The Author

Posted by John Bain | August 8, 2010

See John Type, Type John Type.

John Bain is from Winnipeg and is a recent graduate from Red River College who through various events found himself moving to Ottawa to start a new career working for the Federal Government. John has always had an interest in discovering new ways to make information available to the public and often blogs about them. Johns Blog .

If you would like to get a hold of John you can contact him at john.bain@gmail.com .

The Idea

Posted by John Bain | August 8, 2010

The concept was created during an Ottawa Change camp event that I had gone to sometime in June. If you have never been to a Change camp they are considered “un-conference” which really means it’s a crowd driven event allowing people from the crowd to control the topics discussed and promote “crowd sourcing”.

Anyways, at the event a gentleman who previously worked for Environment Canada mentioned that he had often seen automated sprinklers being activated while it was raining and thought it would be useful for a tool to be created to monitor when lawns and gardens would actually need to be watered. I don’t know who this gentleman was but he definitely planted the idea in my mind. Sadly not through inception … if you have seen the movie you may understand that reference. : )

The concept of the tuna can lawns was something I noticed on one of those bus billboards. A local Ottawa environmental group purchased ad space on OC Transpo bus’s advocating water conservation using tuna cans as a way to monitor how much water to “sprinkle” on your lawn. To this date I still have not been able to find the original ads or the name of the group running them.

The Weather Stations

Posted by John Bain | August 8, 2010

All 1079 of them ...

In google maps form

The Limitations

Posted by John Bain | August 8, 2010

There is an inside nerdy joke there : )

Anyways, some of the limitations of the program are.

  • Only works in Canada.
  • If there isn’t a weather station in a 16 mile radius from your area you won’t get any results… sorry blame Environment Canada : )
  • Environment Canada is responsible for creating the precipitation data for your area. If you think it’s rained more then what is shown use the map and select the weather station closest to you. There should be a link provided in the “cloud” pointing directly to the Environment Canada weather station website.
  • If the Environment Canada data archives are down then so is my site, as no rain data is saved in my database.

The Blogs

Posted by John Bain | August 8, 2010

People worth mentioning: