While on the Subject of Looting…

There’s another type of looting going on that’s just as harmful, dangerous and blatantly wrong as the criminals in the street in Louisiana; big business opportunism. On the same day that the levees were breaking in New Orleans, the gas prices at the pump in Edmonton 4000 kilometers away, were jumping up tens of percent on fuel that was already in the ground at the gas stations prior to the disaster. This is disaster opportunism at it’s worst and should be illegal. In fact, I think it is illegal in Canada, but nobody seems to be doing anything about it.

How can the supply lines for gas in Canada be so short that the suspension of operation of some oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico can have an immediate effect on gas prices all over North America? I can see how the prices would rise over time as the effect of the service interruption propagated through the supply chain, but that should take weeks or even months. Come on! It is the same bullshit that the oil companies pull when they jump the prices a couple of days before every long weekend. Its gouging, plain and simple. Only this time, its gouging that will have a real effect on the speed of the USA’s ability to recover from the crisis, and that’s just wrong.

Looting and Chaos in New Orleans

I don’t know how to react to the hurricane aftermath in Louisiana and Mississipi, and the other weather-ravaged areas in the USA. Neither, apparently, do the victims, nor the American government. After the September 11 attacks, we got to witness the best of people who have been irrevocably harmed but then rise above the dispair and pull together to improve their lot and hold up their heads. This also seemed to happen in Southeast Asia after the Tsunami, although the victims’ reactions were harder to guage due to the different style of news coverage after the Tsunami.

This time, there are many heroic people trying to salvage what they can, save whoever they can and deal with the disaster as well as possible. But, there are also people, who instead of rising above the disaster to elevate the human condition, are sinking beneath the morass to become part of, and exacerbate the disaster. The news has made reports of people running rampant through the streets in disaster-struck areas, looting and burning and shooting. There were even pictures of men stealing bags of sporting goods like runners and basketball jerseys from a New Orleans sports store. Those will presumably feed them well in the coming weeks when there will be no food, water, heat or power.

Other reports have stated that rescuers in boats have had to abandon searches due to risk from gun-weilding survivors. One report I heard on the radio said that a rescue helicopter had to abandon the evacuation of a critically injured patient from a medical facility because gun-weilding nutcases were swarming about the landing pad, and the pilot was afraid the helicopter would be hijacked.

This morning I heard a local professional footbal player who lives in Louisiana in the off season, say that the storm damage would be the least-cause of damages to his Louisiana home. He said that locals near his home knew he was a professional football player and was away from home. He was sure that his house would be looted and destroyed in the chaos down there.

The overwhelming urge to survive is fundamental to us all. Thank God I can’t speak from experience when contemplating a disaster like this, but I have to ask: Why don’t the people of the damaged areas see that cooporating and maintaining civility will maximize the chances of survival for the largest possible number of people, and it will also shorten the time necessary to get things back to normal?

Congratulations and Welcome Back Astronauts

Here’s a piece of news that nearly brought tears to my eyes: Nasa “Return to Flight” mission on board the Space Shuttle Discovery landed safely this morning at Edwards Air Force Base. The Florida landing site was not used due to persistent thunder storms.

Regardless of whatever people say about the safety or lack thereof of the Space Shuttle fleet, and no matter what people think of the space program, one thing is certain. The astronauts who fly the shuttle are heroes. Welcome home Collins, Kelly, Robinson, Noguchi, Thomas, Lawrence and Camarda.

Stuff I Didn’t Write About But Wish I Had

Sometimes I think of stuff to write about here when I’m not near the comptuer or I’m too busy at the time to write it. Here are some of the things I wanted to do a full entry on but didn’t have time.

It was warmer here a week or so ago, than it was on the same day in Jacksonville Florida. That’s despite the fact that here is about fifteen hundred kilometres North of Jacksonville. The local radio station phoned the Jacksonville city office to rub it in.

Mack and I went tobogganing together last weekend. He wanted to go so bad he was sliding his sled down the pile of snow Jennifer and I had shovelled off the driveway. I videoed him a bit with the digital camera, and then took pity (and neatly avoided housework) and took him over to the local hill. His sled is almost like Chevy Chase’s in Christmas Vacation. Zing!

We watched Around the World in 80 Days with Jackie Chan. The kids liked all the action scenes. I love the way Emily laughs when she sees something funny. Her eyes water.

I have ulcerative colitis. That sucks. Doctors like to scare the crap out of you by telling you partial information and leaving all the dire medical consequences up to your imagination.

I like my work. Sometimes I sneak downstairs in the basement at home and do work stuff on my computer. Usually, though, I try to install some software or hack something and end up breaking my computer instead.

Recently I’ve been breaking my computer trying to install Ubuntu Linux’s unstable development branch called HoaryHedgehog. I’ve been trying to install it by doing a synaptic upgrade, but the result is a b0rked system every time.

NHL Hockey morons annoy me. Why can’t the players see that they are entertainers, in the entertainment business, and that if the business makes no money, nobody will bother? And what kind of multi-millionaires need a damn union anyways? Unions are for downtrodden exploited workers in Russia. Unions are not compatible with well-educated professional workers in any field. Try negotiating in good faith, idiots. I think “Teachers Union” is the epitome of oxymorons.

Democracy in Style

For the second time in less than two months, a new democracy has shown us old western democracies how an election shoudl be performed. Admittedly, the Iraquis had a lot of help in getting to where they are in the democratic process, but the people in Iraq rose to the calling of the first democratic election there in memory with flying colours.

Like Ukraine did before them at the end of last year, the people in Iraq have expressed a will to have their voices heard, and done it in a way that puts western democracies to shame. We have our comfortable suburban school polling stations, a few minutes away from our homes, and we manage to get less than half the eligible voters out to perform our right to vote. In Iraq, they had the threat of terrorists, murderers, and fearmongers, with several polling stations actually bombed, and still near 90% of the voters turned out.

Congratulations Iraq and I hope that the future in your country is prosperous and free.

Comments Still Disabled Due to Scum Sucking Spammers

I’ve had to disable comments on my blog a couple of weeks ago when I started getting spammed in my comments. Movable Type is working on a fix to the blogging engine that I use so that hopefully I’ll be able to re-enable commenting at a later date. It seems as if spammers try to increase their Page Rank on Google by spamming your comments with links to their sites. Google ranks pages higher if they have lots of links to them. I started getting so many that it was bringing my poor little server to a crawl.

That sucks for the conversational aspect of blogs, but Movable Type is one of the most popular blogging engines out there so I expect a fix fairly soon, probably in January.

Scum Sucking Spammers

I had a bit of fun with spammers on my weblog today. I run several things on this server, one of which I access on a semi-continuous basis throughout the day. Therefore I notice when the server is having problems. I was trying to talk to the server at about 10:00 this morning and I noticed it was pretty sluggish. I went over to the server room and looked at it and noticed that the hard drive light was lit solidly, which is unusual for this box. Then I tried logging into the text console, and it took a very long time. Running the UNIX command top showed that there were many instances of perl running, and perl is the program that handles this weblog.

I suspected that somebody or multiple somebodies were spamming the comment section of the server. I have already had to disable trackback pings because of spammers. I couldn’t get to the management console of the weblog, because the server was overloaded, so I used grep to look through the comment files for unsavory content, and sure enough, my comments were laced with references to pornographic websites.

I shut down apache, reconfigured the access control to only allow access to my local network, and then got onto the blog management interface, and deleted over 1700 new comments that were posted today. Then, I changed the commenting section to require administrative approval on the first post, so that people could still comment but I’d have editorial control over what appeared on the site. Hopefully that will deter the spammers. I’ve now re-enabled public access to the site.

I want to try to upgrade my blog engine so that it has spam-prevention via a requirement for posters to enter a number that they see in a graphic on the screen, so that I don’t have to review the posts but I will still have spam protection. In the mean time, if you encounter any spammers in the real world, please give them a serious wedgie for me.

Why do Janitors Wipe Computer Screens with Muddy Rags?

Once a week, the Janitors around here seem to like to wipe all my monitors with rags that they previously used to clean mud from their boots. I’ve left them notes, I’ve complained to the management company, but it’s all to no avail. I’m considering changing the lock on my office door and taking out my own garbage just to keep the idiots out of my office. I don’t know what more I can do when I’ve got “DO NOT WIPE SCREEN” stickers with 3 cm high letters, in neon pink, stuck to each monitor. Excuse me please, I have to go get a static-free cloth.

Municipal Election Day

Time to go and get rid of our psychotic mayor whose mission in the last 3 years has been to alienate all neighbouring communities with hostile posturing at all inter-municipal meetings. There’s nothing like being on the hitlist of the councils of all the communities adjacent to our home. See ya mayor!

Winter Falls With a Thud

Well, winter is officially here, ending the golf season on the earliest date in the past 6 years (according to my dad’s records) and continuing a trend of earlier and earlier snowfalls. Over the weekend, we had about 25 cm of snow, 20 of which came in one snowfall. That’s 10 inches for you metrically challenged americans. Ahh, the joys of living in the great white North.

There were more kids outside playing in the snow this weekend than there were kids outside playing on the first really nice day of spring. I don’t know what it is about snow, but kids love it. I went out with mine, and we tried to make snowmen, but the snow wasn’t quite right for it. It was a bit to dry and fluffy. We made igloos instead, in order to comply with the american stereotypical view of Canadians.