This isn’t looking good…

Sayeth the National Weather Service:

THIS OUTLOOK IS FOR NORTHWEST AND WEST CENTRAL ARKANSAS AS WELL AS MUCH OF EASTERN OKLAHOMA.
TORNADO RISK…SIGNIFICANT.
AREA…FAR EASTERN OKLAHOMA AND NORTHWEST ARKANSAS.
ONSET…AFTER 3 PM.
AREA AT GREATEST RISK…NORTHWEST AND WEST CENTRAL ARKANSAS.
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM RISK…SIGNIFICANT.
AREA…ALONG AND EAST OF HIGHWAY 75.
ONSET…AFTER 3 PM.
Severe thunderstorms will develop along a dryline this afternoon…with a risk of tornadoes…hail larger than quarters…and winds in excess of 70 MPH. Initial thunderstorm development is expected after 3 PM…with increasing tornadic potential by late afternoon into early evening. Locations across northwest and west central Arkansas wil llikely be affected by these severe thunderstorms during the peak tornadic potential…thus there is a significant risk of tornado warnings being issues for locations such as Fayetteville… Bentonville… Fort Smith… Ozark… Huntsville… and Eureka Springs. Storm spotters should plan for storm motions in excess of 40 MPH…and wind fields strongly support tornadic potential for any storm which slows and travels more eastward. Be alert and exercise caution today.

Yeeeeikes. Thing is, at only 10:30 in the morning, there’s already nasty stuff cooking up in Oklahoma and trucking right this way. I’ve already brought Xena in for the day and fired up Orac to show nothing but radar.
Now, let’s talk for a minute about Orac. Cranky old computer that it is, it seems to be perfectly capable of running a self-updating weather radar loop on the National Weather Service site for nearly 24 hours without crashing (and without anything other than Windows 98 and some fairly typical security software running in the background). I’ve got Orac connected to the LCD monitor I picked up fairly cheaply last summer to take to OVGE (the fugly monitor that doesn’t even have a back cover), and barring the use of the Atari Video Music, that is all that monitor does; Orac is set to not go to a screen saver or a power saver shutdown mode. Not the most energy-efficient heap of slightly outdated silicon ever to have racked up amp-hours on my electric meter, but given how this storm season is going, it’s been a nice option to have. I can leave Orac running when I go to work and my wife can walk into the game room/computer room and see a live weather radar without having to touch the machine. And let’s not forget that, at the heart of it all, Orac is an old computer with few other uses (it can drive my scanner, whereas my new PC, Zen, can’t; it’s also the only machine out of the two that can talk to my handheld PC)…so really, it’s a safe machine to leave on during a storm because it’s more or less expendable.
It’s funny how experiments become habits, and then habits become things that are simply expected to be there. Orac and its radar are just such a case. Now that I’ve set the old thing running the radar for virtually every “storm day” we’ve had this year, it’s now something that is expected to be done. Sunday night, we weren’t expecting much in the way of bad weather, so I pointed Orac toward the live radar from the National Weather Service in Paducah, Kentucky, where there was a veritable wall of tornado warnings marching into town. After watching the fireworks for a bit, I went to take a nap, only to be woken up by my wife, who was asking, not altogether calmly, why the hell the radar was on Paducah. It seems her sister was on the phone, wondering about the thunder she was hearing in the distance at her house only half an hour away from us. Aha! So Orac’s radar has become something that the whole family depends on all of a sudden. (I don’t know about you, but I find that amusing.)
I think it’s time to take the cranky old heap of chips in to see if it needs a new hard drive, or a new power supply, or some other relatively inexpensive fix. It seems Orac simply can’t retire. In the here and now, however, the first warnings of the day have just been issued, so perhaps it’s time to shut off Zen (i.e. the expensive one) and let Orac do its thing. Here’s hoping I don’t get to repeat my funnel cloud experience from one week ago…