I'm hoping the sky clears later so I can watch the Perseid meteor shower

Very nice

Forecast isn't great, sadly...

Since when did they ever get anything right?

If it's clearer further out, I might have a drive down to the countryside to get a good view.

Good point, well made!



It'll probably be clearer out in the countryside anyway, away from the light pollution...

Oooo. Today's is pretty.

I agree, today's is pretty. I wish the sky was always that colour instead of the horrible grey we have at the moment.

Erm, how about the Burns Day storm, this year's snowfall or the Boscastle floods to name just three? Not that I work for the Met Office any more.

Despite huge investment in technology to bring the sample grid size down on their mathematical modelling systems (I'm pretty sure that was the MET), they still manage to get it woefully wrong more often than not, though!

Huge weather systems that cause large events such as severe gales, floods, snowfalls and the like can usually be seen coming a mile off, to be fair. It's the day-to-day that's usually way off. I never pay attention any more - many weekends last summer I went away with the threat of rain/cloud and it mostly turned out nice

Equally good point, equally well made. You can add the very hot summer of 2003 to that too.

But not the hurricane of 1987

...the day when Sevenoaks lost six of its seven oaks...remember it well...

I were knee-high to a grasshopper but I remember looking out the window and seeing the lamp-posts bending quite scarily in the wind Tiles smashed in the back garden and all sorts.

Funny how I can remember stuff I did when I was as young as 5, but can't remember what I did yesterday...

You logged onto this forum and the green forum

But back on topic, do you think you'll try to see the meteor shower? Weather doesn't look great at the moment...

I'll check the satellite cloud cover photos, if it looks clear further out, I might take a drive to the coast or something. I'm on late shift so no need to get up early!

Why don't more people remember the Burns' Day Storm?

I remember it Aeolienne, but in my patch, the '87 hurricane was rather more severe...

We have a telescope themed Google logo today!

Happy anniversary Galileo!

Yes, I saw that!
By the way what was the August 12 one, I missed it (being away on holiday!)

Perseid meteor shower. Don't know if there's a cached version lurking around somewhere, but guess this is an annual occurence? (astronomers feel free to correct me)

Thank you

What you missed...

Today's is celebrating the late Michael Jackson's birthday.

We have a UFO themed Google logo today!...

Is it me, or is the Google homepage a slightly different style now?...

*checks Wayback Machine*

Yes, the search box and buttons seem to have got larger...

http://web.archive.org/web/20080212090700/...w.google.co.uk/

Car Expert

oooo, I've been observant

Thanks for that CE

Well done barry - have a gold star

Thank you, I shall treasure it always

Crop circle Google logo today!

Yes, I saw that too!

One for H.G.Wells today

Definitely one of the more inventive ones, that

Spot the subtle difference in today's Google logo!...

It took me a second or two to notice that!

Happy birthday Google

I thought they'd accidentally spelt it wrong at first!

Confucius themed Google logo today

Another themed logo today, celebrating Gandhi's birthday!

It's a bar-code today

How have they translated Google into a barcode? I thought barcodes were purely based on numbers, so I assume they are using the decimal equivalent values of the ASCII characters or something?

Or simply the position of each letter of Google in the alphabet (G=7, O=15 etc.)?

Nah, surely they are far too nerdy to keep it that simple!

Just used a barcode scanner and it comes up with "Google". That's made my day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_128

Yep, ASCII encoding </curious geek mode>

Yep that works with the scanner too (goes to trawl the internet for other barcodes)

Yep it's quiet in work this morning!

You beat me to it - I was going to re-attach my barcode scanner to my computer to see what it did (we haven't used them here at work for 5+ years now, but most people still have them lurking in a drawer!)

Do you remember those barcode games that used to be popular with schoolkids? I wonder what happened to them?

I think it was a sort of pokemon/trumps game where you scanned stuff in, so it'd be something like a fight between Cornflakes and Timotei (that would get messy).

Hah, I remember a quiet day I had a work years back when we did use the bar code scanner, I tried scanning a little plastic toy zebra that for some reason was on my desk. It wouldn't beep though. It did lead us to try scanning other things with 'real' bar codes on, for some reason it had never occurred to us that our barcode scanners could read 'real' bar codes and not just the tracking bar codes we had on documents. We annoyed the system by then scanning lots of codes that it couldn't recognise as documents (erm, no, because it is in fact a Mar Bar!)