[ music | REM – It’s the End of the World As We Know It ]

For several days before landfall, we all knew Katrina was going to make landfall in the general Louisiana/Mississippi/Alabama coast area. one to two days before landfall, we knew it was gunning right for New Orleans. the day before there was an evacuation ordered for New Orleans and surrounding areas, and the entire region was preemptively declared a disaster area. So why are the Navy ships only now being mobilized? Why were they not set in motion Saturday? Why is the National Guard being called up now, rather than just the 200 that were called in for Superdome security? Why did a lot of these things not even get started until 3 days after the catastrophe? We knew years ago that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was going to be a total loss if a major hurricane hit. We’ve had studies done, and found that we should have reinforced and raised the levees around the city, and improved the pumping system, but it would have cost several billion dollars. Well, now we’ve lost potentially thousands of lives, and will be paying tens of billions of dollars. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

[ music | Monty Python – Money Song ]

You can get a free registered copy of Opera 8, as stated here at Download.com and here on SlickDeals. It’s to celebrate ten years of Opera. “Simply e-mail registerme@opera.com to obtain a registration code. This offer is valid from 12 a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT).” Interestingly enough, Firefox is always free, every day, with no ads. 🙂

Update: They changed things! This link is now where to get your reg code instantly. I sent mine in just after the opening, and didn’t get a reply till an hour ago. The webpage there is instant though.

[ music | Monty Python – Accountancy Shanty ]

Well, New Orleans was spared 20 feet of standing water in the downtown area – this time. They really need to get some better preparations, and hopefully this close call will spur some movement on that front. There was a bar on Bourbon street open quite late into the night last night, and this morning, Jackson Square saw folks welcoming the calm with a drink. You have to love that town. 🙂

So, about Dreamhost. Use promo code BE25 and you get a one-time $25 off your hosting bill. It’s valid for all plans and all term lengths one year or longer. If you sign up for monthly billing, you save $12 off a Level 1 plan, $16 off Level 2, $20 off Level 3, and $25 off Level 4. You can check here for plan details, and enter promo code BE25 on the payment page.

[ music | Dick Dale – Tidal Wave ]

Hurricane Katrina is now a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds above 160mph (258 kph). And she’s headed right for New Orleans, one of my favorite cities. New Orleans is primarily below sea level, which means, like Holland, it depends on dykes and pumps to keep the ocean out. A giant storm like this somewhat defeats that idea. Here’s hoping she decides to take it easy on the Big Easy.

[ music | Depeche Mode – Precious ]

I have it, and it’s awesome.

This has an awesome sound, you can hear a lot of Violator influence in it again, and if you heard the “Enjoy the Silence 04” remix you can hear the influence from that too. It’s a lot cleaner like Violator and less dirty/distorted like SOFAD and subsequent albums. Now, I LOVED SOFAD, Ultra was great, and Exciter was good, but neither lived up to SOFAD. It’s good to hear the older sound back though. I can’t wait for the full album.

[ music | Radiohead – Sulk ]

Yep. Another whine post. This is basically why I hate having certain conversations with certain people, because it makes me think about things I try to ignore. I was asked, “Do you think you’re a little too caustic sometimes?” I answered, “Yeah, probably.” The reply was, “No, seriously.” “Yeah, seriously. I’m sure I am too caustic at times.” The follow up question, “Why do you think that is?” “Because I’m frustrated with my life to a degree I never knew possible. I know that this is my last chance to start getting back on the right track, or I’ll wind up out in left field forever. I’m 27, and if I don’t get this working now, I’ll be 45 and stuck in the same damned rut. I don’t want to wind up like that. I don’t think I could take that.”

And that’s what it boils down to. With everything that’s been thrown at me, not a lot still strikes fear into me. The idea that I’ll wind up missing that last exit, that still scares the hell out of me. And I just can’t seem to figure out quite how to make it happen.

Time to get a little sleep…

[ music | Dido – Do You Have A Little Time ]

Several weeks ago I sent in a proposal to MoFo about licensing, and still haven’t recieved an answer back. Rather than let all this time continue to go by wasted, I’ve decided to at least test the waters, as it were. A long time ago I took several old Mozilla.org images, and recreated them in Illustrator so they would scale better for large printing. Turns out it’s rather expensive to do these on a one by one basis. So why not leverage the economies of scale? If we sell a thousand of these things, we get them much cheaper and better quality than you could swing at Kinkos.

So, to find out if this is feasable while I wait to hear about licensing rights from MoFo, why not take a 45 second survey? It’s in an iframe right here. No personal information is collected. Please be nice and just submit once, so I don’t get over inflated numbers. If there’s a big enough interest, and MoFo greenlights me with licensing, we can make this happen! I’ve tried to guesstimate the price at around $20-$25 tops, but it could be less depending on the response.

Thanks.

[ music | Radiohead – Let Down ]

Yep, only eight hours left in that auction. I will admit it’s been significantly less successful than I anticipated. Less than 500 pageviews according to their counter. I didn’t entirely expect it to sell, but I DID expect more viewership…

[ music | Nirvana – The Man Who Sold the World ]

Well, this is it. I’ve put my ad-space offer thing on eBay. With any luck at all someone will notice it and spread it around the world, and even buy the damn thing. I started it at $1,000 because it’s more honest than a reserve price with a starting bid of $1, and the Buy It Now price of $5k because that’s my pie in the sky dream. We’ll see…

[ music | Cursive – A Disruption In The Normal Swing of Things ]

When I told the telco to cut the DSL, they somehow assumed I meant the whole damn phone line. So I’ve spent the past week getting my phone back on since tuesday morning. They’re so cute, they cut it at 4:50pm monday.

I would have been online THURSDAY (the turn-on date), but there was a line fault, and then friday the service ticket somehow never got entered on thursday, so I had to be up NOW on saturday for the telco dude. Me being up at 8am on a saturday should be illegal. I’ll be blogging again as normal soonish.