The Little Things that Make Life Fun…
By Brian | September 30, 2005
Seen on the streets of Manhattan today:
Man throws a wadded up piece of paper at a trash can and misses. Misses by so much, in fact, that when he picks it up, he’s too far from the can to reach, so he takes a second shot. He misses again. This time, he picks up the paper, looks around to see if anyone’s watching, and then sheepishly walks it over to the trash can, makes the easy layup, and moves on.
…and those guys in the NBA make it look so easy.
Categories: New York, New York, The World Wide Weird | Comments Off on The Little Things that Make Life Fun…
Plane Blogging…
By Brian | September 25, 2005
I’m sitting on a plane bound for Orlando (business conference in a Disney hotel). Some immediate observations that didn’t didn’t occur to me until I acutally boarded the plane:
– Before we boarded, they announced that there are more kids on the flight than adults.
– They didn’t preboard people with kids as they usually do because, well, what’s the point?
– Any adult that plans on needing a bathroom during the flight might as well forget it. I can imagine that it will be occupied the entire way down, and that the line to wait for the next one will not be a pleasant one.
– I’m sitting near the back of the plane, so I got on before most people, but when I got on, there were already *NINE* strollers tagged with “gate check” tickets on the jetway. I’m guessing there’ll be at least 20 by the time we takeoff.
– Nobody’s crying yet, but there have been about a dozen digital pictures taken since I sat down, so the most common sound on the plane is “CHEESE!!!”
– The scheduled movie is “Monster-in-Law.” I’m *SHOCKED* that it’s not an animated movie. Anyone on the plane with a portable DVD player (and an Elmo disc) will be heroes once we’re in the air…
– Just as I’m typing this, the kid behind me began kicking my chair, and the mother began scolding him to stop. It will be a competition the whole flight to see which is more annoying – the kicking or the scolding.
UPDATE:The crying as now begun. One kid for now, but we’ll see if it spreads. The mother is offering something called a “Baa-Baa” which seems to be helping. Wheeeeeee!!!
UPDATE #2:Flight’s over – if there was any crying, it was not loud enough to outshout my iPod headphones. Gotta love technology…
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging, The Disneyverse | 2 Comments »
Fun with Mailing Lists
By Brian | September 23, 2005
Here’s a familiar phenomenon:
Step 1:
Someone sends a question to an e-mail mailing list containing thousands of people. But they’ve got the wrong list.
Step 2:
People see an e-mail in their box that isn’t addressed to them (just to the mailing list) and reply to all, saying “Why did I get this e-mail?”
Step 3:
More people see the “Why did I get this e-mail?” mails, and reply to all with “Me too” messages.
Step 4:
Still more people (typically the ones who know how mailing lists work) start replying to all with messages that say “Please stop replying to all – this is a mailing list.”
Step 5:
People read these warnings and reply (to all) with “Why did I get this e-mail?”
Go to Step 2 and repeat
This happened at work yesterday. The initial e-mail went to a list with around 2,000 people on it. Then came 18 e-mails saying “Why did I get this.” Then came 22 e-mails saying “Me too.” That was followed by 34 messages saying “Please stop replying to all.” In total, 64 e-mails hit my box in the space of 17 minutes.
As far as I know, this process doesn’t have a name. Right now, I going with “mailing list mushroom cloud,” as in “I was worried when I had 74 unread e-mails this morning, but it turned out it was just a mailing list mushroom cloud.”
Suggestions, anyone?
Categories: Tech Talk | 2 Comments »
Helping the People Who Can’t Leave…
By Brian | September 21, 2005
Here’s how Texas is dealing with the people who can’t afford to transport themselves out of harm’s way.
Again: Note the absence of the federal government in the picture. Note the absence of FEMA. Note the basence of state and local officials waiting for help to arrive.
Categories: Political Rantings | Comments Off on Helping the People Who Can’t Leave…
Evacuating the hospitals
By Brian | September 19, 2005
Tropical Storm Rita could potentially be a Category 1 Hurricane by the time it reaches the Florida Keys, so Florida is taking standard precautions:
Officials ordered [40,000] residents evacuated from the lower Florida Keys on Monday.
The state was sending a National Guard cargo plane to evacuate 22 patients from Key West’s hospital to Sebring, near Lake Okeechobee. Several critically ill patients already had been evacuated to hospitals in Miami.
Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency.
This is because a Category 1 hurricane MIGHT hit the Florida keys in a couple of days. Note the absence of the federal government. Note the absence of FEMA. Note the absence of state and local officials waiting for help to arrive.
Now, one would assume that Louisiana, who’s largest city is below sea level would have a similar plan – at least for the hospitals, right? But then there’s this on the front page of the New York Times:
Of the dead collected so far in the New Orleans area, more than a quarter of them, or at least 154, are those of patients, mostly elderly, who died in hospitals or nursing homes, according to interviews with officials from 8 area hospitals and 26 nursing homes.
There were piecemeal plans. Hospitals were required to have enough emergency provisions to operate for two to three days during a disaster. State officials said it was their responsibility to evacuate patients if necessary. Nursing homes were required to have their own evacuation plans, complete with contracts with transportation companies.
In two public hospitals that primarily treat the poor, emergency generators and wiring were located on the ground floor, vulnerable to flooding, because state legislators had repeatedly refused to pay for upgrades. Both washed out in the storm.
It goes on and on – hospitals and nursing homes were not clear about whether Mayor Nagin’s evacuation order applied to them. Private hospitals, which could afford to do so, hired buses and helicopters, but when the time came, the bus companies had no drivers.
At HCA Healthcare (a large, for-profit hospital), the president had to be awoken at 3AM to be told the water was rising in the building. He had leased 20 helicopters, but the helipad wasn’t accessible from the hospital. He tried to turn Tulane University Hospital’s parking garage into a helipad, but Tulane was evacuating their staff before the other hospital’s patients. Tulane denies this, but most of the staff did get out before some of HCA’s incubator-ridden babies. You do the math.
Virginia McCall, director of the ICU at Methodist Hospital (who got all their patients out) says that Universal Health Services, the company that runs the hospital, told her that they had rented trucks, but that the trucks were commandeered by FEMA for other priorities. The company has no comment, and FEMA denies the accusation. FEMA, of course, has been roundly criticized for having no one on the ground until several days after the storm had passed. Again, you do the math.
People have argued with me recently that there’s no way a city can effectively evacuate 100% of its citizens in an emergency. There will always be people who don’t get the message, or who refuse to leave. I’ve argued that regardless of this, a plan should be in place. Even if it doesn’t work, at least there’s a plan, and people know what to expect.
But the hospitals and nursing homes? No bed-ridden patient is going to refuse to leave if his doctors and nurses tell him he has to. The lack of a plan for these people epitomizes the extent to which the city let its people down.
Categories: Political Rantings | Comments Off on Evacuating the hospitals
Pot to Kettle: Where did you get that tan?
By Brian | September 17, 2005
It seems iTunes 5.0 for Windows is buggy. Good thing I’ve been so swamped lately that I haven’t had time to upgrade.
And for some comic relief, we have this:
MacDailyNews Take: Behold the beauty of horizontal integration. Isn’t having a range of problems with the same piece of software on one PC
Categories: Tech Talk | Comments Off on Pot to Kettle: Where did you get that tan?
Shop Amazon with What’s Under the Couch Cushions
By Brian | September 14, 2005
This is a great idea:
Amazon.com on Tuesday said Coinstar Inc., best known for coin-counting machines found in many supermarkets and drug stores, has agreed to let customers exchange their loose change for certificates redeemable at the online retailer. Under the deal, customers can insert their coins into a Coinstar machine and receive a receipt with a redemption code that can be used to make purchases on Seattle-based Amazon.com.
Categories: The Future is Now | 2 Comments »
I Couldn’t Have Said it Better Myself…
By Brian | September 8, 2005
You know, whenever I get it in my head that I’m halfway decent at putting words down on a page, I read something from a guy who really knows what he’s doing, and then crawl back to my safe little world, where I spend most of the day talking to computers. In this case, it was James Lileks covering the same ground as my Blame Bush First post, but with infinitely more style & grace.
Highly recommended reading. Here are some highlights:
I am somewhat surprised that RIGHTEOUS ANGER is now the default mode in situations like this – but not too surprised. If the biggest problem in the world is Bush, then everything is naturally his fault.
But wait, there’s more!
Oh, the lessons we learned from Katrina. Bush’s refusal to invade New Orleans tells everything you need to know about Republican racist perfidy. The local government’s incompetence tells you nothing whatsoever about Democrats ability to govern at the micro level. Lethal storms can be turned aside months in advance by signing the right treaties. Or so they’re saying in the reality-based community.
And then finally, some lessons for us to take away:
Lesson one: Don’t rely on the government. Four years after 9/11, it’s apparent that some local governments are not well-oiled machines when it comes to disasters – more like a box of sand and busted gears. Blame for that can be promiscuously distributed.
Lesson two: the next terrorist attack will not unite us for a warm hug-filled fortnight. The hard left won’t wait 24 hours before blaming President Bush, and the country will enjoy the sight of prominent pundits angrier at the President than the men who nuked Des Moines.
Well said, Mr. Lileks. Well said.
Categories: Political Rantings | Comments Off on I Couldn’t Have Said it Better Myself…
New Orleans’ leaders finally wake up…
By Brian | September 8, 2005
C. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, has finally decided to make the evacuation of New Orleans mandatory:
Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered law officers and the military late Tuesday to evacuate all holdouts – by force if necessary. He warned that the combination of fetid water, fires and natural gas leaks after Hurricane Katrina made it too dangerous to stay.
I, for one, view this as a positive step. Alas, there are still issues. The military personnel have said they have no plans to use force. The National Guard has said that they don’t take orders from the mayor, which seems like an almost unbelievably blatant challenge to the governor (should we or shouldn’t we?). Local police are also hesitant to use force, hoping that the threat of force would be enough in most cases.
The article says that Eddie Compass, the police chief, is “mindful of the bad publicity that could result from images of weary residents dragged out of their homes at gunpoint.” Seriously? He’s worried about bad publicity at this point? Maybe he’s afraid the focus will come off the White House & FEMA and people will start asking him what the cops were doing in the days before the storm?
More on Eddie Compass: it seems teams of workers trying to repair cell phone towers in the area have been fired upon “on almost a daily basis.” It took “100 officers and seven armored personnel carriers [to capture] a suspect in a housing project who had been firing on workers trying to restore cell phone towers.” The police chief’s reaction?
The police chief boasted that 7,000 more military, police and other law officers on the streets had made New Orleans “probably the safest city in America right now.”
Again, I say, seriously? There are thousands of dead bodies floating in the streets. The amount of sewage-related bacteria in the floodwaters is at least 10 times higher than acceptable safety levels. Workers trying to restore basic communications are being fired upon daily. This is the safest city in America?
On the political front, more encouraging news:
Given the extent of the misery, Louisiana’s two U.S. senators
Categories: Political Rantings | Comments Off on New Orleans’ leaders finally wake up…
Predicting the Disaster
By Brian | September 7, 2005
Here’s an absoultely astounding article (Hat tip to Steve Walsh) about what “might” happen to New Orleans if a large hurricane hit it. The article was written in October of 2001:
The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. “As the water recedes,” says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, “we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.”
Chilling…
Categories: Political Rantings | Comments Off on Predicting the Disaster