Grand Coulee Dam Trip

Update on 12/24 - finally updated the photos. They have come out really well!
Here's one of the sunset - http://tinyurl.com/ArnabPicsSunsetGC. And another one of the highway along the hauntingly beautiful landscape - http://tinyurl.com/ArnabHighwayGC.

View the full smugmug gallery: http://tinyurl.com/ArnabAlbumGC

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My Maa is here for a month. Reached here this week.

This weekend we (Maa, Ujwala and me) are off to Grand Coulee Dam - the biggest concrete dam in North America - generates about 6500 Mega Watts - the highest for any dam in the world.

The drive from Seattle is beautiful - it passes through the Seattle hills/lakes, the Snoqualmie area (water falls, snow-capped mountains and passes), beautiful farm-lands and then on to the arid eastern Washinton area. The route follows the Columbia river and there are some really amazing viewpoints over the gorges along the way. There is a sound and laser show on the dam every evening from 8:30 PM (May-September) - the lasers use the dam as the screen! It is supposedly the largest such sound and light show in the world! The Columbia rivers history is depicted - so all that this weekend.

and the trip weather looks good: weatherbonk link

Weather Bonk

So I want to drive from Seattle to NYC. No really I want to do that once. Coast to coast.
Well I'll leave that dream to come true in another blog. It's a different topic I wanna talk about right now.

So I wanna start at 6 PM from Seattle, let Google Maps (or some other maps) decide the way for me, AND, AND tell me hows the weather gonna be all the along the way.

Now look at this rad site: http://weatherbonk.com/weather/routeWeather.jsp?
Start from Seattle, at 6 PM today, and reach NYC in 3 days. And it tells me how the weather's gonna be along the way. Isn't that cool?

And there are loads of other options! Cool. Now check out their home page: http://weatherbonk.com
I know all this is there in weather.com too but, this is like, presenting all the relevant data in the relevant manner!

Seattle and the Rain!!!

Ok it really does not rain that much here - but it's overcast most of the time. And drizzling... yada yada yada... But statically it's less than LA, NYC, Miami and most eastern-seaboard cities.

However - "RAIN" is a big part of of Seattle life (It's not called Rainy City for nothing! That reminds me - it's also called Emerald City - but I haven't seen any lying around yet)...

Anyway so much so that our intranet has a full wiki devoted to jokes on Seattle and Rain (which is not a big surprize since the Amazon intranet, rather wiki, is full of, ummm, ANYTHING - from comparisons on Grocery Stores to Even-Horizons/Black-holes and to some really good tech material).

This page has a load of jokes - here are my top three:



#3 You can apply the old Mt. Rainer forecasting guide.

1. If you can see Mt. Rainier it isn't raining but it will be soon.
2. If you can't see Mt. Rainer, it is raining, and if not on your head, it will be shortly!

(Mt. Rainier is a range of mountains to the SW of Seattle - there are 2 other ranges, Olympics and Cascades surrounding Seattle - hence the rain!!! Go read up on Seattle in wikipedia)



#2 "I can't believe it," said the tourist. "I've been here an entire week and it's done nothing but rain. When do you have summer here?"

"Well, that's hard to say," replied the local. "Last year, it was on a Wednesday."




#1 A newcomer to Seattle arrives on a rainy day. He gets up the next day and it's raining. It also rains the day after that, and the day after that. He goes out to lunch and sees a young kid and asks out of despair, "Hey kid, does it ever stop raining around here?" The kid says, "How do I know? I'm only 6."

Betting on weather

There was the Amazon Developer Conference last 2 days (Jan 16th and 17th ' 2008) - it's yearly event... Among others was Tim O'Reilly presenting "The O'Reilly Radar" - basically talking about the new things in the internet/tech space!!!

I hope to write more about it and the other talks... but before that I have to tell you about this idea that I loved a lot: www.weatherbill.com

This thing startled me... It's like an insurance on weather... on top of that... you can bet on the weather and if you win they pay you!!!
Go to the site and try the quoting thing. You put a condition (like I am saying it's going to snow above 5 inches each day between 1/27 and 1/29 at Zip Code 07310 - if that happens you pay me $10 a day!!!)

Now it takes your details and uses its own weather predicting algorithm (at the minimum I would assume it to be very very complicated) and gives you a quote - you buy that quote and if it really snows above 5 inches each day in that period you get paid)... I am sure you got the analogy - it's like an Option - but on weather!!!

That and much more - go to the site and read blogs about it!!!

BTW: Started by an ex-google guy... :-)

More to come - watch this space...