Wenatchee Windstorm Video

A video posted on YouTube by "hallmat" of the January 7th Wenatchee windstorm,

Pro Wrestling Beyond presents Out Cold, Feb 3

Back at the Wenatchee Convention Center. For more information, visit the Pro Wrestling Beyond website.

Create Your Own Free Customized Maps

I just finished a new mapping feature for the services page. The new service allows you to pick a location on a map, adjust the map to your liking, and then write a description for your custom map. Once you have finished creating your custom map, you simply click the "View Your Map" button.

The maps are by Google and feature high-resolution satellite images of many areas of North Central Washington, with more areas being added all the time. The new service has many possibilities. You could send an email to your relatives far away showing them your what your house looks like from space. You could create a map showing your business and link to it from your website. You can show people where an event is going to take place, or which house just got knocked over in a windstorm.

Maps only take a minute to create and there is no limit on how many custom maps you can create. Your map can point to any location on Earth, your not limited to just North Central Washington. The custom map page also features links so you can easily link to your map from your blog, email or even a forum. I hopefully have most of the bugs worked out, if not, please let me know.

After creating a map, I clicked on the "HTML link" text, copied the text, and then pasted it into this blog to create the following examples,

Wapato Point on Lake Chelan

Dry Falls Visitor Center

Grand Coulee Dam

Mansfield High School

Downtown Twisp

Slide Waters in Lake Chelan

Click Image for Full-Size

A long overdue feature has just been added to the website. All large photos in the community and directory (Chelan, Douglas, Grant, Okanogan) sections have been reduced in size to fit into a standard window. All images that have been reduced in size now have the following message below them, "click image for full-size". Simply click any of these images to view it in it's original larger format. An example.

New Look for the Wenatchee World

According to the following article, the Wenatchee World is going to get a new look,

Wenatchee World Selects Saxotech for Print, Online Publishing

Here are a few examples of websites using the Saxotech website template,

• South Bend Tribune


• Aspen Times News


• Burlington Free Press


• Tuscaloosa News

Here is another article about Saxotech.

More Wenatchee Valley and Lake Chelan Windstorm Photos

The more I travel around the area, the more I see the true extent of the damage. It's everywhere. Fences, trees, telephone poles, signs, roofs, and more. This storm devastated neighborhood after neighborhood. Many, last I heard, still have no power.

An incredible gallery of photos over at the Webshots website from Gene's BMX.

Go Lake Chelan has lots of information and photos with more photos coming in all the time. Here is the transmitting apparatus for the radio stations from their website.

Carol's Wenatchee has some amazing high detail photos on her website this morning, including a car being crushed by a carport.

KPQ reported this morning that they would soon have many photos on their website, so keep checking back at their website throughout the day.

There must be hundreds of photos and videos of the damage since it was so extensive. If you have links to any photos or videos, please post them in the photos forum.

Jan 10 Update - Here are some photos I took yesterday of the devastation in the Wenatchee valley.

After the Wind Storm, Photos and Video

Here are some photos and video of the aftermath of yesterday's windstorm,

• A Video from the Wenatchee World


• Photos from Go Lake Chelan
  
  
  
  • Lake Street in Chelan
  
  
  • Lakeshore RV Park in Chelan
  
  
  • Water on Lake Chelan
  
  
  • Wapato Lake and some more
  
  
  • Memorial Park in Wenatchee


• From KPQ
  
  
  
  • Photo 1
  
  
  • Photo 2
  
  
  • Photo 3
  
  
  • Photo 4


• Video of tree falling in Wenatchee Cemetery (scroll down page) from King 5

If anybody knows of any other websites with photos/video or if you have your own photos/videos please share them here.

Another Wind Storm Coming!

The windstorm is over for North Central Washington, but will there be another one?

The National Weather Service reports the following,

Wenatchee
Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Chance of rain then chance of snow. Snow accumulation 1 inch. Probability of measurable precipitation 50 percent. West wind 25 gusting to 43 mph. Low 25.

Moses Lake
Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Chance of rain then chance of snow. Probability of measurable precipitation 50 percent. Southwest wind 32 gusting to 53 mph. Low 28.

Omak
Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Chance of rain then chance of snow. Snow accumulation 1 inch. Probability of measurable precipitation 50 percent. Southwest wind 29 gusting to 48 mph. Low 20.

Check your towns forecast at the weather page.

Insane Wind Storm

If we make it through this storm, post your photos, videos or links to your photos in the forum.

No registration is required for the forums.

Websites Missing, Need Help

The following is a list of websites that I am currently unable to reach. If anybody has any information about these websites, please let me know.

Crossland Law Office of Cashmere,
http://crosslandlaw.lawoffice.com/

Action Mortgage Company of Moses Lake
http://jaysmith-actionmortgage.com/

Chelan County Fire District 7
http://www.chelan7.org/

Lee Theater of Ephrata
http://www.fairchildcinemas.com/lee.html

Methow Land Company of Winthrop
http://www.methowlandcompany.com/

Creative Carpentry Concepts of Twisp
http://www.methownet.com/creativecarpentryconcepts/

Ameri-Can OSHA Complaint Hand Wash Trailer of Winthrop
http://www.methownet.com/handwashtrailer/

Pine Meadow B and B of Winthrop
http://www.methownet.com/pinemeadow/

Moses Lake Professional Pharmacy
http://www.mlrx.com/

Moses Lake School District
http://www.moseslakeschools.org/

North Elementary in Omak
http://www.omaksd.wednet.edu/north/HomePage/home.html

Pollywogs Pro Sports in Desert Aire
http://www.pollywogsprosports.com/

Quincy School District
http://www.qsd.wednet.edu/

Skiizks' Cool Pics - Portrait Photographer of East Wenatchee
http://www.skiizkscoolpics.com/

The SoapMeister of Entiat
http://www.soapmeister.com/

Stemilt
http://www.stemilt.com/

Sun Lakes Photography Festival of Soap Lake
http://www.sunlakesphotofest.org/

Thyme Unlimited of Wenatchee
http://www.thymeunlimited.com/

Photos on King 5

I submitted the photo I posted yesterday of a Douglas County sunset to the King 5 websites pix section. They were nice enough to add it here to their Weather pix section. Thanks King 5!

Here are a few of the other photos I found of North Central Washington that have been submitted to their pix section,

• Frozen Rope in Plain by Mark Sasten


• Sleigh Ride in Leavenworth by Mark Sasten


• Lake Osoyoos after the storm by Frank Geisler


• Sunrise on Lake Chelan by Debbie Hanson


• Eastern WA Snow in Molson by Lisa Cole


• Snow Pillows on Icicle River by John Richter


• Snow in Wenatchee by Dan and Gail Phillips


• Icicle Creek by Ken Potts


• Chelan Sunset by Dan Nelson

I would also like to let everybody know that photos can be easily uploaded into the recently added photos forum. No registration is required to upload photos and photos can be up to 4MB in size and in .gif, .jpg, .png, or .bmp formats.

Coming Up in 2007

I don't have a time line or a particular order, but here are a few of things coming to the North Central Washington Portal website in the first part of 2007.

Photos from last Summer of Douglas County, including many cemeteries, the courthouse, and Saint Andrews. Photos from Grant County, including Potholes State Park, Warden, and a few other places. I also have a small collection of old panoramic black and white photos to add to the website. The photo to the left is from a sunset in Douglas County from late last summer. If I recall the photo was taken somewhere near Mold.

I also plan on adding some major improvements to all the maps. Starting with outlines for the counties and hopefully working towards outlines showing city limits.

After reading my own statistics, I fixed the website so it should be viewable in most 800x600 screen resolutions. I also have plans to have large photographs appear in a smaller format and then link to the full-size photos. This should allow 56k users to decide whether or not they want to take the time to wait for a large photo to load or not. I am also working on cleaning up the website code to improve loading time for 56k modem users as well.

The next item I plan on adding to the new services section is Google maps that users can customize to easily show a name and location for any place. The maps will appear on a stand alone page. This will allow, for example, a person hosting an event to provide a link to the map showing the location of the event.

I would also like to add the ability for people to upload photos directly to pages of any place listed throughout the Chelan, Douglas, Grant, or Okanogan directory. For now, if you have photos of anything related to North Central Washington you would like to share, you can post them in the photos forum.

These are just a few things coming soon to the website, if anyone has any suggestions or things they would like to see, you can use the contact page, post in the new forum, or leave a comment below.

Nintendo Wii

My kid asked Santa Claus for a Nintendo Wii for Christmas. If I had only known they would all be bought up by people trying to resell them on ebay, I might have suggested for him to ask for something else. I was unable to find one before Christmas, so we left a note from Santa telling him an elf dropped his Nintendo and broke it, but that he would be back as soon as he could with a new one. Thank goodness Fred Meyer in East Wenatchee had a large shipment in on December 31st. That evening we told him lots of people didn't get their presents on time this year, and everyone was going to light off fireworks that night to let Santa know to come back. He had always slept through New Years in the past, but this time we woke him up and we watched together out the window as fireworks erupted all over town. He was so excited that Santa might come back during the night that he quickly went back to bed. In the morning he found his Nintendo Wii under the Christmas Trii.

On a different note, web developers/designers should be aware that the Nintendo Wii has the ability to connect to the Internet and has a built in web browser. The built in web browser is by Opera. The Wii is designed for standard definition televisions and surfing the web can be a somewhat difficult task compared to a standard computer, but it can be done, and many are using the Wii to surf the web. I checked this website and everything seems to look normal. If you run a website, you might consider checking your website for compatibility in the Opera browser, or you might end up turning away some visitors.