By yesterday evening I managed to import all the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency country place data through the Bs. This morning, I couldn't get to the NGIA website.
All right, sometimes these things happen. No biggie.
Yet, knowing a little about how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince Elon have operated the last 30 days, I did some digging. And I discovered yet another example of how imbecilic these infants are.
Simply: someone has removed the agency from the Internet. All DNS records for the agency are gone. Someone just deleted the entire domain.
NGIA has 14,500 employees, mainly in its Virginia headquarters. Its products include the NGIA name files that cartographers all over the world use to maintain their maps. Google, Microsoft, and Apple, for example, are big NGIA consumers, as you might want to know if you've ever used their maps.
I knew that the OAFPOTUS could seriously degrade Weather Now, but I thought I had a bit more time. I guess not. So if you use Weather Now and want to search for anyplace in a country whose name begins with C to Z (except Canada, Jamaica, Macau, and the UK, for reasons), I guess we'll both be disappointed.
This could just be a temporary error, like how the Clown Prince accidentally shut down vital food services here and abroad, or mistakenly halted cancer research. At least I know the data are still there, even if the computers the data live on are no longer accessible from outside Fort Belvoir. And I expect Google, Microsoft, and Apple might have something to say about this when they notice it's happened.
At least the National Weather Service still has its DNS entries. For now.
Butters, possibly traumatized by Cassie and me leaving her alone for almost half an hour yesterday, has decided to stake out my office:
Incidentally, this is what Cassie and I walked past in the local park yesterday:
We've had progressively warmer days since the temperature bottomed out Monday morning. We might even get above freezing today! I hope so, because I need a 5 km walk to meet a Garmin challenge this weekend. (Cassie will help with that; Butters, not so much.)
Last night I released Weather Now v5.0.9183, with a few bug fixes including a patch to the Gazetteer that recognizes the UK's four constituent parts (example). I've spent a few evenings the past week and a half fixing everything I could think of in the Gazetteer code, plus integrating with Azure Maps to allow me to correct time zones and parent places.
Then, starting around 5pm yesterday, I re-imported the existing data from fresh sources, including the NCDC update Monday and the FAA update yesterday. And just now I've completed importing all 970,000 USGS names records for the 50 United States plus DC and Puerto Rico. The Gazetteer now has 1.6 million records, and there are still a lot of places to import from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
If you're curious, you can go to the About the Gazetteer page to see what all I've imported. I plan to start importing the NGIA country files this afternoon, once I've downloaded them.
The Azure Search indexer that populates the full-text search for the application runs every three hours, so most of the USGS records won't show up in the search feature until just after noon US Central time (a bit more than an hour for now).
Also, after lunch, I'll have a Butters update. Spoiler: she sleeps 21 hours a day.
My friends have gone to a tropical beach for the week, which means I get a second dog for a few days. She has been here many times before (most recently on Saturday), so she knows the drill. Still, five minutes after her people left, Butters seemed resigned to never seeing them again:
By the time I woke up this morning, however, she seemed to have settled in just fine:
Walking the two of them together in this cold doesn't actually work, however. Butters hates cold weather; Cassie loves it. So Cassie wound up dragging Butters for half of this morning's walk, making all three of us miserable. After lunch I'll walk them again...separately.
The temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ has gone up all day, just surpassing yesterday's afternoon high of -11.3°C:
Of course, yesterday's actual high was -10.3°C, at midnight, and we won't hit that again until tomorrow. But by Friday we'll be able to walk outside without losing extremities, and by Sunday it'll even be above freezing. And then, in 10 days: spring!
There is one advantage to Arctic air over Chicago, though: the air is really clear.
I've added a couple of new features to Weather Now, including a view of the best weather in the world. More usefully, I've added a release notes page.
This weekend, I plan to to rebuild the Gazetteer, and import all of the USGS records—about 900,000 places. This will also mean rebuilding the search index in the Basic tier. The Free tier is great for testing, but it only lets me index 10,000 items at a time. Even if the Free tier could support 900,000 records, I don't want to hit "Rebuild" 90 times.
I'll also be setting up a Donate button, for obvious reasons.
Enjoy.
Winter ends two weeks from tomorrow, but climate science and meteorology can only study nature, not command it. That explains why, despite ample sunshine, the temperature at IDTWHQ has stayed around -7°C since it leveled out this morning, and promises to shed another 8-10 degrees tonight. Then we're in for a few blasts of cold interspersed with warm days and some snow here and there for about a week before it consistently warms up.
Elsewhere in the cold, cold world:
Finally, Google has suspended comments on the label "Gulf of America" because of all the one-star reviews people gave the body of water. I realize Google just follows the USGS on American place names (same as Weather Now), but still, they could have slow-walked it (as Weather Now is doing).
I promised snow photos.
So far, it looks like we've gotten only about 25 mm of snow, though it continues to fall and will probably keep falling until the early morning. Cassie and I went out around 1pm, and I gave her a bit of off-leash time in the courtyard:
That is a happy dog. And we're about to go out again, because she insists on metabolizing food and water.
Tomorrow she gets to go to day camp and I get to go to my downtown office. One of us will have a lot more fun than the other.
I'm just noting a few things and moving on with my day:
I'm planning to wrap up a new release of Weather Now this evening, too. I'll post snow photos when I do.
We have a winter weather advisory until tomorrow at 3am, warning of "mixed precipitation" with snow accumulations of 75 to 150 mm. It has begun in earnest:
If I don't get so busy that I forget to do it, I'll snap another photo before the sun sets for comparison. Right now we've gotten maybe 5 mm of snow, with the temperature holding steady around -2°C, about 3°C below normal. Normal snowfall for February is 273 mm, so this shouldn't surprise anyone.