Yet another personal account of the disaster in New Orleans.

I was born in Louisiana and lived here for most of my life. We cajuns have always lived with the nagging fear of death and destruction falling from the skies. We remember Betsy and Camille. We've also seen the loss of our barrier islands and marshes that served as a buffer against the storms and knew that something bad was going to happen sooner or later.

My family is from Houma and the surrounding communities, about 60 miles south of New Orleans. Parts of Houma are 12 feet above sea level, whereas New Orleans averages about 5 feet below sea level, so in my seven years of living in the Big City, my first choice of where to evacuate (I've done this three times now, go figure) was south to Houma, a direction that always puzzled quite a number of my friends.

When I finally went to bed that Saturday, I suspected that the storm would at least sideswipe New Orleans. If memory serves, the winds were up to 135 MPH, but when I woke up 4 hours later at 6:30 AM (thanks, Amber), they had increased by 30 MPH. I couldn't believe that the windspeed had increased so much in such a short time. The storm looked huge on TV, and its eye stared at me onimously. I knew right then that we had to leave Metairie. We lived right off Metaire Road in Old Metairie at about 8 feet elevation, but I had been listening to Bob Breck for 7 years rant and rave about the bowl filling up and drowning everything in the entire metro area, so sticking around was not really an option.

To tell the truth, I really didn't feel comfortable weathering the storm at my parents' house. I was sure the storm was going to hit Terrebonne Parish. Andrew back in the 90s did considerable damage to the parish, and my Mom said that when the hurricane passed by, they thought the roof was going to come off due to the high winds. Fortunately, their roof sustained only minor damage. I was afraid that Katrina would pass even closer to their house, and that perhaps even the eye wall would pass over the area. My heart was filled with fear about the winds, because of the fact that in the space of just a few hours, the winds increased by 30 MPH, and by late morning they were reaching 175 MPH. I feared that they were going to strike our parish at speeds approaching 200 MPH, which would totally destroy any house standing in its path, in my mind. After talking it over with my Mom, I reluctantly decided to head down to their house to ride out the storm.

I managed to get our two vehicles packed and on the road by 12:30PM Sunday. I took what I deemed essential --- my business records, a few data CDs, 3 laptops, my desktop and a new server I had just acquired, the technical books I had recently been studying, and a few changes of clothes. My wife also packed the things she thought were necessary into her car and we left the city.

Airline Highway was jammed with cars, so we took the overpass to Jefferson Highway, made it to the Huey P. Long Bridge, and headed westbound down US Highway 90. As I anticipated, there was a bit of traffic from Avondale to Boutte. Once we got past the I-310 interchange, traffic was flowing quite well, and I think I got up to 65 MPH for a mile or so. However, as we approached the Raceland exit, there was a line of cars stretching for about a mile, and we were completely stopped for probably 20 minutes. Finally we started moving, and I considered getting off at the Kraemer exit, which would have brought us to Highway 308, but I decided against it and immediately regretted it. I did get off at Raceland once we started to move again, and 308 was clear, as was old Highway 90 (I forget the new name for it). We didn't have any more trouble getting to Mom's house.

During the drive to Mom's, my wife and I communicated with a pair of walkie-talkies I had picked up at Home Depot a few months earlier. I hadn't ever used them until the hurricane, but they worked very well, to my surprise. Incidentally, the trip normally takes 1 hour, but with all the traffic we made it in about 2.5 hours.

It's been a whole 2 weeks since the FCC decided to let Bell stop sharing their lines with independent DSL providers, and I'm already out of a job. Admittedly, I'm only going to lose a couple hundred dollars a month, but I'm angry nonetheless.

My company provides occasional tech staffing for a smallish DSL provider less than 100 miles from New Orleans, and I was notified late Friday that as of October 1, they will be shutting off DSL service to their customers. I figured something like this would happen, since I started seeing commercials a week ago advertising DSL for $24.95 from BellSouth. My client (who asked me not to tell anyone about their decision until after they notified their customers, which is why I'm being evasive here) simply can't compete with $25 per month DSL.

In other words, Bell lowered their retail rates, but not the wholesale rates they quote to third-party vendors. The whole point of the AT&T breakup in 1984 was to stop Bell from using monopolistic practices against its competitors. I understand that the bottom dropped out of the long distance market a few years ago and they're looking for new revenue, and I'm also at least slightly sympathetic about their potential impending losses due to the the VoIP revolution, but I still say that this latest bit of deregulation was a bad move. With the stroke of a pen, the Federal Cracker Company has wiped out an entire industry.

Note to independent DSL providers: if you aren't partnered with an ILEC, you're toast.

Here are the guns I would like to one day own:

• Ruger Mark II, model MK6
• Gamo Hunter 220 airgun

Don't like my selections? Go get your own guns.

Seriously, I already have an old bolt-action .22 rifle, a Ruger Single Six .22 revolver, and a couple of old shotguns... oh, and a nifty blowgun (I can hit a coca-cola can more than half the time at 25 feet).

I'd like to step up a bit, and actually start practicing on a regular schedule. The air rifle can obviously be fired in stealth-mode and can replace the bolt-action for squirrels, and I always thought the Luger-style design looked cool, hence the MK6 :-) I really can't afford the .22 Beeman I really want, though that would be better for small game.

A posting on guru.com:

Description: We have a site with a photos folder that is around 30 GB in size. This folder is causing us trouble when trying to download as these files are enormous and we keep erroring out on download. We think it may be because of the naming convention .JPG versus .jpg or that the FTP mod that is on the server just stinks. We do not know.

Here is what we need. We need YOU to troubleshoot as to why they are not downloading right,install a different type of FTP mod and try downloading again, or find some other method to back up this folder remotely that works and re-upload this folder to our new server. If you can successfully download this folder to say a backup drive that we can send you, that can work as well.

Can you do this?

ROFL!

After much deliberation (or was it procrastination), I finally got around to putting up a ministry blog on my site. I coded the thing in PHP/MySQL yesterday, after much derision from the #perl crowd. In all of their comments about me being too naive about what actually went into writing a blog app, they never even considered that I would do it in PHP. Heh.

"What's a ministry blog?" Well, I need a place to put all my preacher-type rantings, and figured it would be best if I kept that separate from my personal diary.

I guess I'm not a very good blogger. I'll try to do better, I really will.

So what's been happening?

• I went out and got a business license about 18 months ago. I started from scratch (with maybe half a client), but gradually picked up business here and there. I'm just finishing a wiring job that will end up paying me over 7 grand (I've done 2 so far), and ride herd on quite a few company networks around the city.

• I almost cut my left index finger off while working on the jobsite mentioned above. I had been using the back end of a hatchet to knock out pre-cut holes in a fabricated beam, and forgot the hachet on top of the ladder. When I pushed the ladder forward, the hatchet fell onto my hand. This was on a Saturday, and I was the only person on the property. Had it not been for my cellphone, I might not have survived the accident (I'm a ninny, and went into shock). The ambulance came about 10 minutes after I called 911 and bandaged me up, and I actually drove myself to a doctor, who used "steri-strips" to stabilize the cut and put me in a finger split for 10 days. Whoopie.

• Ten days later, I broke a bone in my right foot. I stepped off a stack of sheetrock (drywall) at the jobsite, and onto a piece of styrofoam packing material. The styrofoam crumbled, and I went down, hard. One more trip to the doctor. They put me in a walking boot, which worked for about a week and a half. I switched to construction boots, which made getting around a lot easier.

• I'm all healed up now, and $1200 poorer, thank you very much. I need to get insurance. Oh, and I had to use a lot more temporary laborers to complete the wire-pulling than I'd budgeted for. That's what LUG members are for, I guess. Thanks, guys :-)

• I've started playing with Asterisk, the open-source PBX. I helped a fellow consultant on a 30-phone installation, and came home and got it working on my server, where I can tinker with it. One of my clients needs a few additional phones, along with voicemail for all employees, and I'm going to use Polycom SIP phones and Asterisk, tied into their existing Avaya PBX.

I wasted my last mod point on the following post by an AC. I shall have to make use of it.

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ironic
Audio pronunciation of "ironic" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (-rnk) also ironical (-rn-kl)
adj.

            1. Characterized by or constituting irony.
            2. Given to the use of irony. See Synonyms at sarcastic.
            3. Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended: madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker. ....

ironically adv.
ironicalness n.

                Usage Note: The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentence

    In 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where
    she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came
    from upstate New York.

Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence

    Ironically, even as the government was fulminating
    against American policy, American jeans and
    videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls
    of the market.

where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.

irony Audio pronunciation of "irony" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (r-n, r-)
n. pl. ironies

1.
        1. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
        2. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.
        3. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See Synonyms at wit1.
2.
        1. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).
        2. An occurrence, result, or circumstance notable for such incongruity. See Usage Note at ironic.
        3. Dramatic irony.
        4. Socratic irony.

[French ironie, from Old French, from Latin rna, from Greek eirneia, feigned ignorance, from eirn, dissembler, probably from eirein, to say. See wer-5 in Indo-European Roots.]
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

fill out in response to stupid spam ideas. not written by me, shamelessly stolen.

------------------------

Your post advocates a

( ) technical
( ) legislative
( ) market-based
( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

My wife just got her biopsy results today: no cancer!

...it took 3 months to get the results. Let that be a lesson to those who think they want socialized medicine (she went to a state hospital). Grr...

In other news, I'm picking up a little work here and there, so we've got a little money coming in. I'm really hoping to start getting some new clients who are interested in putting Linux in their server rooms (and on their desktops, hey...) here in New Orleans.

To all those who sent their good wishes regarding my wife's ordeal, I am very grateful for the kindness you've shown to us. Thanks. I pray that when you get into a jam, the Lord helps you, as He has helped us.

Mr. C.
Last month my wife found out she might have cancer. We are awaiting test results, etc., but as of this point we don't really know anything. We are believing God that He will bring us through it, though. While Jesus was on this earth, He healed the sick everywhere He went. Please pray with us that He will stretch out His hand and grant healing to my wife.

Crash and Burn
My main server had been giving me trouble, and I had been looking for parts to put together a replacement (I can't afford new hardware at this point) for about 3 months. Last week I was given a motherboard and chip, and put them in a case I already had along with some RAM, etc., and put up the new box. I had everything copied over to the new box and had most of the services working correctly by Friday.

Friday evening, however, the building housing my server burned down, and all was lost, including my new server. Fortunately, I have the old box here at my house, and was able to secure another location having a fast enough connection to meet my needs, and I was able to commandeer their firewall box and press it into service as a host for all of my stuff on Monday. I've gotten most of the services working, but have been spending most of my time this week working with the business owner that lost all of his stuff in the fire, locating backups, purchasing a new server for his business, working with the telephone and data providers, etc. They are having to start their entire business over from scratch. At some point I'll have another box to put up at their new location. Possibly I will be able to fix the old box and reuse that one.

Whelp, I lost my job a month and a half ago. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I was working for an ambulance chaser, and I'm certainly happy to be away from that scene, but on the other hand I'm dead broke.

I've been trying to rustle up some business selling PCs. An interesting angle I've come up with is a site I've been working on for a while now, a church directory portal for the New Orleans metro area. It's a LAMP site that's pretty useful, in my opinion, if you happen to be a churchgoer in New Orleans. If the site gets any kind of traffic, hopefully I'll get some click-through business from it. If nothing else, it's an opportunity to improve my PHP skills.

Another thing I've been doing is studying like mad to take a couple of the CompTia certification tests. I've always downed certs, but I figured out that the stuff that's covered on the I-Net+ test is the same stuff that I've been doing for 4 years now as a linux sysadmin. For the price of a book, a couple of months' reading it to make sure I fill in any knowledge gaps, and $185 (gaa...) for the test, I too can have a piece of paper to wave around in front of interviewers. The Network+ exam is my next planned conquest, and hopefully I can knock both of them out by summer's end. LPI (now that is a worthy goal, IMHO) by the end of the year, anyone?

Heh. I created a monster with this comment.

Whew!

I'm sure someone is going to read my post and jump to the conclusion that I am a racist. Of course, that's ludicrous.

I have a job.

I hate my job.

Actually, I love my job. I'm a network admin for a large law firm. We unfortunately have to support windows/novell users, but we (me and the other admin, my boss) have serveral linux servers, and use linux/oss whenever possible. I maintain the linux stuff, and all of the windows boxen. The people I work with are great, it's a lot of fun, etc. It's just the management that I hate. That and the fact that I work for lawyers.

I also do a little linux/networking/internet/whatever consulting on the side.

Other than that, I'm a preacher of the gospel. I do missions work and evangelism. I used to have a radio program (that's programme for all of my british friends), and will start it back up once my cashflow gets better.

I like to fish, plus I hunt some. I'm a patriotic American. I'm married. I'm bored (which i why I'm writing in a blog).

I'm one of the leaders at my local linux users group. Irc? I'm mmlj4 on EFnet, freeload and rhizomatic.

I'm a cajun, unfortunately living in the cesspool known as New Orleans at the moment.

I'm a trumpet player, although about all I do now is keyboards, thanks to TMJ; I also sing, and write a little.

Ok, that's enough about me. What about you? Oh yeah, that's right, I dont have comments enabled.

Lucky me :-)