Posted By RichC on May 25, 2012
Ever since the debut a few years ago, I’ve thought the rugged looking MB GLK sport utility vehicle has been a nice smaller addition to the Mercedes Benz SUV line up … but it would be been better as a diesel. Next year it looks like the U.S. may get the little 2.1 liter 4-cylinder BlueTEC diesel … the review looks promising (check out the photos).
Posted By RichC on May 25, 2012
I’m not sure how the NOAA models forecast the hurricane season but Adminstrator Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D. predicts a “less active season compared to recent years. I was assuming that will the warmer spring and mild winter that thre U.S. would be seeing more named storms? Go figure?
For the entire six-month season, which begins June 1, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says there’s a 70 percent chance of nine to 15 named storms (with top winds of 39 mph or higher), of which four to eight will strengthen to a hurricane (with top winds of 74 mph or higher) and of those one to three will become major hurricanes (with top winds of 111 mph or higher, ranking Category 3, 4 or 5). Based on the period 1981-2010, an average season produces 12 named storms with six hurricanes, including three major hurricanes.
“NOAA’s outlook predicts a less active season compared to recent years,” said NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D. “But regardless of the outlook, it’s vital for anyone living or vacationing in hurricane-prone locations to be prepared. We have a stark reminder this year with the 20 th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew.” Andrew, the Category 5 hurricane that devastated South Florida on August 24, 1992, was the first storm in a late-starting season that produced only six named storms.
Favoring storm development in 2012: the continuation of the overall conditions associated with the Atlantic high-activity era that began in 1995, in addition to near-average sea surface temperatures across much of the tropical Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, known as the Main Development Region. Two factors now in place that can limit storm development, if they persist, are: strong wind shear, which is hostile to hurricane formation in the Main Development Region, and cooler sea surface temperatures in the far eastern Atlantic.
“Another potentially competing climate factor would be El Niño if it develops by late summer to early fall. In that case, conditions could be less conducive for hurricane formation and intensification during the peak months (August-October) of the season, possibly shifting the activity toward the lower end of the predicted range,” said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
“NOAA’s improvement in monitoring and predicting hurricanes has been remarkable over the decades since Andrew, in large part because of our sustained commitment to research and better technology. But more work remains to unlock the secrets of hurricanes, especially in the area of rapid intensification and weakening of storms,” said Lubchenco. “We’re stepping up to meet this challenge through our Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, which has already demonstrated exciting early progress toward improving storm intensity forecasts.”
Lubchenco added that more accurate forecasts about a storm’s intensity at landfall and extending the forecast period beyond five days will help America become a more Weather-Ready Nation.
In a more immediate example of research supporting hurricane forecasting, NOAA this season is introducing enhancements to two of the computer models available to hurricane forecasters – the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) models. The HWRF model has been upgraded with a higher resolution and improved atmospheric physics. This latest version has demonstrated a 20 to 25 percent improvement in track forecasts and a 15 percent improvement in intensity forecasts relative to the previous version while also showing improvement in the representation of storm structure and size. Improvements to the GFDL model for 2012 include physics upgrades that are expected to reduce or eliminate a high bias in the model’s intensity forecasts.
Next week, May 27- June 2, is national Hurricane Preparedness Week. You can find out everything you ever wanted to know about hurricanes on the website for the National Hurricane Center
Posted By RichC on May 24, 2012
I was glancing ahead thinking about mowing grass and noticed the weekend forecast looks nice for the Cincinnati area. We’ll most likely see some isolated thundershowers with the heat rolling in, but sunny skies sound good to me. About the only complaint for the official summer kickoff would be that 90+ degree days are starting already — the pool will feel good!
Posted By RichC on May 23, 2012
Thanks for sharing this article Tim. Jon Kitna is still one of my favorite Bengals quarterbacks — he earned respect both on and off the field … and continues as a high school math teacher “by choice.” A great guy for all to look up too.
TACOMA — “We’re working,” Jon Kitna says. “We’re working.”
It’s his first-period math class at Lincoln High School, and yes, Kitna is working. Has been since 7 on this Thursday morning, which is when Kitna walked onto the campus of the high school he once attended, past the statue of Abraham Lincoln and into Room 102 carrying a bag full of McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches.He will spend the next three hours in this classroom on Tacoma’s east side where the clock remains stuck at 1:44. The man who spent the past 16 years studying X’s and O’s as an NFL quarterback will spend three periods explaining x to the fifth power among other assorted math quandaries.
You might have heard Kitna retired. Well, that’s not true. He’s just not playing football anymore. The NFL career he never expected is over, and he’s now in his first year teaching math and coaching football, which is exactly what he hoped to do when he left college in 1996.
“The NFL wasn’t supposed to happen,” says Kitna, 39.
Quarterbacks from Central Washington University don’t usually move on to the NFL. Not even the really good ones, and as great as Kitna was, he graduated with a degree in math education and had every expectation his next gig would be in a classroom and not under center. He applied for his first teaching job before he signed with an NFL team.
How did a man who played 16 years of professional football and made millions of dollars wind up — voluntarily — in a classroom at the most impoverished high school in Pierce County? It’s a tough question. One that Kitna himself can’t really answer, not even with one of those equations he throws at his students.
He doesn’t know when he decided he was going to do this, because he can’t remember a time when this wasn’t part of his plan.
“I never knew I wasn’t going to do it,” Kitna said.
Which is why one of the most successful NFL quarterbacks to come out of this state shows up early in a collared golf shirt, his hair still buzzed so close you can see scalp, bringing a bag of breakfast for his students.
Applied education
Understanding Kitna’s conviction about this position requires you go back to when he first applied for the job.
Back in March. March 1996.
Bill Milus — who coached Kitna at Lincoln — had retired, and Kitna applied for the job the month before the Seahawks signed him as an undrafted free agent. He was an NAIA All-American on a national championship team and perhaps fortuitously was college teammates with the nephew of Dennis Erickson, the Seahawks’ coach at the time.
Kitna spent 1996 on Seattle’s scout team instead of in a Tacoma classroom. It was the starting point for a pro career as unlikely as it was impressive. He was World Bowl MVP while playing in Europe, a backup to Warren Moon and the first starting quarterback for Mike Holmgren in Seattle. He started 124 NFL games, playing for the Bengals, Lions and Cowboys after leaving Seattle in 2001. He passed for almost 30,000 yards.
Plenty of people say they won’t let the NFL change them, but Kitna demonstrated that. Football was a career; teaching was a calling.
“I didn’t marry an NFL quarterback,” says Jennifer, his wife of 18 years. “I married a teacher and a coach.”
Jon Kitna used to talk about taking some time off after he stopped playing. At least a year, maybe two. But then Jennifer began to notice that the longer her husband played, the shorter the amount of time he talked about taking off.
All of that explains how the Kitnas wound up at a coffee shop on South Ninth Street and Broadway in Tacoma last November, meeting with Pat Erwin, Lincoln’s principal. Kitna was the Dallas Cowboys’ backup at the time, his second year with the team. He suffered a back injury earlier that month in practice. A bulging disk that he’d had for years had become a herniated disk, and Kitna had decided that 2011 would be his last year in the NFL.
“We weren’t the only school that was interested in Jon,” Erwin said.
But there wasn’t going to be a better fit than Lincoln. Mike Merrill — Lincoln’s previous football coach — became the athletic director, and the school didn’t hire a coach so much as it staged a homecoming when it introduced Kitna.
“If it was going to be in the city, it would have been real hard for it to be anywhere besides here,” Kitna said.
Here at the school he once attended, as did his parents. Here at a school that hasn’t made the state playoffs since 2003 and had the same weight room that Kitna used when he attended.
His son, Jordan, will enroll at Lincoln as a freshman next year, becoming the third generation of Kitnas to attend the school.
So after he was introduced in January, Kitna came to Erwin and said he and his wife wanted to buy all new equipment for that weight room. Fantastic, said Erwin, but first they’d have to go to the school board to get approval since the project was going to exceed $50,000.
One problem, Kitna said: “I already bought it.”
On Feb. 24, they got permission to install the weight-room equipment that by then was already waiting in the trucks outside. And so the heavy lifting of building Kitna’s program started.
“Greatness in these halls”
“Charles, how much do you weigh?” Kitna asks.
He’s talking to a sophomore who stopped by his classroom before school starts. Charles wears socks that read, “I (heart) haters.” Charles weighs 135 pounds, and he’s been attending the weight-training sessions Kitna runs after school.
“You weigh 135 pounds and you front squatted 155 pounds?” Kitna exclaims. “My man. My man.”
Charles didn’t play football and had never lifted weights until Kitna arrived at Lincoln. Now, he takes his shirt off during the workouts, and if there’s an ounce of fat among those 135 pounds, it’s not evident. The kid is shredded.
Kitna has a rapport in the classroom. A natural ability to communicate with these kids, which is good, because the rest of this job is hard.
Start with the fact that Kitna is used to learning a playbook, not putting one together for the day’s lesson. Throw in the overhead projectors and the graphing calculators — which Kitna didn’t use in high school — and, well, there are times when staring down a blitz would feel more comfortable than standing in the pocket of his classroom.
“The technology is completely overwhelming,” Kitna says.
His classroom is open before the school day starts, and the teacher who was looking for open receivers last year is now looking for opportunities to assist. He thanks a student named Anthony who comes in for extra help.
It’s not hard to imagine a former NFL quarterback filling his afternoons with football. It’s tougher to imagine that same man — a guy who was making $3 million last year — arriving on campus at 7 a.m. and bringing breakfast for kids who need extra help, hosting a home room and then teaching two periods of algebra.
That’s what makes Kitna’s return so extraordinary.
“We don’t believe that we’ve been given all we’ve been given to just enjoy a comfortable life,” he says.
This was the path Kitna and his family wanted. One he planned for, and while he ended up in the classroom much later than he expected, he’s here now. Back at the school he attended before heading off to Central Washington, where he started out as the last of 12 quarterbacks and played his way not just to the starting job, but to a pro career.
His career is proof of the potential that is contained within these halls, something he points out. There are about 2,000 players in the NFL at any given time, and every year as many as 400 rookies come looking to take someone’s place at the table. Two years ago, Kitna went and looked up how many players from his rookie class remained in the league.
He counted six, and two of them attended Lincoln: Kitna and safety Lawyer Milloy, his high-school teammate and the best athlete to ever come out of Lincoln. That reality provides the backbone of the rallying cry.
“His message is, ‘There’s greatness in these halls,’ ” said Erwin. “That’s the exciting thing about having Jon here. Do I want to win football games? Sure. But I want him to be able to convey to kids his story and the greatness that is here in this school so that kids start to live up to their potential as opposed to live down to some of the expectations others might have.”
Kitna’s expectations are high. He has visions of an alumni association whose donating members number in the thousands, and Jennifer has turned the school’s booster club into a registered charity.
The school has a new weight room, the football program a new energy and in Room 102 there’s a first-year math teacher standing at the front of his classroom watching his students complete their assignment.
“We’re working,” Kitna says. “We’re working.”
Yes, they most certainly are.
Danny O’Neil: 206-464-2364 or doneil@seattletimes.com. On Twitter @
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/seahawks/2018240060_kitna20.html
Posted By RichC on May 22, 2012
Everyone wants to head home after a hospital stay … and that includes my mom, but if rehab is called for and skilled nursing care required, I can’t think of a better place than the Dorothy Love community. It is just a few miles from my mom and dad’s house in Sidney Ohio and an easy country road drive for my dad. The surroundings are clean and homey, the staff very polite and genuinely kind and care seems to be good. Hopefully they are not too easy on mom and are able to push hard enough to get her to work in rehab so she’ll be back on her feet and able to head home soon. We’ll see.
I had a positive visit this weekend as mom was reasonably clear headed due to the reduction in pain meds, but still very weak. I brought home the meds list and am having the doctors, pharmacist and nursing in the family review them … really hope to reduce a few that cause her to be so tired and foggy in the head.
She has a nice room, a comfortable bed and powered recliner chair as well as a nice sitting chair and TV to make dad’s longer visits survivable. He is happy to be home and enjoyed going out to eat with me before I headed home. Hopefully this stay won’t go on indefinitely and that she’ll soon be able to care for herself, move around without pain and get some quality of life back.
^^^^^^^^^^^
Written Monday
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EDIT Tuesday morning:
My positive feelings on leaving were short lived and I may have written a premature entry … although still found the Dorothy Love facility excellent. Unfortunately mom had some labored breathing Tuesday morning (4:30AM) and they sent her to the ICU and called dad. Dad followed up with a trip to the hospital and calls to my brother and me this morning. I followed up with a call to the nurse in the ICU who indicated her Troponin levels were being discussed by the doctors at the moment, but that her INR was ok. They have her on breathing assist, but she has anxiety with an changes or attention at this point. I’ll probably head up after work today.
Posted By RichC on May 22, 2012
I found this one on my phone, another one on Brenda’s Kodak Zx5 camcorder gizmo and the other couple that included yours truly from Katie’s huge album on Facebook (Taylor’s friend)… a really enjoyable memory seeing all of her photos.
Posted By RichC on May 21, 2012
It’s not that the plastic cam actuating handles were cheap … considering the shipping, but being able to repair a 26 year old $260 line clutch to match the other three is a good feeling. I really needed just one handle, but I replaced both so as to keep the old “good” cam handle as a spare part (actually I have another unused broken one on the port side of the companionway hatch). The difficult part about making this repair is that due to locating the two sets of 2 clutches next together, and the fact 3M 5200 was used to cement them to the deck, is that I’m unable to repair them while in place on the boat. Getting this thing off in one piece was a challenge.
Posted By RichC on May 21, 2012
So much for day two of the Facebook IPO … no need to look here for some stock market excitement. As the Star Wars line goes, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for … move along.” Perhaps there was just too much hype?
Thankfully I didn’t jump when offered a few shares at $38 … it would have been a disappointment since the glitches left many sellers holding stock at the end of the day even though they were trying to sell. There may be better opportunities in stocks that benefit from renewed interest in social networking and technology stocks?
Posted By RichC on May 21, 2012
Five large cable operators said Monday they will join forces to give customers access to each other’s wireless Internet hot spots in the most sweeping Wi-Fi roaming agreement struck by the industry to date.
The consortium includes Comcast Corp., CMCSA +0.48% Time Warner Cable Inc., TWC +1.28% Cablevision Systems Corp., CVC +1.16% Bright House Networks LLC and Cox Communications Inc. Consumers will be able to access more than 50,000 Wi-Fi hot spots in the New York area, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando and Philadelphia. Most of the operators offer the service only as a perk to current broadband subscribers—but Time Warner Cable has offered a pay-as-you-go option for non-customers as well.
LINK
Posted By RichC on May 20, 2012
This is a video test to check for streaming compression using Handbrake on a PC. (this is a test for Keith Thomas at GroupBibleStudy.com)
Deleting the Hana-FLV-Player plugin from WordPress as it is no longer supported.