This time of year along much of the Left Coast and the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, we watch news reports carefully for indications that it’s time to pack up the people and the pets and head for the hills. It’s hurricane season. Again.

Fed by hot, tropical waters in the Atlantic and the Gulf, hurricanes are so huge, so potentially devastating, that there’s only one defense: advance information. Weather forecasting being what it is, we get several days warning, plenty of time to zoom inland.

I live 100 miles from the coast, plenty far enough to avoid hurricanes’ dangers - with some notable exceptions. We’ll have power outages, some flooding, a little wind damage, and a big scary day or two, but nothing like the devastation that visits coastal areas.

Information becomes essential, especially on the go. To that end, it’s reassuring to hear that CBS has announced a new partnership with AccuWeather for a new CBS Mobile News Hurricane Center. It’s a made-for-mobile severe weather resource that enables users to track late-breaking and targeted thunderstorm and hurricane updates. Part of CBS News’ Mobile website, the CBS Mobile News Hurricane Center invites you to register your Zip code to get immediate access to local information when you visit the mobile-friendly website.

AccuWeather will supply weather updates in near real-time, complete with live radar updates and storm tracker data from its meteorologists. The website will also offer information from the National Weather Service on Hurricane Warnings and Hurricane in the area defined by your Zip. And ads.

Predictably, the CBS announcement also touts a partnership with the mobile advertising network Quattro Wireless. Guess what else is “targeted.” The ads. Well, somebody has to pay for the service, I suppose, but the whole concept of being “targeted” ruffles my feathers as bad as Hurricane Hooey on a windy day.

Flash! Ka-Blammmmm!

Hurricanes aside, we frequently have severe thunderstorms around here, and I’m not comfortable leaving my computer equipment plugged in while lightning bolts bounce around. I got it honest. Except for my father, my family always had a great fear of thunderstorms, perhaps because my grandmother’s house had been struck by lightning in the 1940’s and burned to the ground. Besides her family, she managed to save only a single plate and a lamp.

In a thunderstorm, therefore, everyone had a designated task. Mine was to unplug all the appliances, including the refrigerator and the TV’s. We used my spiffy Bakelite “transistor” radio for weather information till the storm passed, dependent on the local radio station, less than a mile away.

These days when a thunderstorm approaches, I unplug my computer toys. They’re all hooked up to surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies, but I unplug them anyway. Sadly, even this isn’t enough. I lost all of the innards of an unplugged computer summer before last when lightning zapped through a phone line into its internal modem.

As I roam around town on various errands, I watch for dark clouds in the sky and frequently check the weather radar on my Palm smartphone, whichever one I have with me. I look for indications that it’s time to rush home and unplug stuff. I’ve been using Mobile Weather.com, a service of The Weather Channel. If you browse from Blazer, which is what I use on my Centro and Treo, the site detects the mobile browser and goes into mobile mode for you.

A Google Mobile search yielded this link, apparently for a Palm-specific website, but it failed. Maybe offline, maybe some other problem, but it failed.

Just now, I tried out CBS Mobile News for Hurricane Fay – she’s cruising the Caribbean – and found it pretty much the same, except that weather.com had different ads. Not “targeted” maybe? Both websites detected that I browsed from my Centro and automatically switched to mobile-friendly versions.

I’ll stick to Weather,com on the mobile for now. I like their radar and satellite maps, and their non-targeted ads were more interesting and less scary for invasive targetedness (or maybe they just didn’t tell me I’m a target).

I’ve also tried weatherunderground.com, but found it not too friendly to the small screen. At the bottom of the scroll-forever page, it boasted of its “targeting” capabilities to attract advertisers. Y! Weather too. Not much different, except that it insists on knowing where you are (ad targeting?) before you get anything, and neither of these was overly useful for information on Hurricane Fay.

The official information on hurricanes, plus radar displays and severe storm warnings originates from the National Weather Service. They fly airplanes through the hurricanes to see what’s what. (As a newspaper reporter, I rode in a small plane that flew into the eye of a hurricane once. Never again!) The extensive NWS website contains no ads, targeted or otherwise. Though its radar maps on the mobile screen are tiny, for hurricanes and other sever weather events, it’s the definitive word.

When I’m at my desk, I check weather at the website of one of our local television broadcasters, WIS-TV However, their site depends a great deal on Javascript menus, and it isn’t very friendly to the small screen. The Treo’s and Centro’s native browsers don’t honor much Java. I wish they didn’t honor targeted ads, either.

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