weather forecast for Illinois zone 022

"grundy, kankakee, kendall, will, including the cities of, joliet, kankakee, morris, yorkville

Monday March 1, 11:52 am

SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH until 5 pm cst.
This Afternoon  Thunderstorms likely. Some thunderstorm may produce gusty winds and damaging winds. Windy. Highs in the lower 60s. Southwest winds 20 to 30 mph. Chance of rain 60 percent.
Tonight  A chance of showers. Windy. Lows in the lower 40s. southwest winds 20 to 30 mph. Chance of rain 60 percent.
Tuesday  Partly cloudy. Breezy. Highs in the upper 40s. West winds 15 to 25 mph decreasing to 10 to 15 mph in the afternoon.
Tuesday Night  Partly cloudy. Lows in the lower 30s. Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph.
Wednesday  Partly cloudy. Highs in the middle 40s. Northeast winds around 5 mph shifting to the east 5 to 10 mph in the afternoon.
Wednesday Night  Mostly cloudy with a 30 percent chance of rain. Lows in the upper 30s.
Thursday  Mostly cloudy with a 40 percent chance of rain. Highs in the lower 40s.
Thursday Night  Mostly cloudy with a 40 percent chance of rain or snow. Lows around 30.
Friday  Mostly cloudy. Highs in the upper 30s.
Friday Night  Partly cloudy with a 40 percent chance of snow showers. Lows in the upper 20s.
Saturday  Partly cloudy with a 30 percent chance of snow showers. Highs around 40.
Saturday Night  Partly cloudy with a 40 percent chance of snow. lows in the upper 20s.
Sunday  Partly cloudy. Highs in the lower 40s.


>> View map of this area" [weather forecast for Illinois zone 022]

This is the kind of weather forecast I've been waiting for in my aggregator. An extended forecast so I know what to expect tonight, tomorrow, and for the next few days. It's narrow (not statewide), and it doesn't appear every hour. I get it a few times a day (I'd prefer just  once or twice), and it included today's severe thunderstorm watch. Courtesy of the Weather Toolbot.

And today was a freaky weather day here in the Chicagoland area, including a March 1 hailstorm. You can view some of the pictures I took with my Treo 600 over on my moblog (including the way cool double rainbow).

Cogitum Co-Citer

" 'There's a stone cold freebie (no ads, spyware, etc) called 'Cogitum Co-Citer', available for download here.

Once installed, when you're at a site where you want to save some text, you simply highlight the desired text, right-click to get the pop-up context menu, then select 'Grab the selected text'. Co-Citer then auto-opens its screen, allowing you to add comments, organize by selecting/creating a category, etc. To get to the info later, you hit the start menu and choose Co-Citer, which includes print, find and other goodies.

This app is incredibly feature-packed, and an absolute stable/smooth joy to use. Sure has cut back substantially on the 'paper-notes' syndrome which used to surround my laptop!...' " [PDA 24/7]

Nice freebie that could help with personal knowledge management. Unfortunately, it only runs on Windows and requires Internet Explorer 5+.

RSS for RFPs

"Utah's Division of Purchasing has an RSS feed of current solicitations. This is an RSS version of the current bids page. Of course, the good news is that if you're interested in following Utah RFPs and know how to use an aggregator, they'll just show up on your desktop without having to remember to go and check the page. I wish they had a 'what's this?' link next to the RSS link to tell people about how to use RSS. If more states had RSS feeds of their solicitations, you could do some nice work with a filtering aggregator to deliver customized solicitation notices for multiple jurisdictions. Since solicitations frequently have addendums and updates, there's a need for extensions that consistently render the solicitation number or some other correlating information so that addendums can be linked to the original solicitations." [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Portable Music Cuts the Cord

"At CES last month, one of the biggest 'aha' moments for me came when Rio showed me an update to its current Karma, with an MMC/SD slot that'll accept a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi card.

The first use for a wireless MP3 player is fairly obvious: transferring music without physically connecting the player to your computer. This change is certainly convenient, but the disappearance of a single wire is hardly revolutionary. If wireless connections become common on MP3 players, the sky is (literally) the limit in terms of where your music can come from....

If we add Wi-Fi to this whole scenario, things get even more interesting. Rather than waiting until you got home, imagine walking or driving within 300 feet (the range of Wi-Fi) of any record store and automatically purchasing the song you heard earlier that day. For that matter, skip the record store--a Wi-Fi hot spot could deliver the song just as easily, for less.

Following this trend to its logical conclusion, imagine setting up a wish list on your MP3 player, just as you would with P2P networks such as Soulseek. You'd be able to add songs to the wish list by entering them on your home computer, identifying songs using acoustic identification à la Shazam, or scanning bar codes à la Symbol....

Imagine that you've created a wish list and are walking down the street, when suddenly you feel your MP3 player vibrate an alert. Sure enough, one of the songs you were looking for just downloaded to your player because someone walking next to you was sharing the song through their MP3 player's Wi-Fi connection. Who knows? Maybe this could lead to some sort of real-world musical Friendster network, where compatible people would be automatically introduced if their music collections share similar artists.

If the RIAA thinks it's a tough gig monitoring every file-sharing network in the world now, just wait until millions of MP3 player users can trade songs just by ambling down the street or driving down the highway. After contemplating that scenario, perhaps the RIAA would be more likely to license content to services that are willing to cut the industry a slice of the pie before it crumbles under the weight of failed consumer expectation. I'm talking about centralized hot spots, Shazam-like services, musical Friendsters, and whatever other businesses surface around the inevitable convergence of portable music players and wireless technology." [MP3 Insider]

Eliot Van Buskirk throws out some pretty wild scenarios, but they're very appealing to someone like me. Recently, I've been listening to Shoutcast music on my Treo 600 while walking the dog, so I'm already halfway there.

My main concern is back up in the second paragraph: "If wireless connections become common on MP3 players, the sky is (literally) the limit in terms of where your music can come from." What if you can get your music from anywhere except the library?

E-Books Open Up the World of Print to Visually Impaired Readers

"The Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center, TAP Information Services, and OverDrive, Inc. have won the ALA SIRSI Library Leader in Technology Grant for 2004. 'E-Books Open Up the World of Print to Visually Impaired Readers' is the innovative project being recognized.

The award will be presented at the American Librry Association Conference in Orlando on June 29 at 5:45 p.m. The SIRSI grant is an annual award consisting of $10,000 and a 24k gold-framed citation of achievement given to encourage and enable continued advancements in quality library services for a project that makes creative or groundbreaking use of technology to deliver exceptional services to its community.

Beginning in July 2004 the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center, OverDrive, Inc., and TAP Information Services will undertake a one-year project to explore how ebooks can increase access to--and the usability of--digital information for print-impaired users, including the blind, visually impaired, physically challenged, and dyslexic. The goal of the 'E-Books Open Up the World of Print to Visually Impaired Readers' project is to create a rich collection of multi-format e-books that have been optimized for use by print-impaired library patrons. A project team from the collaborating organizations will select, organize, test, and evaluate a rich, robust e-book collection and supporting technologies. All technologies supporting accessible digital content will be included in the project, including software, systems, and hardware—playback devices. Digital talking books in various file formats, including recorded audio and text-to-speech technologies, will be included in the creation and use of the collection.

Tom Peters of TAP Information Services will serve as the Project Coordinator working with staff from the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center and OverDrive, Inc. The Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center is a subregional library for the blind and physically handicapped located in East Peoria and Quincy, Illinois and is administered by the Alliance Library System. The Center is part of a state network of libraries serving this population coordinated by the Illinois State Library Talking Book and Braille Service and a national network of libraries coordinated by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.

TAP Information Services provides a wide variety of high quality planning, consulting, research, and assessment services supporting libraries, consortia, government agencies, museums, publishers, and other organizations in the information industry.

OverDrive is the leading digital content solution provider for publishers, retailers, and libraries. For more information, please contact Tom Peters at tapinformation@yahoo.com; Lori Bell at lbell@alliancelibrarysystem.com; Steve Potash at spotash@overdrive.com; or Loree Potash at lpotash@overdrive.com."

You can also view the Joint R&D Project web site to view the titles included in the project. Congratulations to Lori and Tom!