Randomness Redefined

Where were you on this day 4 years ago? Don’t know what I’m referring to, well I guess you forgot the events that occurred on September, 11 2001 then. Ah, its coming back to you now isn’t it? This day sort of snuck up on me even though I remember very vividly every hour of that day. I was just curious to see what memories, etc that any of my readers or anyone out on the Blogsphere or the Internet in general had on the event. Leave a comment if you want to discuss.

I have been meaning to post some new posts and to do some house cleaning, but every time I try to do it I can’t stop thinking about all of the people down in New Orleans that have had their homes and property destroyed and their loves put on hold while an ineffective administration twiddles their thumbs and says that everything is fine and that there is no need to worry. I think that is utter bullshit to be perfectly frank. FEMA, etc was woefully unprepared and its not even their fault, ever since 9-11 they have been absorbed into Homeland Security and have no ability to function as they once did. So I guess I am going to have to rant for a bit and to get this off my chest

What got me started on this thought train was a post over at Binary Bonsai. He rants for a bit about his frustration and disbelief that we spent so much money in Iraq but can not help our own citizens. A brief summary is this:

There are gangs with guns, killing at will and raping children and women as they please.
People are dying. There is no place to put them, so they are shoved up against walls, into corners. Everywhere.

I am repulsed at the amount of dragging of the feet the governmental institutions have done. And the lack of evacuation support provided prior to Katrina hitting.

I am frustrated that the rescue operations were stopped because a chopper was shot at once. Give them gunship protection; hell give each chopper and man with a fucking gun! Instead they called off the rescue operations to go and search for the people with guns? Are you nuts?! Get those people out of there! You have the largest military in the world; you can run two wars half-way around the world at the same time, how hard can it be?

BoingBoing has some commentary on the situation as well, you can read about it here, they also have a letter written by one of the volunteers on the scene that you should read. Personally, I am disappointed the CNN has not been showing much beyond some pretty censored images of the destruction, if you want to see what the damage really looks like take a look here, here, and here. According to WIRED, the disaster management agencies have very detailed computer models and knew what to expect but did not really do much of anything other than hold meetings.

Virtually everything that has happened in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck was predicted by experts and in computer models, so emergency management specialists wonder why authorities were so unprepared.

“The scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was well anticipated, predicted and drilled around,” said Clare Rubin, an emergency management consultant who also teaches at the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University.

That sort of makes you wonder just what the hell they were surprised about doesn’t it? If you want some first hand accounts of what is going on head over to the Livejournal blog of some IT professionals that have somehow managed to keep their business powered up and online. You can read about their stories by clicking here and then you can see a WIRED story about them. In other news, it looks like that over 5.000 musicians are donating ALL of the profits from their CD sales to the survivors (via MacMegasite), so go listen to and buy their CDs by clicking ,a href=”< a href="http://cdbaby.com/group/redcross/from/wbplanet">on this link.

If you want to see a map of the damage that is available and is also an editable WIKI, then go visit this site. the site uses the awesome potential of Google Maps to display all of the entry points and WIRED has given them some coverage that you can check out. A little excerpt from the article to let you see the level of detail these volunteers have gone to:

Since Scipionus.com launched Wednesday, it has become a giant visual “wiki” page, attracting tens of thousands of visitors who are collaborating in creating a public document of astonishing detail. “Corner of 1077 and Brewster. Had contact with parents. Lots fo trees down, but no water damage. No electrucity and no phone at the monebt 8/31 2:00pm,” reads one of hundreds of entries.

The site is the brainchild of Jonathan Mendez, a 24-year-old computer programmer living in Austin, Texas. Mendez says he grew frustrated combing message boards trying to find out if his family home — the one his parents and brother had just fled from — had been destroyed.

Mendez turned to his co-worker, Greg Stoll, a 23-year-old software engineer who had experimented with Google Maps’ API, and asked him to code a way for people to report and find damage assessments on a Google Map.

Now that I have some of this off of my chest I think I am going to go pass out from exhaustion. when I am feeling better and not so buried by course work and personal projects i will let you in on two CDs that I bought at a concert I recently attended. Some of you know what I am talking about, but lets keep it a secret for now. For now just everyone do me a favor, please click on the Red Cross banner on the top of my site or on the links at the bottom of my RSS entries (That the awesome folks over at Feedburner have provided as a option to have on my feeds, so thanks for that and for making my life easier!) and donate some money or something to help out these people! Ok, enough ranting and soapboxing, I’m going to bed!