• Blogging

    Water bleg

    September 8, 2005 /

    Do any of my vast legions of readers have any thoughts on water purifiers? Comments are open. To my knowledge there is the Pur filter system and one other brand, but I don’t really know anything about the topic.

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  • Katrina,  Personality,  Wal-Mart

    Reactions to Katrina

    September 7, 2005 /

    A person’s reaction to Katrina seems to vary in direct proportion to their average daily time spent with people. The more time with people, the more likely one will see it as a human problem, either with Bush or the N.O. Residents. The less time one spends with people, the more likely to see it as an engineering (both physical and social) problem.

    Oddly, I’ve been hearing the idea that we should not rebuild New Orleans (at least nowhere near as it was) from some surprising quarters, including me. For a good summation of the main argument, see Josh Trevino’s article.

    For more literal reactions, see the Agitator’s post on what WalMart has done so far. It’s quite staggering. The business community has done a great deal already.

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  • family,  Photography

    Reunion photos are up

    September 6, 2005 /

    One the whole I think they turned out fair. There were about 35 photos (mostly from the reunion but a few from the day before) that turned out very poorly due to my mistakes with the Auto Exposure Lock (AEL) feature of the camera. I need to read up a bit on how to use that.

    Most of the AEL problems occurred when I was trying to photograph people in the shade while still capturing a lot of the sunny landscape. I deleted the over/under exposed photos from the gallery. Very little retouching has been done to the photos.

    When viewing the gallery please note that clicking the main/large image will take you to the next image in the series.

    With no further ado

    The 2005 Johns Family reunion

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  • Atlanta,  Dogs

    As it should be

    September 6, 2005 /

    Just got back from the vet to pick up Drex. He seemed very calm and good spirited and had has his nails cut (which makes me think they drugged him). All is back as it should be here in Steveland. It’s amazing how much of an empty space is created when pets aren’t there.

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  • Katrina

    History in the making

    September 2, 2005 /

    I think we’ll be learning the “lessons” of Katrina for years. The chief one being to take care of the low-hanging fruit of pump maintenance and levee inspections. Most of it will be of this variety. I’m sure there will be a left wing version of the same list soon.

    I think some of the unobvious lessons of the current New Orleans debacle will be

    • Failure to show a police and National Guard presence in the early hours
    • Allowing the perception of preferential treatment to go unanswered (I’ll have a much longer post on self-selection in who stayed and who left when this is all done)
    • No mass communications, either through megaphones on boats, or Donald Sensing’s leaflet idea. This gives the impression that society has ceased to exist, hence more lawlessness and looting. For a lot of these people the more “social” people left, which altered the composition of the folks remaining. More thoughts on this later.
    • Leaflets could also be used to convey simple instructions on how to survive in this situation. This would let people do something to improve their situation instead of just waiting there (specifically the people waiting at the convention center) feeling like suckers. Much disease prevention could be handled in this manner, for that matter a solar still (for water) seems quite possible as well.
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