Our friend Patty's organization that normally sets up voicemail for homeless people in cities around the country is working with the Red Cross, Cisco Systems, and SBC Communications to give free voicemail to Katrina victims. Good job, Patty!
The U.S. government requested emergency food rations for Hurricane Katrina victims. But, after the United Kingdom airlifted 400,000 daily rations, our government would not distribute the food for five days. (Thanks to dr_scott for the original cheery blog bit on this travesty that occurred September 5 -10th.) President Bush and his administration are simply too comfortable to understand real life. The concept of the life-or-death emergency need for food apparently is one which apparently so foreign to them that they just cannot deal. How many generations back is Marie Antoinette in Bush's ancestry, anyway?
My friend Mike's sister is trying to sell his house in San Francisco while packing her things and preparing to evacuate to higher ground if Rita hits her Galveston home. She expects that her neighborhood will be five feet under water if Rita gets there. Ugly. The best tracking pages I've found are at the National Hurricane Center.
When Hollis and Mary Pat decided to remodel their 1950's box house into their dream retirement home a few years ago, they hooked up with Ashland, Oregon's top home designer and an excellent contractor. The result of their renovation was featured in the regional newspaper last spring. Their contractor is a great guy. He's intuitive and does careful, quality work. Jeff Hamlett (pictured left) asked me to do a website for him to show off his work. He engaged a local photographer to take pictures of some of his houses, and I put it together on a website. There wasn't much [...]
The new computer continues to be my pleasant task master, demanding my attention and robbing me of time normally set aside for reading about yak breeding on the Internet or composing worthy blog entries. Most of my actions have been the trivial entering of unlock registration codes and the downloading of drivers for infrequently used ancient scanners and other more esoteric devices. allanh's suggestion to use "AlohaBob PC Relocator" was appreciated, but it did, indeed, arrive too late for this transfer. I have followed Walt Mossberg's Wall Street Journal suggestion and am trying Foldershare to keep my laptop and new desktop files [...]
A new desktop computer arrived with the UPS man Friday evening. It's fast with great capacity and included a nice large monitor as the special come-on of the Dell week. Of course, with the arrival of the new machine I have been absolutely unproductive for days. The shelpping out of the old, unworking desktop to the garage was simple. Getting the new model to display the "Welcome to Windows" greeting to me took only minutes. It's the days of feeding CDs into the hungry maw of the new beast that's taken the time. Rejiggering the application settings, entering license codes, [...]
Once again Andy Borowitz is the first to get the facts to the public... In the wake of the former First Lady's sensitive remarks on the hurricane refugees we now know how Ms. Bush is being, mmm..., protected. Get the details: Barbara Bush Relocated
From Capital City Squares yesterday at 8:30 am I'm saddened to report that Stan Boyden passed away Tuesday night, Sept 6, at about 11:30 pm PST. His partner of more than 55 years, Bill St John, is doing well this morning in his usual stoic way. I will publish more information in the next few days as arrangements are finalized. Please do not try to contact Bill St John directly at this time... -- James Ozanich From PACE based on email sent yesterday at 10 am by Bonnie Abramson. I got a call about 11:45 p.m. last night and was asked to [...]
Relayed by PACE from Michael Foft dated September 6... As you may have known, Stan was taken to the hospital last week; he has returned to the (same) convalescent hospital as of today; however; Folks, there is no way to sugar coat this: the prognosis is not good. Basically, Stan was returned to the facility because nothing further can be done. It is only a matter of time, and not a great deal of that, until Stan Boyden dies; the decision was made that no intravenous feeding, no feeding tubes, etc., would be used; there would be little point to [...]
The Reverend William G. Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (my church), writes on the Katrina response.I am so angry. I've had to stop watching coverage of the disaster along our Gulf Coast. The statements from our political and military leaders that we have "turned the corner," that we have a unified disaster command with "perfect coordination," in response to this "natural disaster" are more than I can bear. I cannot watch one more press conference with congratulations for the "heck of a job" FEMA and the military have done. Natural disaster? Katrina was certainly a force [...]