[Today’s run: rest day]
We lived in Estes Park, Colorado from the mid-1990’s through the mid-2000’s, just a bit more than 10 years. At that time I was trying to drum up some business in computer consulting. There were not that many people using Linux systems and I knew a little bit about them.
If you have ever been to Estes Park you know that it is a tourist town and a mountain town. There is no airport. When we first moved to town there was no on-line weather information at all for the local area. I’m not even sure the national weather service was collecting readings from that location. Now that I think about it, I believe there was a volunteer weather guy who sent readings to the NWS on a periodic basis. But nothing that a person could easily get their hands on.
Soon after we moved there I bought some pretty fancy weather station equipment and installed it at my house. I used an old PC running Linux to gather the data and format it. We had dial-up internet. I had a method of creating the web pages, doing the dial-up connect, uploading the web pages and then dropping the connection. I had a second phone line.
So I was the quasi-official weather information from Estes Park. People would send me email asking about the weather for a certain time of year, for their vacation or a wedding or something. I once had a query from a guy asking about the weather on a specific day because he was investigating an auto accident (5″ inches of snow that day!).
When we left Estes Park I dismantled my system and gave it all to the YMCA of the Rockies, hoping that they could put it back up and keep the information going. They didn’t do that, but other people have filled in the gap and now it is pretty easy to get weather from Estes Park.
Here is a link to the historical data that I gathered over those years.
Anyway, now I think I have a line on some fairly sophisticated weather station equipment and I’m looking forward to being back into the weather data game. If it works out. In this case I’m only a few miles from an airport and a little farther from an USAF training base. So my data is not very exclusive, maybe not that interesting. But it still sounds good to me.