- Cape Rolling Out Bloomfield Road Art Trail (8/21/19)1
- Donors Pledge Almost Two Grand To Replace SEMO's Possibly Sentient ‘Gum Tree' (8/16/18)
- SEMO and The Will To (Become A Consultant) – Part 2 (6/14/18)
- SEMO and The Will To Do (You Really Want To See That Legal Notice?) – Part 1 (6/4/18)
- Judge, Jury... Trashman (6/1/18)
- Diary of Cape Girardeau Road Deconstruction (5/11/18)
- Trying To Save A Tree From City “Improvements” (4/30/18)2
The Forecast Calls For.... A Tsunami????
When storms blew through the area last Tuesday, I got five or six text messages on my phone from SEMissourian.com alerting me of various weather warnings throughout the evening.
With the exception of one flash-flood warning, I essentially got all of the alerts after they had already expired. One was almost two hours after the fact.
Damn, that lousy, stinkin', good-for-nothin' newspaper website!
Oh, wait! I work at that lousy, stinkin', good-for-nothin' newspaper and I'm neck-deep in the technology side, so I guess there must have been a good reason for the delay. But as a consumer and a customer myself of the newspaper website, I certainly didn't like it. I want my weather information in a timely manner, that's why I signed up for weather alerts at SEMissourian.com.
So, I started investigating the situation and it appears to have been caused by some kind of a bottleneck on the AT&T wireless network. Other employees at the paper who also use AT&T noticed the same untimely nature of our weather alerts.
However, our token Verizon user -- online editor Matt Sanders -- got the same weather information in a timely manner. This appears to be a pretty easy fix. Everyone who currently uses AT&T for wireless, cancel your contract and switch to Verizon.
Problem solved.
While I was looking into this issue, I decided to check the weather alert options of some of the other area media.
I first signed up for KFVS-12 Weather alerts. However, they don't offer text-messaging, just email. That's fine if you have a smart-phone with email access.
I do, but I don't want it to squawk at me every time a piece of email shows up. If I did that, it would be yelping all the time, so that function of my phone stays in silent mode. But I do have incoming text messages sound an alarm. I don't get many of them and the ones that I do receive are either weather-related or letting me know what restaurant my wife and I should meet our friends Mark and Claire at for happy hour. In other words, critical stuff.
I next visited WPSD-TV's website. Reputedly, they have text messaging weather alerts, but their system kept giving me an error whenever I tried to sign up that service.
However, I was able to sign up for their email weather alerts where I encountered something... unusual.
WPSD has a more customizable weather alert system than either the Southeast Missourian or KFVS. They allow users to pick which specific weather events they want to be emailed about.
Some of these are rather typical for our area. "Severe Thunderstorm," "Winter Storm," "Tornado" and flooding, I would expect. However, "Hurricane" I really don't think is a necessary option for anyone living in the Heartland. Any hurricane that wanders this far north has usually decayed into a thunderstorm or two by the time it gets here.
But the one that I really couldn't understand was "tsunami." I'm not joking. WPSD has that as a weather alert choice.
Are tsunamis really a threat to anyone living in the Midwest? And if they are, and a wall of water 50-feet-high was headed our way, I think it's safe to say that basically we are all screwed and none of us will be worrying about the timeliness of our weather-alerts going forward.
I do rather like how WPSD handles its Weather Alerts. Maybe by offering a "tsunami" alert they are zeroing in on an underserved part of the weather monitoring market that we at Semissourian.com have been ignoring.
That's why, I'm going to recommend to our webmaster that we duplicate WPSD's efforts and offer our users customizable weather alerts including tsunamis. Just because I'm a doubting Thomas doesn't mean they can't happen here.
For that matter, we will also include typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, gamma ray bursts, asteroid-collisions, locust plagues and nuclear war. Oh sure, I know some of those are a little hard to predict, but that's no reason why we can't cater to the end-of-the-world-is-near market.
I've even lined up an advertiser in case one of these apocalyptic disasters does happen to occur.
For instance, if NASA spots an asteroid heading on a collision course for the Gulf of Mexico, ChapStick will sponsor our text message alert. That's smart marketing.
Everyone will need a tube, so they can kiss their butt good-bye.
The Signup Sheet for Email Weather Alerts for WPSD
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