theITbaby

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Informative

It’s 2022, I’m watching live lightning strikes on the internet to see if my kid has swim lessons tonight

If lightning strikes within 20 miles of my kid’s pool, they shut it down. Pretty standard procedure as for some reason crispy fried children are not something the pool wants for some reason.

We’ve had an unusual summer, lot of thunderstorms at 5ish on nights that my kid has swim lessons. Tonight if things go to tune will be the third cancellation of swimming out of 6 classes we’ve attended… I may be off on that, one might have been just us at a pool, but whatever.

Lightning maps letting me know that at least at the moment there's not a chance my kid is going to have swim tonight.

The website for lightning strikes

Anyway, there’s a site called … wait for it… lightningmaps.org where you can see real time strikes, and it appears radiating circles that probably indicate sound waves of the lightning in near real time (it claims the delay is about 3 seconds while I’m watching it now, but this goes up and down)

Assuming all goes as expected, this will save me 30 minutes of driving to find out it’s been cancelled. But either way it’s a useful indicator of when to not go to a pool.

Just something useful to put into your arsenal of tools to save you time and answer the question “was that lightning about 20 seconds ago or was that my stomach growling?”

[Lightningmaps.org]

Paul King

Paul King lives in Nashville Tennessee with his wife, two daughters and cats. He writes for Pocketables, theITBaby, and is an IT consultant along with doing tech support for a film production company.