Month: October 2007

Krosa, Part 5

I’m no expert, but the current radar and satellite images for Krosa show that the storm is losing organization and breaking up. Things have been mostly quiet here for a while now. When Krosa hit the east coast instead of keeping on its northwesterly heading it decided to turn left and headed south down the coast. Predictions were for it to loop back around and head towards Taipei again, but instead it looks like it is breaking up instead. I think it’ll be a fairly calm day Sunday.

Krosa, Part 4

Well, this is turning into quite an adventure. Nothing serious yet though, fortunately. Shortly after the previous blog post I walked downstairs and said, “Hey, why you sitting in the dark?” Turns out the power went out during the time I was walking down the stairs. Emily was very upset about this because it was dark, but giving her a flashlight to play with solved that problem. Then she was upset that she couldn’t watch TV. I got the laptop out for her to watch a DVD one. The power came back on a few minutes after that.

We had some lunch and then I went back upstairs to get the computers back up and found that there was a puddle on the floor of the computer room again even though I’d plugged up the spray coming from the bottom of the window. The water seemed to be coming from the side wall, so I popped open the side window to see what was happening on the roof.

Oops, the roof was like a swimming pool about 8 inches deep with water. I went outside to try to unplug the drain but had a lot of trouble finding it. After about 10 minutes I had to give up and call in the reinforcements. My mother in law went out and found the drain and cleared it out quickly. By this time I was completely soaked and had to strip off my clothes and take a shower to get cleaned up. Being outside on the roof during a typhoon is not exactly fun.

Krosa, Part 3

Water is hitting the northern window in the computer room so hard that it was spraying up out the bottom of the window every time there was a big gust of wind. It was spraying right on top of the computer and had made a small puddle on the floor which the servers were sitting in. Fortunately not enough to damage anything; even the printer looks OK. Stuffed a towel in the bottom of the window which seems to do the trick.

Will Krosa be the one?

It’s been a fairly slow season for Typhoons as far as Taipei is concerned. The last two were fairly unexciting. Next on base is Typhoon Krosa (颱風柯羅莎). It may affect us as soon as tomorrow night with most of the effect coming on Saturday. I may be making a foolish prediction again, but this is a big one with strong winds, good organization and a strong eye. This could be it.

Bookz

OK, I usually don’t do this meme crud but this list looked interesting.

Top unread books from LibraryThing: Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Actually I’m reading it now but I will almost certainly finish it.)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 (In my to-read pile.)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (I finished it and didn’t hate it, but thought it was terribly disjointed and poorly written.)
The Silmarillion (I will have to try again but I just couldn’t get into this one though I really like LOTR and Hobbit.)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses (Joyce) (Does Joyce really make sense to anyone?)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice (In my to-read pile.)
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha (In my to-read pile.)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (This one took a while to get through. OMG two more!)
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (Atlas Shrugged is better.)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist (In my to-read pile.)
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Surprisingly good.)
Dune (I seem to recall this one being hard to get through too.)
The Prince
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present (In my to-read pile.)
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere (Really liked this one!)
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (In my to-read pile.)
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion (In my to-read pile.)
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye (In my to-read pile.)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry into Values (In my to-read pile.)
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow (You’d think this would be a miss since I don’t like Joyce but I did like this one.)
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island (In my to-read pile.)
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers