Weather or Not

After my last blog entry this morning, about my office shutting down due to inclement weather and not letting me know, I got to thinking: maybe it's partly my fault. I mean, surem they could have tried harder to contact me -- but if I had known the storm was coming, I might have thought to check with someone about the office's status before shoveling out the car.

Most people learn about upcoming weather by watching the evening news or reading the paper, but I don't have cable and don't get the paper -- so, since I just listed a bunch of computer-related ways that my boss could have reached me, what are some computer-related ways that I could have learned about the storm?

Well, right off the bat there's WeatherBug -- a downloadable program that sits on your desktop and shows your current staus, predictions for the next few days, and alerts you with warnings about upcoming extreme weather. I've encountered WeatherBug on my mother's computer and some co-workers' machines -- but each time, all it's seemed to do was get in the way. I've found that my co-workers' computers started up significantly slower ("Loading WeatherBug, please wait ... zzzz..."), and the weather-alerts feature pops up a small box in the corner that just will not go away unless you've you've opened the program and read the alert.

I've always found WeatherBug annoying. But, given that last feature, if I had it, I definitely would have known about the storm...

What else? There's Weather.com, which is run by the Weather Channel. They've got a "local weather" feature right on the front page, where you type in your zip code and get the current status and a 36-hour forecast. Handy, but I've never seen such an ad-heavy page. I literally have to work to figure out what content is weather-related and which content is an ad -- and that's a very bad thing. (Plus, right now one of the ads is that stupid "dancing man/woman/alien" gif from LowerMyBills.com, which just makes my teeth grind for some reason.)

Weather.com seems to have downloadable desktop feature much like WeatherBug. I wonder if it would slow down my co-workers' computers' startup time any less than WeatherBug? Hmm.

There's also Yahoo Weather, which runs weather updates (powered by weather.com) and weather-related news stories. This storm certainly qualified -- look, here's an AP news article about it.

I'm sure every major online news site has a similar weather subsection -- msn.com, USA Today.com, cnn.com. If I'd been paying attention, or used these sites for my news more regularly, I probably would have noticed a mention of the storm.

Also, I could have been signed up to receive weather alerts by e-mail. This site offers them, as does weather.com. (Oddly, boston.com weather doesn't seem to have this option, although I could have sworn they used to offer something similar.)

So, with all these high-tech options available to me -- I really should have had an inkling that we were supposed to be walloped with a foot of snow. So I guess part of the fault for not checking if my office would be closed does rest with me.

I think I'm going to look into weather.com's downloadable desktop app. If it turns out to be less obtrusive than WeatherBug, they may have just gotten themselves one more customer...