Tropical Storm Delta has become extratropical, and the final NHC advisory was issued at 10:00 AM. But it will still be “a significant storm system for the Canary and Madeira Islands and northwestern Africa”:

STORM FORCE WINDS IN THE MADEIRA ISLANDS AND GALE FORCE WINDS IN THE CANARY ISLAND WILL BE POSSIBLE TODAY AND EARLY TONIGHT… WITH GALE TO POSSIBLE STORM FORCE WINDS REACHING THE THE COAST OF MOROCCO AND NORTHERN MAURITANIA BY LATE TONIGHT OR EARLY TUESDAY.

Two United States congressmen were injured when their convoy was involved in an accident on the way back to Baghdad Airport Saturday. The two were Tim Murphy (R-Pennsylvania) and Ike Skelton (D-Missouri). Jim Marshall (D-Georgia) was in the vehicle but was unhurt. Murphy was airlifted to Germany for an MRI, while Skelton remained at a hospital in Baghdad. More here.

Note that these sorts of injuries aren’t all that uncommon; a pretty significant number of U.S. fatalities in Iraq (something like a quarter of them, actually) have been due to non-combat incidents, which can usually be read as cleaning your rifle while it’s loaded or getting in a auto accident.

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

Tropical Storm Delta refuses to weaken — indeed, its winds have strengthened back up to 65 mph — and it is expected to bring gale-force winds to the Canary Islands today and possibly the coast of Morocco late tonight, with a landfall there tomorrow morning if it holds together.

Following in the footsteps of Vince (see also here), Delta could be the second tropical storm of the season to make landfall on the eastern side of the Atlantic!

Delta is expected to become extratropical before hitting Africa, but as The Storm Track notes, “Delta was originally expected to transition already.” So who knows? The 2005 hurricane season continues to defy all expectations.

Track map here.

Earlier this evening, I brought home another new laptop — the third PowerBook I’ve owned in the last ten days.

No, I didn’t have another one stolen. I returned my “baby” to the Apple Store and exchanged it for the identical model because — how to put this delicately? — my baby was a lemon.

Transferring files from my old 15-inch PowerBook (right) to my new 15-inch PowerBook (left).

When I bought my 15-inch PowerBook at the Apple Store in Chicago on Tuesday, I noticed immediately upon beginning the OS X installation process that the screen did a weird flickering thing. It’s hard to describe, but basically, the display went haywire for a split second, then immediately returned back to normal. The glitch was so fast, you could blink and you’d miss it entirely. But obviously, a brand new computer shouldn’t do that.

That “flicker” should have set off alarm bells in my head, but I was in a hurry and decided to ignore it. Bad idea. Over the last several days, the display malfunctioned at least a dozen times. Usually, the problem came in the form of a split-second flash of “junk” in the bottom third of the screen. Once, the entire display image appeared to “jump” downward by about an inch, then immediately move back up into place. Another time, it just generally went haywire, like it did in Chicago, but again only for a split second.

That wasn’t all. The keyboard had issues, too. Specifically, the spacebar sometimes squeaked, and the “N” key kept getting stuck:

Also, the battery came nowhere near the promised longevity (90 minutes, if that, versus 3-4 hours), and native OS X applications crashed several times (Safari and iMovie, to be specific — again, totally unacceptable for a brand new computer that I’d barely touched).

Last but not least, the display showed a pattern of tiny horizontal lines which are extremely annoying when it comes to looking at photos and such. Alas, these lines are apparently “normal” for the new 15-inch PowerBooks. They don’t appear on the 12-inch or 17-inch models, nor on the older 15-inch models. Admittedly, they’re the sort of thing that I can probably learn to live with… but dammit, I shouldn’t have to. (Here’s a picture.)

So anyway, as these problems mounted, I decided it was time to head to the Apple Store and make a reservation at the Genius Bar. Becky and I did this today, and the keyboard problem was enough to convince the “genius” to replace my five-day-old laptop with a brand spanking new one. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, the new system has the same horizontal bar problem — which, as I said, appears to be inherent in the new 15-inch PowerBooks, which is incredibly lame — and I’ve already seen the screen “flicker” twice. Bah.

I’m not sure what to do. I really, really want a 15-inch PowerBook; I’ve simply outgrown the resolution and screen real estate on the 12-inch models, and the 17-inch models are heavier and bulkier (not to mention more expensive) than I want. But I’m rapidly losing faith in this new line of 15-inch models, and even if the “flickering” problem can be resolved and the battery life is better on this machine, I’m not at all happy with the idea of paying $2,500 for a computer that has tiny horizontal lines where smooth, happy pixels should be.

Perhaps I’ll return this computer and see if I can buy an older 15-inch PowerBook, if they’re still selling any of those. Perhaps I’ll make the jump to the 17-inch, in spite of the extra 0.9 pounds and $500. Or perhaps I’ll just suck it up and deal. Admittedly, none of the problems I’m having are debilitating… but the screen “flicker” seems like the sort of thing that can only get worse, not better… and besides, like I said, I shouldn’t have to be making allowances for faulty computer issues already, immediately after buying the machine! This sort of thing is simply unacceptable, and not up to Apple’s standards. In the wake of this summer’s iPhoto bug (now fixed), I find myself feeling increasingly disgruntled. What has happened to Quality Control at my beloved Apple???

Oh, well. I’ll quit my bitching for now. Just wanted to update y’all on the latest news from Brendan’s laptop odyssey. Stay tuned, as they say.

UPDATE: I just had a kernel panic. After rebooting, my AirPort card had mysteriously stopped working, and its icon had disappeared from my menubar. When I tried to click on the speaker icon, it too disappeared, and my sound card was disabled. I had to reboot the computer again to get everything working again.

Buggy, very buggy.

UPDATE 2: The saga continues. Latest developments here.

In the wake of its unimpressive victory over Stanford yesterday, Notre Dame dropped from #6 to #7 in the AP and USA Today polls, and from #5 to #7 in the Harris poll. All three polls now have the exact same top 11 teams, in the exact same order: USC, Texas, LSU, Penn State, Virginia Tech, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Oregon, Auburn, Miami and UCLA.

Texas also lost some ground because of its unimpressive victory Friday over Texas A&M. The Longhorns went from 14 first-place votes to 10 in the AP poll, from 13 to 9 in the USA Today poll, and from 25 to 15 in the Harris poll. All of the defectors’ votes went to USC, which is, of course, #1 for the 867th week in a row. (Okay, okay, it’s actually 32 weeks. Whatever.)

But there is some potentially very bad news for the Trojans:

Just six days before top-ranked USC tries to beat archrival UCLA, lock up a Rose Bowl berth and get one step closer to a national championship three-peat, the Trojans got a major scare at practice Sunday.

Junior LenDale White, the thunder to Reggie Bush’s lightning in USC’s vaunted backfield, had to be carted off the field after an apparent left shoulder injury.

The severity of the injury at this point is unknown. Coach Pete Carroll said that White got dinged and will be evaluated Monday.

The 6-foot-2, 235-pound White, who’s rushed for 1,024 yards and 19 touchdowns, was shaken up in the early part of Sunday’s practice. He was injured on what seemed to be a normal play; however, he pulled up, dropped the football and went down holding his shoulder. Observers didn’t notice anything unusual until a minute later, when the USC sports information director realized White was still down behind a few players who were standing.

White lay on the field for several minutes while being attended to by team trainers. He appeared to be in a lot of pain.

Yikes.

Golfer Fred Funk made a bet that Annika Sorenstam wouldn’t outdrive him during the Skins Game. He lost. You can see the result for yourself:

Heh.

Thousands of people paid their respects to slain Newington police officer Ciara McDermott yesterday. More here and here and here.

Boi From Troy says Fresno State’s loss to Nevada last night really isn’t that surprising because “teams have not fared so well in their game immediately following the USC date in their schedule. … The bottom line is that playing USC takes so much out of teams that they have trouble rebounding the next week…even against inferior opponents.”

Incidentally, Boi is celebrating Saturday’s USC-UCLA rivalry game with a big gay party. :)

The NCAA Division I women’s volleyball tournament field has been announced, and Notre Dame will host a set of first- and second-round games this week. Northwestern will play Texas A&M and the Irish will play Dayton on Thursday, and the winners will play each other in the second round on Friday. Whoever emerges from the Notre Dame sub-regional will advance to the College Station regional. Bracket here.

According to the AP:

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job.

This needs no commentary from me; despite the failures on other levels of government, I think few people would defend Brown for his role in the post-Katrina response. More here.

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

Gonzaga’s top bench player, Josh Heytvelt, broke his ankle in the UConn game, will have surgery tomorrow and is expected to be out for the rest of the season. (Hat tip: Patrick.)

Following up on yesterday’s post about earthquakes, volcanoes, and asteroids: There has been a magnitude 6.1 earthquake off the coast of Iran, resulting in the destruction of several villages, and presumably many deaths. Remember that two years ago it was a magnitude 6.6 quake that killed 26,000 people in the same general area. This is also just after another quake in China which has killed a few dozen people (officially) and left many thousands homeless. (The world is being shaken to death.) CNN has it up as Breaking News at the moment, but there’s an initial piece here. This story will surely get worse as the day goes on.

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

With the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season finally winding down — it officially ends on Wednesday; Delta will most likely be its final storm — the Washington Post looks at the recent rise in tropical activity, wonders what the immediate future will hold, and asks whether global warming is to blame. Excerpt:

Until recently, a rough consensus in the small world of tropical cyclone specialists had held that there was no evidence of unnatural hurricane trends over the 20th century. Hurricane activity over the Atlantic has fluctuated naturally over decades going back as far as 1900, and it was unlikely that global warming could be having a significant impact, many researchers said.

But a pair of scientific papers published this year detected an unexpected spike in storm intensity over the past several decades, suggesting that global warming might already be having an effect. The research set off a passionate and sometimes personal debate in the small community of storm scientists.

“In the sense of the history of scientific ideas, we’re either in the middle of a paradigm shift or a false paradigm shift,” said Hugh Willoughby, the former director of hurricane research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Adds Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr.: “Either way, we are going to see many more years of intense hurricanes. Scientists on both sides agree on that.”

Read the whole thing, then flame away. :)

A Canadian teenager with a peanut allergy died after kissing her boyfriend, who had eaten a peanut butter sandwich hours earlier. Yikes.

SI’s Arash Markazi rates the Pac-10 campuses in terms of their road-trip desirability. USC comes in at #7, narrowly beating out Stanford, Wazzu and Oregon State. ASU is ranked #1, and Arash seems to be just barely holding himself back from explaining that it’s because “the girls are hot and slutty.” :)

Speaking of which, there’s an ASU student on the cover of Playboy’s “Girls of the Pac-10″ issue. Alas, the USC section of said issue is somewhat sub-par. Er, so I’ve heard.