry, hit preview to let it spell check, and this came up "colon-seperated" from the original page. How funny is it that a spell cheking page has spelling errors?

2in diameter hail!

So not 4 days after I mount the weather station on the roof, we get a wicked storm with 2in diameter hail. mind you, thats the majority of the sizes, there was some 2.25in easy. So while this is happening, I'm watching my weather station graphs and software praying one doesn't nail the weather station. Amazingly enough, it lived through its first hail storm.

Thats not the funny part. ...

I mounted it up on 4/15. logged into wunderground and pulled up the google map. I noticed all my wind directions were the opposite! damn, I mounted my anemometer backwards! Its winds FROM the south, not TO the south. duh, stupid mistake. 4/16 I climb back up and rotate the pole 180 degrees and re-angle the solar panels. While I'm up there, I take pictures. For more info on that and pictures, check out my weather page

So thats not the crappy part... Both of our cars are outside? ever wonder how big hail has to be to cause car damage? golf ball sized causes little dings, hen egg (ie 2in) causes bigger crater-like dings. Thank god my deductible is only $250. The trees god pruned by nature, the gutters didn't get a dent, and the roof looks clean.

There's 3 more days of this forecasted, oye vey.

UPDATE: The gutters did end up w/ 3 dings from the inside out.