Atkins Meyer

When I moved to Chicago in the summer of 2007, I thought that living near a beach would be a summer time bonus. It turns out that Lake Michigan freezes over in the chilly month of February. Living on the banks of Lake Michigan is kind of like living on the ocean. The body of water is so large that you can not see across it even on the clearest of days. If the weather is just right, you can see the smoke stacks of Gary, Indiana and Michigan City. Since the lake is so massive and sea like, I wasn’t expecting much ice to form on it during the winter months. The ice formed in amazing patterns and melted and refroze in a rapid manner. Ice near the beach would reach 20-30 feet in to the lake and 5-10 feet above the beach, then in a matter of 24 hours, it would be gone and the lake would instead be frozen out towards the horizon.

I started taking pictures in January and tried to take them as often as possible. I took the photos using my iPhone camera, which is great because it’s quick and not so great when there is a lot of reflected light. When the sun was hitting the ice on the lake, the reflection caused photos to appear almost as if they were taken at night. While interesting, these photos are not ideal for the photo documentary. Anyhow, on to the goods.

Here are some of the highlights. The complete set is available in high resolution on my flickr account.

I’ve been very happy using the Google Desktop software lately and have done a little bit of widget programming. Google Desktop adds, among other things, a Vista style sidebar to your desktop which can be filled with a ton of great gadgets. The selection of gadgets that are available in Google Desktop seem to be far and away better than what I’ve seen created for the Vista sidebar and it has officially won me over.

That being said, I had not found a weather gadget that I liked. There are many weather gadgets that show the current temperature and all the standard weather information; however, I really wanted something that gave me quick access to my favorite weather maps. So, I modified the U.S. Weather Map gadget, which is by Vishnu.S, and came up with my own style.

This one is for the weather enthusiast and includes U.S. weather, radar, satellite, water vapor, precipitation, current temperatures and forecasts on a national and local (Chicago) level. The national maps should work great for all the U.S. users out there and the local maps can be changed pretty easily by anyone with a little XML knowledge. If you have any interest in the gadget, please click below and check out the page I’ve made for it.

Take me there!