Thanks Snow!

Well, I'm feeling much better today. Vitamin A. When you're feeling crappy, high doses of Vitamin A and Vitamin C will do the trick. I'm avoiding the outdoors today due to the snow, which as I expected has been somewhat of a let down. Looks like even my totals will be too high for what we'll end up with here. That said, it's still snowing so I should just shut my mouth. Per radar trends it's looking like Lake County, IL will win locally.

Anyway. As I was saying, I've spent the majority of the day indoors working on more much needed website updates. With heavy snow falling currently, storm chasing seems like a distant memory. However, we're less than 3 weeks away from what I generally call the beginning of the storm chasing season. Nothing is really "fun" to chase until April 15th, but after a long winter stuck indoors I'm never one to turn away a chance at bagging a needle in the haystack and give chase to some fast moving supercells in March, as usually happens a couple times in the midwest. It's generally a good idea to be ready to go around March 1st, in my opinion. So, that's what I'm shooting for. I don't have any technological updates going on gear-wise, so I'll be set to go when the first event approaches, be it early March or it waits til April. Since I renovated the website early in 2008, I left a lot of things in temporary statuses, and never got back to changing that. So my mission this winter has been to get everything up to par once the season starts. Today's updates include:

A new page for time lapse videography. I've really taken a liking to creating time lapse videos of severe weather, so this will be the site where I'll be posting all past and future videos of that type. You can view that here: WX in Motion

I've also spent a lot of time working on new photo galleries. For example this one, Supercells and Tornadoes was finished up today. I've created several new galleries, including winter weather, and a gallery featuring photos of storm chasers that I've taken while in the field. Perhaps you're featured? It's slim pickins right now, but I'll be adding more over time.

I've updated the gear and equipment page as well. Nothing new is really added, but I changed some of the photos to actually include photos of my own gear, rather than store images. You can check that out here.

Let's see. I tweaked a couple other things cosmetically, but those will likely go un-noticed. If you haven't recently, go on over to the main PrairiestormMedia.Com page and let me know if you've got any better ideas.

There are areas that I'm still working on, such as updating all the old chase logs. I had been dragging my feet moving everything from the crappy geocities server to the new one since 2008. Well, that cost me, as I was unaware that geocities was doing away with it's entire service, so I lost everything from 2001-2007. I've got 2004 and 2007 mostly updated, but the rest of those years still need to be done. That will likely be what I focus most on before things get going this spring. I'm not re-writing all the logs, because there is no way that I'll remember all the details. But I'll at least get video captures from the more important dates on there. I had no idea what was going on back then anyway, so I really don't need to revisit my actions during those chases back in the early part of the decade. We'll save that for myself in private when I watch those old tapes!

That should about do it for today's update. I've been going at this for several hours today, and it's time for some food and a night of college basketball. College basketball and March Madness keep me entertained as we transition into severe weather season and baseball season. I long for listening to the Cubs on WGN 720 while driving out to the target area on a moderate risk day in June, but for now an exciting end to the college hoops season will do. Illinois' has somehow found them in the race for the Big Ten Conference, so things could be interesting down the road.