Good Tuesday Everyone!

I wanted to briefly explain why we suddenly dropped off the grid last week in terms of our usual website and social media activity. While we still had Jenny Brown manning the facebook page, our twitter account and website were fairly quiet. Now it is true that with the exception of Sunday, our weather was mostly quiet in terms of precipitation. However, we are normally active even during the quiet weather periods. This all started about three weeks ago when I was prepping my chase vehicle for an overnight chase in Central Texas. As I was loading my laptop into my vehicle, the exhaust system went out on my laptop. I run a fairly high-end gaming laptop in order to run multiple programs and render video as quickly as possible. Without the exhaust system, my laptop wouldn’t stay powered for more then a few minutes before overheating. Luckily, I have a full warranty at a retailer so the parts/labor were already taken care of. The issue is that several parts had to be ordered, thus keeping my laptop out of commission for just under three weeks.

I keep backups of all my data on multiple hard drives, so I didn’t lose any data. However, my backup computer (a desktop) is fairly low end, thus it takes a lot longer to do things that it normally would on my laptop. This means a seven minute daily weather video that would normally take two minutes to render on my laptop takes closer to forty five minutes on the desktop, not to mention how long it takes to upload. That put a damper on the weather videos, but those will be back tomorrow. I plan on getting back on a normal schedule today with videos being posted during the late afternoon hours. While some of you won’t be able to watch the videos until the evening/overnight hours, understand that we’re talking about several days in advance and the videos will still explain the upcoming weather.

Now, I’ve chased a few times now without live video. What’s up with that? It all goes back to the laptop issue. I actually had to install the backup desktop into my vehicle, which mind you is a small Ford Explorer Sport, to have a computer in the vehicle. While that meant I would still have live radar data, the computer was not powerful enough to run the live video stream, so that’s why we haven’t had video for the past few chases. That issue is resolved now that I have my laptop back.

Finally, we also had a tragic event occur last weekend in Oklahoma. Fellow friend and storm chaser Andy Gabrielson was killed in a vehicle accident. That came as quite a shock of the community. When his family invited storm chasers to attend the funeral in Laverne, Minnesota, both Connor and myself committed to it. The drive is about 13 hours each way from Dallas, so I left on Thursday and returned on Sunday. Needless to say, this unexpected event messed my schedule up and meant that I didn’t have time to do much else besides school before the trip. During the trip, I once again took my backup desktop, but was focused on the events during my trip.

Simply put, we got overwhelmed with so many things at once that we basically shut down for a few days just to chill out. While we’re committed to Texas Storm Chasers, even we need a few days off once in a while. Now that we’re back in town and have our technology issues worked out, we’re going to be ramping back up! Look for a continuation in our educational series along with the daily weather videos. In addition to the videos, it’s my goal to post a daily written discussion for those who would rather read a brief summary then watch the entire video. We’ve got a lot coming up before chase season begins in a few weeks, so stay tuned!