Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Thunder Storm!

I've had some bad luck with storms in Denton. You may remember my past blog post about my dorm getting struck with lightning - and thereby frying the Ethernet port on my computer. It seems the ethernet ports on everyone's machines in the Santa Fe dorms back then got fried. I never knew ethernet was capable of Gigabit transfer, 100 M attenuation range, AND carrying enough electricity to destroy the ethernet interface in my computer's motherboard. I'm honestly surprised that that's the only thing that was destroyed. I mean literally - the device manager shows no ethernet port anymore. The only network connection I have now is a USB Wi-fi dongle I have.

I bring this up again because north Texas in general has been going through some pretty rough winds lately. It happens yearly I suppose - after all, April showers bring May flowers right? All weekend we were under a tornado watch and even Monday while I was on campus the sirens sounded. I mean these things get loud - especially if you're on campus. There's got to be several scattered around the campus. In fact - here's a map of Denton County and its storm sirens:

I sort of wish they labeled I-35 on this map

As you can see, they aren't shy about the sirens. In fact, I had the misfortune to walk home on a Wednesday afternoon from class last semester - the first Wednesday of the month mind you. It sounded like we were under attack... by mother nature.

Monday I was actually in the physics building going over some lab material when we were hit by a storm system. The storm alarms sounded and professors came walking briskly by all the classrooms and labs shoving all the students into the basement of the physics building - which I was hardly aware it existed. It was neat - it was a little underground den where you can hide and study physics. Lots of reading material down there too. It's own little miniature library.

Anyway, if you're worried you won't hear the sirens, you can also tune into KNTU 88.1 FM - a local radio station in Denton that a lot of UNT RTVF students work for. They intermittently inject weather alerts (about every 5 minutes or so) during their regular broadcast. I think I also heard them say "To help you remain tranquil in the face of certain death, smooth Jazz will be deployed in three, two, one *queue Jazz*." ...Or something like that ;)