You can't get there from here

I've been bothered by something for quite a while now. Whenever I go look at the Weather Channel's radar page for our area, it shows this:

There's only one problem - more than half of the towns shown on the map above don't exist, and some that do aren't shown. Here is an accurate map from Google that covers the same area:

The towns on the first map aren't just tiny little burgs, nor are they historical site names from what I can tell - they are literally fictitious. The weird thing is the Weather Channel's map is generated by Bing according to the logos in the lower right hand corner. But if I go directly to Bing's map for the area, it shows only the correct towns, too:

There's something kind of "Twilight Zone" about seeing a map of your area and not recognizing most of the names.

A flashback

One of the earliest memories I have is when I was probably four or so. We lived in a trailer court in Indianola, Iowa. One night there were tornadoes nearby, and the whole park's inhabitants ended up in the basement of the owner's (or manager's) house in the middle of the court. It was like a party - radio on, people talking, lights blazing. It made some sort of impression on me, since I remember it pretty vividly. Obviously it was out of the ordinary and that stuck.

Today reminded me of that. Just before 2:00 senior management at work decided it was time for all of us to head for the training room in the basement because of a tornado warning, and for the next 45 minutes we were all down there - talking, laughing, watching the radar loop on the projection screen. And because my employer never does anything without providing food (one of the many reasons I find it hard to lose weight), there was even candy and cookies and soft drinks! A nice, festive break in the middle of the day while we all sat around waiting to be transported off to Oz.

And then we all returned to our normal lives, and glad they had remained just that - normal.

But it was still fun.

Frazzle Rock

We are in the midst of prepping for a major application upgrade this weekend at work, and I am leading the technical side of it. There has been lots of issues to work through during testing and I have obsessively compiled a "to-do" list of things to do before I even start the upgrade that is currently at 109 items, out of which I have about 40+ completed. The rest I can't do until Friday night.

Anyway, with all that going on, last week there was a conference call with a vendor on my calendar for a status discussion on another project. I didn't want to bother with it because I was in the middle of chasing problems for the upgrade, but since I am that project's lead for our company I dutifully dialed in and waited impatiently for five minutes with no one else joining the call before I hung up in disgust.

About a minute later I get an email from one of the participants at the vendor asking if I was going to join the call. I was about ready to send off an nasty-gram email about how I had been there and waited for five minutes with no one else joining and then it then hit me - the phone number we were using for the call was my conference bridge account! So I was the one that everyone was waiting on...including myself!

In the words of one of my personal heroes:

"What a maroon."
- Bugs Bunny