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First an update on that sales tax increase that was decided by 4 votes. That was before the absentee ballots were counted though even now it won by only 87 votes which really isn't that many in the grand scheme of things. Nice to see it passed though.
More fun Frances stuff:
Awesome picture
More NASA pics
More of those cool 3Dish pictures
No school on Friday!
Traffic's about 4 times as heavy as normal (and the average speed goes from about 70 to 18)
And finally an interesting factoid that the last time two major (Category 3 or higher) hurricanes hit the mainland US in the same year was in 1950.
Gmail is looking like it's close to going "public" as the amount of Gmail invites is exploding and it seems as though everyone and their mother has 6 to give away. With 1 Gig of storage, there's a lot I could do with that that doesn't involve email at all. No more wondering how to transfer huge files between home and school or friends.
And the world's slowest moving hurricane EVER still hasn't even come close to hitting Gainesville. Supposedly it'll start tomorrow morning, but as of about 2 AM I still haven't seen a drop of rain or anything midly windy.
So instead we went out tonight and took some pictures around Gainesville of the boarded up shops (some of which have been closed since Thursday night).
The first thing that would have been blown away, boards or no boards
Getting blown away in front of Office Max
I see a cloud!
I also made Hurricane* cookies.
*peanut butter cookie mashed into a vauge hurricane like shape
However my parents in Tampa did get a shock after coming home to get some food. It had poured while they were out, and came home to find this:
Tree is no more
Before and After
And then a few of my friend's parents from the coast are reporting that their power is out, so it's slowly but surely making its way inland. Now it looks like the main threat is flooding. It's also supposed to go right over my house in Tampa, instead of hitting Gainesville like the original projection had it doing.
Mozilla updated their website look, for the first time in the several years I've been using Mozilla (since about the M11 build I think). It's come a long long way since those early days, and is starting to gain ground on IE. If you haven't tried out their awesome browser (which has gotten better reviews than IE for quite a while now) then I highly suggest giving it a try. Built in pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, and middle click opens up another window on a link (I LOVED that from Linux, and glad to see it made it into the mainstream). Not to mention a whole lot less security holes, and the one's that are found are fixed in a few hours instead of a few months like IE.
Despite rumours to the contrary, I did manage to survive Hurricane Frances. I never even lost power, though I did lose internet for a few days. I've just been so busy with school and the whole college thing, I haven't had any time or motivation to update. Anyways, shortly after I typed that last entry is when it began lightly raining, and by the time morning rolled around it was pouring and gusting wind. As I said we never lost power (had a few power surges though) but most of Gainesville was without it, some for 3-5 days. I created a webpage of various pictures of before and after, which can be seen here. There wasn't widespread mass destruction and choas up in Gainesville, but it did make a lot of people's weeks not very fun.
And speaking of the weather, a cold front must have moved through because it was pretty chilly this morning and most of the day. Not that the buses cared since they still kept the AC on full blast, freezing everyone. I really need to start bringing a pullover to class since they keep the classrooms really cold as well. That or I trully am becoming a Floridian and anything less than 90 with 75% humidity is chilly.
Career Showcase is this week, meaning lots and lots of events and networking sessions and two days of dressing up and doing mini-interviews. I never enjoy these kinds of things, but it's just the nature of the beast and once you get a job it makes it all worth it. I'm also going to be tabling with the company I worked for over the summer, since they'll be there, so I get a chance to swap roles a little bit during the day. And there's always lots of free food at all the events, so that's always cool.
I visited the brand new UF Butterfly Rainforest on Thursday for free, and it was really really cool. Lots and lots of flowers everywhere, and hundreds of butterfly's, of all kinds of species, flying about. It's one of those things I'm really going to miss about college.
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