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In the east African highlands, even during the rainy seasons, it's sunny and clear. You can see a great distance, like you can in Montana, and during the rainy season, you can see the rains slowly meandering across the land. After your first few, you quickly learn to estimate their path, size, and speed. Over the course of an afternoon, it might go like this...

    That one's gonna miss me. Off to the left.

    Ahh, this one's headed here. It'll be here in about 25 minutes and it looks like it'll last less than 10 minutes before it moves on.

    Now there's a big one, looks like a half hour of rain! But it's going to pass to my right, not too far, I'll probably get some peripheral rain, but not the real downpour.


Today at lunchtime I went to the farmers' market, and picked just the wrong time. *boom* the sky opened up, and I hadn't seen it coming. I ducked inside Harvest to get some groceries there, and when I was done, pulled up the weather radar on my phone. I could see the spot of red, a small one right over Camberville, and I could see how fast it was moving, so I waited out it. About ten more minutes 'til it waned, I guessed, and I was about right.

Today's technology makes this almost as easy as East Africa. Pity it can't bring the 60s-to-80s medium humidity air here, too.
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From CNN, about last weekend's CrisisCamps:
    (CNN) -- A weekend meeting of technology pros looking to help victims of the Haiti earthquake yielded some ready-to-roll projects and a few more nearing completion. Perhaps more important, participants say, the gathering produced a framework that could keep aiding disaster-relief efforts in the months and years to come.
    ...
    Results included a digital map to help relief groups in Haiti coordinate their efforts and applications for the iPhone and other smartphones, including a Creole-to-English dictionary.

There's going to be a CrisisCamp Boston here at ITA (by One Kendall Square) this Saturday (tomorrow) 9am-4pm. The wiki page has info, including a list of projects this camp plans to work on.

... and on that subject, here's a useful new tech tool for disaster response that you can help with from home with no technical skills: http://www.BeExtra.org/Haiti - it asks you to look at photos and see if the people match, to help locate missing people.
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