Dujodu Blog

I bought a Mac, an Apple- you know, the kind you can’t eat because they’re carved out of a solid block of aluminum (at least the cases are). This may come as a surprise to many of my friends who have sat through my anti-mac rants over the years. How did I end up changing my mind?

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I bookmark a lot of websites every day related to obscure hardware/software things for work, and my bookmarks in firefox were getting out of control. I thought about organizing them all in firefox and just trying to make sure I categorize links correctly when I add them, but the categories would easily get out of control. Many categories also tend to overlap and pages end up having equal importance in two or more places which is not good for a folder based setup (I don’t really want to double bookmark things). I’ve flirted with using an online bookmark manager in the past but laziness and/or lack of necessity usually stopped me pretty quickly. When you deal in the business of weird hardware and software combinations though there are way too many little tools/patches/extensions needed to get things up and running to remember them all so I decided it would be best to keep things organized. Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) is pretty damn good at doing that, with even less effort than it takes to bookmark things “the normal way.” One nice thing about del.icio.us is that it uses tags to organize links, not folders. So if I run across a specific tool that lets software package x talk to hardware setup y using technology z for project a, I can simply tag my bookmark “x y z a” and be done with it It’s now in four distinct categories, and will be displayed under searches for any of them (or a combination of a couple). Using an online bookmarking system has other advantages, like being able to access your bookmarks anywhere with an internet connection (without having to install some sort of bookmark sync manager), being able to link people to your bookmarks (http://del.icio.us/dujoducom/, or specific tags: http://del.icio.us/dujoducom/blog) and being able to see bookmarks from other people that bookmark similar things. Even though I initially started using del.icio.us as a simple organizational tool with little interest in much else, being able to view similar bookmarks has become a huge help. People generally tend to bookmark quality websites, so if you are trying to find information on something you can get a snapshot of “the best of the web” on any given topic by browsing through the most popular pages on any subset of tags. It is also great for finding additional bookmarks for obscure topics that might have taken you longer to find using a search engine. It’s also good to be able to bookmark things based on project, that way if I know I used a certain tool for a given project, I need only to call up the tag for that project to see a list of pages associated with it. The art of tagging takes a little while to get used to because it is a lot different than using a folder structure, but del.icio.us helps you out by recommending tags that other people used for certain pages, and once you have a tag collection of your own it will also recommend tags from your repository. That way you can be even lazier by clicking on the tags instead of having to type them in manually.

Well, that’s the end of my rant, I hope you check out del.icio.us if you haven’t already.

Firefox users, be sure to grab the del.icio.us extension for incredibly seamless and easy bookmarking!
http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension

I was watching this on C-SPAN2 today and it was pretty interesting. They had a panel of hurricane Katrina evacuees talking about the conditions before and after the hurricane. All of them had horror stories about the evacuation and recovery, people herded by gunpoint to what they described as “concentration camps.” What really caught my attention though was the serious discussion that took place about the possibility that the levee was intentionally breached to minimize damage to the upper class areas of New Orleans. The panel cited “earwitness” reports that people heard explosions, as well as divers finding craters underwater at the foot of the levees where they were breached. The committee actually had a discussion about the possibility and agreed to investigate, the evacuees requested that it be done by an independent source and even offered to fund it but were turned down. Either way, there is apparently going to be an investigation. I don’t know if we’ll ever hear about it of if it will make any sort of national news, but I thought it was pretty amazing that they were taken seriously (or at least made to believe that they were). I’m not saying I believe that there was some massive conspiracy to breach the levees, I just thought it was interesting/disturbing. Apparently it’s fairly common practice to “guide” floods in this manner to minimize destruction though. In fact the tactic was used during the Mississippi river flood in 1927 in order to save New Orleans. 30 tons of dynamite were used to breach the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana so that it wouldn’t flood New Orleans, which was owned by powerful banking families. Following the flood 13,000 African American refugees were detained and forced into labor at gunpoint as ships came to save white women and children. They were denied food, water, pay, and access to the city without tags to prove that they were working on the levee. Nearly 80 years later, not much has changed.

Don’t take my word for it though:

• PBS: Voices from the flood: Protecting the levee
• PBS: American Experience: Fatal Flood Timeline
• Book Review - Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it Changed America

The panel will continue next week, with questions for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

After officially abandoning soda for at home consumption (I still drink it while out sometimes) I had to broaden my beverage horizons. Water and water with ground coffee beans infused into it just wasn’t cutting it, so I decided to branch out. Ok, more accurately “leaf” out. I didn’t ditch the bean, but recently I’ve been very fond of the leaf. It all started when I tried some “Honest Tea.” It is simply bottled ice tea and it comes in a variety of (delicious) flavors. Their teas are flavorful but subtle, not overly sweet and not too bland. My previous exposure to tea was limited to the way too sweet Arizona iced tea that came in cans that I remember never liking. Waaaaaaay too sweet. You might as well be drinking soda or a glass of water with 2 cups of sugar in it. On the flip side of that, there are the little tea bags that are commonly found in the grocery store near the coffee aisle. Those teas are far too bland, and barely resemble the Honest Tea that I grew to love. There was only one problem with Honest Tea, the price tag. They aren’t really sold in bulk and they only come in small glass bottles that cost approximately $1.80 at most stores. This isn’t very economical, so I had to search for something a little more reasonable. I settled on gallon containers of Arizona Green Tea, which wasn’t nearly as sweet as their other teas and cost waaaay less than Honest Tea. It wasn’t nearly as fulfilling or healthy as Honest Tea, so the search wasn’t over. I soon came to realize that crappy bagged tea wasn’t the only way to prepare it. There is also “loose tea” which is kind of like the equivalent of buying coffee beans and grinding them yourself instead of settling for Folgers. I’m all for high quality coffee, so trying loose tea seemed to be the next logical step in my quest for good tea. Thankfully, my mom recently purchased a ridiculous amount of loose tea, despite not knowing how to prepare it or even how insanely much she had purchased. I decided to give it a whirl, and the results were satisfactory. The tea wasn’t nearly as good as honest tea, but it beat the hell out of tea bags. I decided to seek quality loose tea online, that way I could get user feedback and know that I was going to receive quality tea. After awhile I came across the Adagio Teas website, which looked very promising. They had an active forum, a plethora of flavors, and reviews for each one. The teas in their Green Tea sampler are definitely better than I ever expected. They are very unique and flavorful, not overly sweet, and not disgustingly bitter. Now I’m very excited to try their other teas, specifically of the oolong and white tea varieties.

At the same time my loose tea habit was developing, I took quite a liking to the masala chai (tea) that was offered at an amazing Indian buffet near MATC that I go to quite often for lunch. I’m still searching recipezaar.com for good chai recipes, I’ve found some that are decent but I’ve mainly stuck to powdered chai and some really kick ass liquid chai latte mix. It’s kind of similar to coffee, it’s like the coffee of the tea world. I approve.

I’m a little late on this one, but I’ve been thinking over a lot of stuff and I thought I’d rather post about it than just let it sit around in my head. The way the Federal and Local governments handled this situation is disgusting, and now Bush is out there trying to lead the commision to investigate what went right and what went wrong. Here are a few quotes.

George W. Bush

What I intend to do is lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong.

We still live in an unsettled world. We want to make sure we can respond properly if there is a WMD attack or another major storm.

Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people.

There are so many things wrong with these quotes that it is unbelievable. If someone was being suspected of committing a crime, I don’t think they would be allowed to “lead an investigation” to find out who commited said crime. I really don’t think Bush will be pointing any fingers in his general direction, he was after all unable to admit to any mistakes he had made during his post 9/11 presidency as of April 13th 2004 when he was asked to think of one:
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What the hell is wrong with the “news”? I’m consistantly disgusted at their complete lack of ability to inform (isn’t that supposed to be their main job?). We all know there was a hurricane, we have seen the damage it has done, we have seen the struggles that people are going through because of it. I can understand an update on the situation every now and then, that’s perfectly understandable. Why don’t they spend a little bit of time actually examining the situation? There are so many issues that come to the top of my mind as I watch the news casters explaining to us what they see in the live video from the on-site helicopters; as if we can’t see for ourselves. Why don’t they talk about global warming? I’d say it’s a relevant topic given the situation. I don’t think I’ve heard one mention of it. Another thing they’ve talked about a lot is gasoline. Another potentially great and informing topic for them to talk about. They just cycle through every person on their station saying “gas prices have gone up” without really elaborating on it. Why don’t they talk about our oil addiction? How about lack of quality public transportation? A lot of news casters have hinted about there being an evacuation call - suggesting that everyone was warned to leave. They fail to mention (everything I’ve seen anyway) that the bus lines stopped the day before the evacuation call. How are tens of thousands of people that rely on public transporation going to run away from a hurricane? The result of course being that everyone who can’t afford to own a car are left to try and survive. How about the pollutants that are going to be seeping into the ocean and devestating the local fish industry. Even more issues for valuable discussion. The lack of preperation is also pretty disgusting. The city is BELOW sea level. How did they NOT see this happening? Was Bush too busy on his vacation to acknowledge this as a problem before it was too late? I’ve got to give it to him though, it was so corageous and commanding when he cut his (record breaking) 5 week vacation short by TWO entire days to assure everyone that everything would be ok and offered the valuable advice to only buy gas if you need it. Even though Louisianna is down a bit on national guardsmen, they are over in Iraq, they could have been ready to mobilize much faster with federal aid.

This is going into a new “Rants” category. It’s kind of like an article but with no planning, less research, more opinion, and less structure. I’ll be able to post more rants than articles.