I got this email today. I was rather offended. Here is the original email:

—–Original Message—–

Subject: Catagory “5” Blizzard Emergency

This is an actually weather bulletin from a county emergency manager just outside a small town in western North Dakota after a recent snow storm.

WEATHER BULLETIN

Up here in the Northern Plains we just recovered from a Historic event — may I even say a “Weather Event” of “Biblical Proportions” — with a historic blizzard of up to 44″ inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10’s of thousands.

FYI:

George Bush did not come….
FEMA did nothing….
No one howled for the government…
No one blamed the government.
No one even uttered an expletive on TV…
Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit.
Our Mayor’s did not blame Bush or anyone else.
Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else either.
CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC did not visit – or report on this category 5 snow storm.
Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards…..
No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House….
No one looted…
Nobody – I mean Nobody demanded the government do something.
Nobody expected the government to do anything either.
No Larry King, No Bill O’Rielly, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and No Geraldo Rivera.
No Shaun Penn, No Barbara Striesand, No Hollywood types to be found.
And
Nope, we just melted the snow for water.
Sent out caravans of SUV’s to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars.
The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn’t ask for a penny.
Local restaurants made food and the police and fire departments delivered it to the snow bound families.
Families took in the stranded people – total strangers.
We Fired up wood stoves.
Broke out coal oil lanterns or Coleman lanterns.
We put on an extra layers of clothes because up here it is “Work or Die”.
We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for sittin’ at home’ checks.
Even though a Category “5” blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early…we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves.
“In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% most of the world’s social problems evaporate.”
It does seem that way, at least to me.. I hope this gets passed on.
Maybe,, SOME people will get the message,, The world Does not owe you a living….

—–My Response—–

No, I did not enjoy this.

Anyone who compares a blizzard, regardless of the magnitude, to a Category 4 or 5 hurricane simply doesn’t know what a hurricane is. Let’s not even take into account the tragic flooding of unprecedented proportions that hit a city the size of New Orleans. Not even Fargo/Moorehead, which seems to require FEMA assistance every seven years is remotely close to the size or splendor of New Orleans. Nope, not even the entire population along the banks of the Red River, which seems to require FEMA assistance every so often, which is rewarded with assistance from FEMA and the federal government every so often without delay, without question, without the rest of the United States suggesting that maybe they shouldn’t rebuild their dinky little towns along a river which, generally speaking, flood the towns every seven years.

The city of New Orleans alone has a population of 1.2 Million people. That’s just New Orleans. If you count the impacted cities you’re well over 2 Million people. Now, there are estimates that about 60% of the population evacuated. So, let’s say that approximately 1.2 Million people of the 2 Million (probably less) were trapped in the impacted area out of power, under water, out of water, starving, begging for help from the government that they have invested their tax dollars in. No one came for over a week. Thousands died as a result of this. North Dakota has a total population of 642,200 people. That’s the entire state. Tens of thousands without power? Gee…wow. Try over 1.2 million people without power, water, food. Melt snow? Gee, that’s great. There was no water for these people in New Orleans. Interestingly enough, FEMA had truck loads of bottled water they didn’t truck in. Why? Ask FEMA. It took them more than a week. Why didn’t these people leave? Well, like I said they were trapped. The military and police blocked the bridges and did NOT allow them out of New Orleans. Unless, in many cases, you were white. I’ll not even address the absurdity of ‘looting’ other than to say that this was sparse and in almost all cases was out of necessity for survival.

The first time I visited to New Orleans was in 1984. I was 9 years old and my family and I were there for the World’s Fair. I fell in love with the city and the great state of Louisiana. The culture, the music, the people, the spirit of the city…words can’t describe it. My wife and I, before we were married would again visit New Orleans to enjoy the great food and incredible music. In 1999 we were married in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Some day, I would like to live in the New Orleans of my memory. However, I fear the New Orleans of my memory is gone. Of course, neither the author of this email, nor those who resend it have any idea what I’m talking about.

The world does not ‘owe you a living,’ but we are Americans, we are citizens of the greatest and richest country in the world, more importantly we are human beings and we do owe our fellow man a little decency. The fact that these people’s tax dollars fund FEMA and our federal government just as much, if not more (in sheer numbers), than those in North Dakota who receive federal assistance when the Red River floods aside, let’s show them a little human decency and care for their lives and well being.

“In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% most of the world’s social problems evaporate.” Well, this person clearly hasn’t traveled far from their “small town in western North Dakota.” I have, and I know better. The social problems found in the north are the same as those in the south. I don’t care if THIS gets passed along. Whether someone gets the message or not, I don’t care. It’s not my purpose to ‘teach’ others my perspective about how I or they or we are better than someone else because we live in some place rather than another or because we have a different color skin. On a final note, it’s pretty clear to me that this has some pretty racist overtones.

No, I did not enjoy this.

~ Aaron

This Web 2.0 company is clearly going to be an industry superstar.

Gah!! I’m losing IQ points by the minute from these sites.

Firefox Moves Farther Ahead of the Hunt

The browser that finally broke Microsoft’s monopoly just got its first major update. If you haven’t switched from Internet Explorer yet, consider Firefox 1.5 your invitation to do so.

Agents’ visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

I have a copy of this book somewhere. Does this make me an enemy of our new police state?

Pre-War information was clearly distorted, hyped and fabricated. Here are just a few points that plainly illustrate this:

Point: 10 days after 9/11 the President’s Daily Security Briefing stated there was: “few credible links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Later CIA reports said the same thing. Yet, for three years after receiving the initial President’s Daily Security Briefing the administration officials continued to say that there were important connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda to the point where nearly half the country believed it.

Point: Mohammed Atta never met in Prague with Iraq officials — he was in fact in Virginia Beach at the time. In fact, the CIA and FBI told the Bush administration most certainly did not take place. Yet, Dick Cheney frequently claimed this as a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda for years after being debriefed to the contrary.

Point: Iraq never sought fissile material in Africa, or as far as we know anywhere else during the Bush Administration. Yet, Dick Cheney and other members of the Bush administration, including G.W., continued to proclaim the truth of this for more than a year after Ambassador Joseph Wilson proved this to be untrue. Oddly enough, it was the Vice-President’s office who asked this to be validated and had sent Ambassador Wilson to Africa and received for validation: “absolutely untrue, provably so.” However, in speeches throughout the country the administration continued to claim it to be true. They even included this outright lie in the State of the Union Address.

Point: The administration continued to assert the Iraqis had mobile factories that could make biological weapons long after they knew this not to be the case. The Iraqi defector codenamed: ‘Curveball’ was discredited and this was known by the Whitehouse, as is corroborated in writing.

Point: The Whitehouse continued to claim Iraq had provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training even after they knew this to be untrue. The Defense Intillegence Agency informed the Whitehouse that the source of that information was almost certainly lying.

Need I go on? Dishonest and reprehensible indeed Dick.

Think it cant be done? Think again!

Britney Gallivan has solved the Paper Folding Problem. This well known challenge was to fold paper in half more than seven or eight times, using paper of any size or shape.

…

The exact limit for single direction folding case was derived. It is based on the accumulative limiting effects induced by each and every fold in the folding process. Considering the intricacy of the problem the equation has a relatively simple form.

For the single direction folding case the exact limiting equation is:

where L is the minimum possible length of the material, t is material thickness, and n is the number of folds possible in one direction.

L and t need to be expressed using the same units.

More details here [Wolfram].

Starwars.com

In Southern California, George Lucas Beats Dead Horse

The power of the Force meets the power of the Allspark with a new assortment of Star Wars vehicles from Hasbro that are actually robots in disguise. Star Wars Transformers combine the classic characters and vehicles from a galaxy far, far away and transforms them into mighty mechs with seamless Star Wars alt-modes. This first wave of unique crossover toys includes four ‘bots, with a mix of good and evil to wage shapeshifting battles among your other Star Wars or Transformer toys. Each figure also comes with a miniature pilot.

Darth Megatron

Optimus Kenobi

Luke Starscream

This has now gone too far. This is an outrage. This is wrong. This is just plain awful. Next year we will also see the arrival of Cabbage Patch Vader, and Leia Kid Sister.

I have had my PPC-6700 for about a week now. In the beginning I was a tad disappointed; specifically with Outlook Mobile. Let me start by stating that there is no push mail unless you are using MS Exchange ’03. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you won’t care. That aside my problem with Outlook was that I originally had the device synching with my Laptop/Desktop Outlook. This meant that it created it’s own set of directories for the synched Outlook. Then in order for me to send/receive email using my usual MindTouch POP3 account I had to setup another account, which meant that it created another set of the usual Outlook directories. Get ready for this, I couldn’t even reply to emails that were synched from the Laptop/Desktop Outlook client. So, I would synch, run out of the office and couldn’t reply to the emails that were synched. Incredibly lame! Well, Steve resolved the problem for me by altering my behavior in a very simple way: don’t synch email. I leave email on the server, and receive email on my device from the previous three days. Very obvious, very simple. Leave it to Steve to point out that which is right in front of my face. Sure, no push email, but I’m satisfied with email now.

A big complaint of mine is that copy/paste is very limited. Not at all like my Treo. It should be pervasive throughout the OS. It isn’t. It seems to only be available in selected apps and the clipboard is not persistent between apps. This makes for providing a WEP key a real pain the ass, let me tell you. Especially when you roam between more than six different wifi networks. Another complaint is speed. I could do without some of the eye candy if the damn device would be a tad more responsive. When I am in a pissy mood and want to make a phone call to bitch someone out I want it dialing: NOW. It seems like it always lags when I am in a pissy mood and want to bitch someone out. Maybe this has something to do with the frequency of my pissy moods…I don’t know. Another point: the device tries to think for me. Often it does things (e.g. – flight mode) and I have no idea why. Slowly I am learning that it mostly has to do with holding down buttons (inadvertently) for a certain quanta at which time the button performs a different behavior than if you just tap it. Very poor design if you ask me. UeX 101: provide a system that is predictable and simple. Don’t get smart with it because users typically are not smart (myself included); more importantly, users are not going to have the same ‘smarts’ as you, the engineer. What the engineer deems as an obvious ‘smart’ move involving ‘thinking’ by the system based on the behavior of the user is almost always a bad idea. This should never be done without informing the user and giving them opt-out for the event and all future instances of it. Another huge complaint with my new PPC-6700 is that my Treo was WAY better designed for dialing a contact. The Treo was S-I-M-P-L-E. With the PPC-6700 I have to use the keyboard to get it done, which means sliding the keys out (see photo), which rotates the display (lags), and banging out a full name. The Treo would take two letters: last, first — much better design. Another complaint: I sure would like to be able to toggle through all the open apps and be able to quickly close those I no longer care to be open (in an attempt to diminish the lagginess of the OS).

What do I like about the device, now that I have bashed it extensively? EV-DO screams compared to the old Sprint data network. The display is gorgeous. I am absolutely in love with the ability to quickly and easily capture voice notes. I’m really digging audio books on the device (I liked this on my Treo too, but I constantly had issues with my Treo [I went through four in as many years]). Umm… I think there are other things. OH! The keyboard is awesome! It’s very easy to bang out a lot of text.

As an aside, who the hell named this thing? PPC-6700? I mean c’mon! Oh, SunNimubus looks surprisingly good on this device. It’s at least legible.

I’m currently scrounging for cool apps. I did find: Virtual Earth for PPC, which is pretty cool; although, I won’t get into the usabilty problems of this app here. I’ve not gotten into the dev environ setup or other apps, but I’ll now promise that in the near future I’ll follow up on both topics.