A while ago, Darin wrote about all the cars he has owned, so I thought I’d put together my list, which is shorter than his (but then he’s older than me).

• 1987(?) Eurosport: greyish, this was the first car I owned.  I bought it from my parents for a token amount of money.  Over the years, I replaced various bits, including miscellaneous hoses and also the radiator and the valve cover gasket.  (It costs about $40 to have a valve cover gasket replaced by the dealer — pay the $40.  Trust me.)  Traded it in with 204000 km on it and still in good condition and had the used car manager comment "I didn’t know they went this far".  Had an Oki cellphone installed in it back in September 1991.  Nice car.
• 1991 Pontiac Firefly convertible: white.  Bought this car "new" from the dealer (billed as a "factory official vehicle" — some guy drove it for about 1000 km for quality assurance).  Drove it year-round and had the roof down in every month of the year, with the possible exception of January.  With a three-cylinder engine, I got silly gas mileage and regularly filled the tank with premium and still got change from a $20 bill.  Broken into twice, both times by pinheads who slashed the roof.
• 2002 GM Tracker: blue with silver panels.  Bought this new (as opposed to "new") from the dealer and tinted the rear windows myself.  I’ve been happy with it, though I did have a bit of excitement that was covered by a recall warranty.  I’ve taken it off-road and driven all over the place in it.  My biggest grumble is that I couldn’t find decent tires for it in Canada.  Fortunately, I was able to buy a set in Odgensburg.

Well, 25:59 UT has come and gone.  This means that the bounty I posted for a location-based profile manager for the BlackBerry Curve has expired without being claimed. This is too bad because people who heard about it seemed very interested in it, with one even adding $25 to the original $50 I posted.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that I start feeling crummy between 18 and 24 hours before a significant weather change. I haven’t kept any records to see if it’s predictable, but I suspect it is.

Well, yesterday evening around 10pm or so, I started feeling crummy, which persisted through to sometime this afternoon. Even now, I’m still feeling a little blah. I happened to see the nurse at work this afternoon and we chatted about this for a bit. She told me that I’m not the first person to mention something like this to her and described, almost perfectly my symptoms, namely feeling kind of "fuzzy" like you have a headache about to form.

So, I looked up the air pressure readings for Ottawa for the last twenty-four hours. I started feeling under the weather (sorry!) around the same time the pressure started dropping. If you click on the graph at the right, you’ll be able to see a larger version.

The graphical area forecast (GFA) for the Ontario-Quebec region for 8pm this evening (click on the image to the left) shows Ottawa sitting on the 996 millibar isobar, so it doesn’t look like the pressure is going to drop much more than it has.  (At 5pm it was 99.9 kPa or 999 millibars.)

Oh, and I just looked out the window to see the first snowflakes of the season.  Sigh.

TAF CYOW 272338Z 280024 VRB03KT P6SM FEW040 BKN200
FM0800Z 34008KT P6SM -RA BKN025 OVC100 TEMPO 0814 6SM -RA BKN012
OVC025
FM1400Z 34012G22KT P6SM -RA BKN012 OVC025 TEMPO 1420 4SM -RA BR
BKN008 OVC020
FM2000Z 33015G25KT 3SM -RASN OVC012 TEMPO 2022 1/2SM SN VV005
FM2200Z 32015G25KT 1/4SM +SN VV003
RMK NXT FCST BY 03Z=

So, it looks like the snow is going to start around 16:00 localtime and then be in full blizzard mode by about 18:00 tomorrow.  Well, maybe not an official blizzard per Environment Canada’s definition (four or more hours of snow or blowing snow with winds of 40 km/hr or more, visibility reduced to less than one km. in snow and/or blowing snow, and a windchill of -25 or colder) but definitely lots of snow and wind.

This just in from Environment Canada:

WINTER STORM WATCH ISSUED For Ottawa BY ENVIRONMENT CANADA
BULLETIN ISSUED AT: 3:50 PM EDT MONDAY 27 OCTOBER 2008
THE FIRST MAJOR SNOW STORM OF THE SEASON LIKELY LATE TUESDAY AND TUESDAY NIGHT.  THIS IS AN ALERT TO THE POTENTIAL DEVELOPMENT OF DANGEROUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS IN THESE REGIONS. MONITOR WEATHER CONDITIONS..LISTEN FOR UPDATED STATEMENTS.

The civil forecast for tomorrow afternoon/evening is suggesting:

Snow at times heavy. Amount 15 cm. Blowing snow overnight. Wind west 50 km/h gusting to 70. Low zero.

So, the commute home tomorrow could be quite exciting.

Sigh.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) evening at 19:59 Eastern (23:59 UTC), the bounty for a location-based BlackBerry profile manager expires and I refund the money added to the original bounty to the donor.

It’s too bad because I think there would be a market for a profile manager that automatically sets the active profile based on where you are.

A minor security fix for WordPress was released yesterday.  Basically, there is a low-risk vulnerability in the Snoopy library that is used to display the RSS feeds in the Dashboard.  You can download the fix, grab the files manually (wp-includes/class-snoopy.php and wp-includes/version.php) or use Subversion to pull them down thus:

   1: svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.3/

It took me longer to log onto my server than actually do the upgrade itself.