August 2006 Archives
A year ago today, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi.
The storm surge on that day wrecked the house where I grew up, my home for over half my life, where my parents still lived. My parents themselves had evacuated, thankfully, and it took them most of a week to make their way back to learn the extent of the destruction. Vast swaths of the area where I grew up were washed away entirely. A city that I loved and romanicized was flooded.
That's just my personal view of the loss. Many lost so much more -- lives, family, livelihoods -- either in the storm itself or due to incompetence and negligence after the fact.
In the past year, my parents have resettled and started a new life for themselves. Other have done the same, or been able to start reconstructing their lives in the affected areas. Many more, though, seem to be stuck in a kind of limbo, without the resources to make a new start.
So much more I wish I could say, but can't find the words...
- "What hurt more, Sidarth said, was when Allen gave him a sarcastic welcome to his own country, his birthplace even."
- "...the 20 castaways for Survivor: Cook Islands will be grouped by race, with competitors divided into four tribes consisting of whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics."
- "The church was 'afraid Joe might come with his people and have blacks in the church,' Stevens said."
- "Nine black children attending Red River Elementary School were directed last week to the back of the school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children."
Well, that's what it looks like as the Websites as Graphs visualization tool reads, maps, and arranges the DOM of a web page as a graph. I can't pretend that it's particularly useful in its current form (though ading some mouseovers to show what part of your page a node represents might help), but it's sure nifty to watch working.
The biggest news in the weblog world in the past week or so seems to be the new weblog posting tool spewed forth from the maw of Redmond. Still in beta, the Windows Live Writer seems to be getting favorable comment here and there. While it appears to have been created for Windows Live Spaces (no, I don't have a site there yet), and will probably tie into the ever-expanding Windows Live agglomeration in other ways, it has a surprising amount of support for other sites and back-end tools.
Yes, I'm trying it out. No, I'm not entirely sure what to think of it. As the screenshot here shows, it gives me a pretty WYSIWYG interface, even pulling my template down from the server for the background. I'm so used to typing in my own raw HTML that I'm switching back and forth between "Web Layout" and the HTML source to get things laid out the way I want them. At least it doesn't seem to produce the kind of horriffic back-end markup I've come to dread from other Microsoft products. I'm mildly afraid of the built-in "Insert Picture..." feature, until I know where the tool plans to store my graphics (I'm betting some service named "Live" is involved), so I'll stick with Flickr, or maybe my own gallery, for now. While it does have some metadata support, it doesn't give access to Movable Type's new tag functionality, so I'll have to go into MT later and add tags.
Nitpicks aside, this is a handly little tool, and I'll have to see how I like using it over time.
P.S. The tag formatting in the current (Purple Crush) theme I'm using looks like ass. I think I'll have to go in and dink with the stylesheet at some point if I decide to stick with this design.
So, it's been six months since my last post. I know, bad weblogger, no biscuit.
Now, I'm trying to get this weblog started up again. New host, latest version of Movable Type. Still tinkering with the design, which may change pretty radically, especially over the next couple of weeks. I'm hoping to post fairly regularly again, at least a couple of entries per week, and avoid another unintended hiatus.
What have I been doing for the last six months? Working. Posting on LiveJournal, and tinkering with other social-network-ish apps. Watching my parents get settled into their new home in Paducah. Occasionally trying to learns some new technologies. It's been pretty quiet lately.
Anyway, welcome back, if there's anybody out there.
