I'm such a weather geek.

I've been playing for the last few days with a Davis Vantage Pro weather station. The company sent me a loaner so I could write a piece about home weather station's, and it's a hoot. You can check out the readings here, though don't expect them to be up to date, as I'm not going to leave the computer on all the time just to post the weather numbers. I'd love to. It'd be cool to be able to log in from work during a rain storm and see how much it's raining at home. Am I a weather geek or what?

It's got a battery operated LCD control panel so I can check the weather at any time, along with a serial port connector to download much more detailed data to the computer. All Windows stuff, though I found a guy who's written a Linux package for it that downloads data into a MySQL database, which looks much more flexible than the Windows stuff. I'll have to try it.

With the graphed data on the computer I can see precisely when Lissa turned on the air conditioner the last couple of hot afternoons, and I could see the barometric pressure drop about an hour before the winds picked up this evening as a cold front started its move through town. (Very impressive - my National Weather Service forecaster friends nailed that one exactly.)

Sadly, I just get to use it for a month, then I have to send it back.