The Well-Rounded Sciolist

I was speaking to my dear friends George and My that now run the Mont Albert Florist and they are definitely doing a great job. I have seen their arrangements and they are certainly first class.

Mont Albert is a suburb in Melbourne Victoria, so I am on the wrong side of the country at the moment to be a regular customer at the moment! If you are in the area then pop in and tell them Troy sent you :)

More than six months since my last post - better start posting again before this blog suffers total bit rot!

The new Intel Macs are now out and there is already talk of home to install Windows on them.

Based the Apple documentation, they use Intel's EFI instead of the standard PC BIOS. This means that Windows XP 32 bit will not stand a chance, but Windows Vista is meant to support EFI so it looks like that is worth a try (well for anyone that wants to run Windows on their Mac).

OK it is 9:30pm and it is still hot - looks like summer has finally decided to start!

A friend of mine is quite interested in accurate time keeping, particular with reference to NTP - a protocol for various time servers to synchronise time. Apparently we got an extra "leap second" added between 31-Dec-2005 and 1-Jan-2006 and he has written a detailed assessment of how the leap second propagated through the NTP network.

The short answer is "not as well as it should have", but I recommend that you look at the article to see the point illustrated graphically.

I found the following from last year when sorting through my old sent items at work - seemed funny enough to relive :)

My council is having one of those "collect any junk from your verge" weeks, so I dutifully piled all my best junk up on the verge on the weekend. I clearly beat anyone in the street on sheer quantity, the competition was just a matter of who had the best quality junk.

Well the early bird scavengers were cruising already on Sunday, crawling past with eagle eyes. Some had trailers hitched, others made do with back seats and roof racks. I remained calm well encountering the junk collectors, I was sure that a sales pitch would scare them off.

Sunday was quiet - just got rid of power cord for a Commodore 128D - he was clearly tempted by the actual computer too, but he settled for the cord only.

Monday after work and the pile looked no different except an old briefcase was gone - depression was starting to hit.

Tuesday after work and I realised that some major sales had been made - no need to doubt the high quality of my junk. Some of the highlights:

• IBM P75 with no RAM, no IDE cables
• IBM P75 with no RAM, no IDE cables, no IDE drives
• Commodore 128D + joysticks
• Commodore 9 pin dot matrix printer
• Mac LC630 with no RAM, no floppy, no CD, no memory, no drives
• 17" monitor that probably didn't work
• 2 hubs without power supplies
• 1 rack mounted hub
• 1 bag with busted zippers
• 2 dressing tables with drawers
• 1 very old chair

Interesting, I had gained two shovel heads - obviously someone thought that my junk was so good that they had to make space! No interest in the old trampoline frame and the fake wood look colour TV?

Strangely my neighbour resents the scavengers going through his junk - some people are weird don't ya reckon :)

ps - speaking of junk, as of today, I am no longer an e-bay virgin!

I was aware that Katrina had devastated New Orleans, without actually being aware that Katrina had devastated New Orleans.

I got put onto the Interdictor blog by a link from slashdot. This guy is with a hosting company that has basically refused to allow the circumstances to stop them - apparently their disaster recovery plans are much more comprehensive than any I have ever prepared!

Of course, it is the human side of it that has the most impact. From yesterday:

Three days ago, police and national guard troops told citizens to head toward the Crescent City Connection Bridge to await transportation out of the area. The citizens trekked over to the Convention Center and waited for the buses which they were told would take them to Houston or Alabama or somewhere else, out of this area.

It's been 3 days, and the buses have yet to appear.

Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.

There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like -- all of them in dire straights.

Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.

The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians.

The buses never stop.

Before the supplies were pitched off the bridge today, people had to break into buildings in the area to try to find food and water for their families. There was not enough. This spurred many families to break into cars to try to escape the city. There was no police response to the auto thefts until the mob reached the rich area -- Saulet Condos -- once they tried to get cars from there... well then the whole swat teams began showing up with rifles pointed. Snipers got on the roof and told people to get back.

He reports that the conditions are horrendous. Heat, mosquitoes and utter misery. The smell, he says, is "horrific."

He says it's the slowest mandatory evacuation ever, and he wants to know why they were told to go to the Convention Center area in the first place; furthermore, he reports that many of them with cell phones have contacts willing to come rescue them, but people are not being allowed through to pick them up.

Addendum: Bigfoot just called to report that "they" (the authorities) are cleaning up the dead bodies at the Convention Center right now.

And from today:

The city is starting to feel more secure now. Much larger military and Homeland Security presence and many fewer civilians left. Of course with this added security comes additional dangers like hyper-suspicious, armed authorities. If you watch the cam or walk the streets, you see that almost every civilian is approached, evaluated for threat potential, then either patted down or left alone. The disconcerting thing is that these authorities always have their guns at the ready and look like they're enjoying intimidating the people. Two of us have already had guns aimed at us by police -- Brian by the Federal Cops guarding the Boggs Federal building while we were waiting for the resupply, and me when we were delivering the router to City Hall.

Don't get me wrong, some guys are more professional than others. You can tell the ones who took the job because they wanted to bullies and who took the job to protect and serve. That's one thing a catastrophic situation does -- it sifts people's true personalities out.