It’s not exactly encouraging – when you’ve got a number of politicians of various stripes lined up for a cycle tour of Bigtown on Friday – to be driving down the M74 motorway the day before and see the dot matrix signs all warning of ‘heavy rain’ on Friday. Given that this was in the west of Scotland, where heavy rain is more or less the default setting, the sort of rain that they felt was worth warning people about was likely to be very heavy indeed. As in send gopherwood heavy.
Anyway, yesterday morning, going to check the Met Office forecast I remembered that they’d managed to bollocks up their previously perfectly functional* website and replace the simple five day forcast table with some sort of flash-based, doesn’t-work-on-rural-broadband, great-if-you-like-clicking-a-million-times abomination (It’s slightly by the by, but setting aside the fact that sometimes it doesn’t work at all, I can’t be the only one who goes to the Met Office site to answer questions like ‘what day next week won’t be raining so I can arrange to meet someone in town on my bike?’ or ‘is it likely to be frosty in the next few days or should I plant out those potatoes’? So having a ‘five day’ forecast which only shows you one day at a time is not just a misnomer but verging on the bloody useless, is it not? Or is that just me?). So I decided instead to go and have a look at MetCheck instead, only to be confronted with this:
Looks like it’s a good thing I got that jacket after all.
As it happened – and despite there being snow between us and Notso Bigtown – the weather for the event itself was extremely pleasant, culminating in a perfect spring evening and a glorious sunset for my ride home. This may just be the calm before the storm, though, especially given how many people told me hell would freeze over before I got a Bigtown Councillor on a bike. As it was, we got eight of them … that’s got to cause a disturbance in the fabric of the universe.
*I mean, apart from the forecasts themselves, of course
Abomination. Fantastic word and so apt in the circumstances. I stumbled into the twilight zone myself earlier this week, I doubt I’ll be back.
I have emailed them some full and frank feedback…
Try these:
http://7thspace.com/sidebar_gadgets/462316/msn_weather_20.html
or http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/downloads/personalize/gadgets
On the bottom row, the last one on the right, “orange weather” This displays current conditions, and opens up a page in your web browser with a five day “hour by hour” forecast. This one works on Vista and Windows 7
I like the picture of the bridge on the top of the site, what is below.
John.
WOL – thanks, though I don’t really need a gadget for the site (WordPress is anyway a little restricted in what you can add), just something I can look at and see the forecast.
John – that’s the old railway aqueduct over the river
Go to http://www.magicseaweed.com and don’t be put off by the surfing stuff (it’s the one the fishermen depend on too). Select the wind chart on home page and believe. They usually have it right – for 7 days ahead! It will show you if there’s no wind & your frost likely. And when the gales will be. AND it works with rural bbd. I’m very attached to my Firefox weather toolbar (from accuweather.com) and available in Chrome – links into any weather station close by – in my case one of those lamp–post–style weather thingies the council put by the side of the road, a mile away! It’s an unobtrusive partial toolbar and you can have it for 5 days ahead, top or bottom of screen. Shows day & night temps & weather expected. It’s usually right too! Hover on an icon & detail pops up. Works really well. I wouldn’t be without it.
shall check it out. Really disappointed with the Met Office for messing up their site
[...] work out how to get the five day at-a-glance forecast functionality that their latest upgrade had removed from the website version. This was handy because it looks like the weather gods have a backlog of rain they need to get rid [...]