/dev/random

My community is collecting items such as clothing, blankets & pillows, radios, flashlights, canned goods, diapers, children’s toys & books, etc. to send to hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. In addition, people can offer help to new orleans residents on this page. Of course there’s always Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. If you’re a [...]

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Via nancies.org: DMB will play a benefit concert for New Orleans-area hurricane victims, Billboard reports. They’re adding a fourth show to their three-night Red Rocks stint, on September 12, with all proceeds benefiting victims of Hurricane Katrina. Tickets will go on sale next week. Thanks to Susie Lake for the tip.

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Remember the Kutztown 13? It seems their case has been resolved. n meetings with students over the last several days, the Berks County juvenile probation office has quietly offered the students a deal in which all charges would be dropped in exchange for 15 hours of community service, a letter of apology, a class on [...]

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Racism

Originally uploaded by dustin3000.

Look at the two of these photos on Yahoo News - notice anything different between them? According to Yahoo, black people “loot” — white people “find.”
(via Boing Boing)

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My little trial of Opera is over. I got fed up with its quirkiness & went back to Camino (at least until it starts crashing or slows down).

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I switch browsers frequently because I get annoyed with the one I’m using. I try to keep my bookmarks pretty much in sync between browsers using URL Manager Pro, and I usually add new bookmarks to del.icio.us rather than my browser’s bookmarks.
Right now I’m trying Opera as my default browser, thanks to the free [...]

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Via Flablog: Could this be another Jerry Rieger? Jeb names ultraconservative think tanker with Congressional ambitions as Florida’s chancellor of K-12 education. (And self-described creationist) See the Fla. Politics post comparing coverage. Related: The Austringer wonders if Florida will be the next flash point for people trying to teach Intelligent Design/Creationism in public schools.
Also, Wired [...]

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I was surprised to find this song in iTunes Music Store after hearing it on Link TV’s world music show. I checked LinkTV’s store and they didn’t have it. That song immediately caught my ear since it sampled “Ay Chona La” by Youssou N’dour.

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Professional AC installation

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

I had to have my air conditioning unit repaired after it started leaking a few days ago. When the guy moved the ceiling tile to access it, this is what we found lurking. I can’t believe it was like this since I’ve lived here.

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Thankfully we missed the worst of Katrina. It was only a category 1 storm when it hit us and it’s now far away from us. After it left south Florida, it strengthened to category 5 and it’s now heading towards New Orleans. This is going to be really bad. Hurricane Andrew was a category 5 [...]

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We escaped with little damage other than a lot of downed trees and a few signs destroyed. Luckily we never lost power, although much of the surrounding neighborhood still has no power. The Publix around the corner has only emergency power with no refrigeration or air conditioning. The ATM was working & they were selling [...]

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For the last few days I’ve been getting weird feedback emails for all of my websites. I get 3-4 of them with random bogus addresses at my website’s domain and containing empty multipart MIME messages containing only the mime section headers. It looks like someone is trying to hack my feedback forms, most likely a [...]

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Katrina demonstrated that there’s no such thing as a ‘minimal hurricane’. Katrina was barely a category 1 storm and the winds we got here didn’t even reach hurricane strength, yet we had as much damage as we did last year from Frances & Jeanne, which were category 3 & 4 storms that didn’t hit us [...]

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Is something missing?

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

The wooden “Embarcadero” sign in front of the clubhouse is gone.

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08-26-05_1351

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

A whole stalk with 6 flowers broke off this orchid during the storm. Yesterday I noticed the stem was bent & I planned to cut it off and put the flowers in a vase, but it got blown away before I could do it.

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Damaged tree

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

No major damage and we never lost power. There were a lot of branches down and a few damaged screens. The worst damage we had was this newly planted palm tree that got taken down. I’ve posted a full gallery at www.mcdevzone.com/gallery/katrina.

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It’s now 11:45PM. The wind died down but it’s still raining.

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We’re getting hit by the worst part of Hurricane Katrina right now. The rain is very heavy and we’ve had some strong gusts of wind. A lot of trees are down & most of the neighborhood is without power. Our condo is one of the only places that still has power around here, just like [...]

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Via Daily Kos (original link):
Montana’s governor wants to solve America’s rising energy costs using a technology discovered in Germany 80 years ago that converts coal into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel.
The Fischer-Tropsch technology, discovered by German researchers in 1923 and later used by the Nazis to convert coal into wartime fuels, was not economical [...]

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Via Daily Kos - Bob Davidson, a scientist who is also a devout Christian, was at first attracted to Seattle’s Discovery Institute but soon saw through their psuedo-science:
“I’m kind of embarrassed that I ever got involved with this”
“It’s laughable: There have been millions of experiments over more than a century that support evolution,” he says. [...]

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