Nix Bits

Well Twitter was all abuzz about a Wordpress worm and sure enough a worm had been circulating attacking old versions of wordpress.  Well obviously I pretty much never post on this blog these days.   And wordpress is notorious for security issues.  This is partly due to the popularity of the product, partly due to problems with php itself, and probably partly due to some flaws in Wordpress’s on code. But, to their credit, they update quickly and the word doess get out.  And, to their credit, upgrading was really simple despite the many customizations I have done.  So kudos to the wordpress team.  What I didn’t want was for this thing to get hacked and have spam links spread all through it and have it ruin my google search ranking.  So there it is.

On a more fun note, we’ve been spending the past year trying to learn to lindy hop.  Maybe someday we’ll get as good as this:

Over Thanksgiving, Jennifer and I took a weeklong vacation in Paris.  We’ve been talking about going for years and just put it off and put it off and finally just decided we had to go this year or we never would.  We haven’t been on a vacation together since 2004.

So we started planning to go in the off-season.  We watched for ticket deals on Kayak.com and kept our dates flexible.  We searched for hotels and found the Hotel des Grands Ecoles in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

Doing it this way made it far more reasonable. The flight didn’t cost any more than a flight to a lot of US destinations from New Orleans. After the exchange rate, the hotel didn’t cost us any more than a typical 8 night stay in a US hotel.

We hit Paris and really did get the most out of our week there. We walked the city from end to end. It was cold, of course, but we adjusted. We even got to see snow flurries on the Champs Elysees from the ferris wheel. We climbed all 704 steps to the second level of the Eiffel tower (and took the elevator ride on the final stretch to the top). We climbed the Notre Dame, too and hit the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay, and explored the Catacombes.

And, of course, we ate. And we didn’t think twice about any of it. Foie Gras, cream, bread, desserts, whatever. In fact, we both managed to lose a couple of pounds.

One question we get asked a lot is if we were treated well. We were treated well and everyone was polite. Neither of us know French, but we learned a little bit — enough to be polite and greet people initially. The effort is appreciated. Because it’s the off-season, things weren’t so crowded and everyone was in a good mood. We were occasionally not recognized as tourists receiving French-only restaurant menus and being asked for directions more than once.

It’s definitely a trip we would recommend checking out. We took a TON of photos of course. I’ve labeled most of them with captions and all of them are geo-tagged so they can be viewed on a map. You can check out the entire set, starting here.

Wow.  Feel so happy about this day.

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

pornos gratuites

-Abraham Lincoln

I sure hope my friends who feel so very differently today will eventually come to recognize that the better angels of our nature have indeed touched us this day.

State Rep Labruzzo proposes a “voluntary” sterilization program to reduce future costs of social support programs.  When David Duke proposed the same thing back in 1991 while I was a young student at Ole Miss, my friends would ask me, “Hey aren’t you from Metairie?”  um. yeah. actually.  And it was terribly embarrassing. This is pretty much the same feeling but at least I no longer live in the district.

The main issue is that Labruzzo is, apparently, butt dumb.  He’s too dumb to even realize how dumb, racist, and ludicrous this “idea” is.  He  hasn’t even attempted to think his magical “idea” through.  Varg at the Chicory, has done the job for him in brilliant fashion. I’d like to hear him talk to fellow Republican and VP candidate Sarah Palin about this since she recently had a Down’s syndrome child that will ultimately require some government-provided social services.

Maybe we should require the CEOs of the big financial firms to get vasectomies since we are now proposing $700Bn of welfare for them.

All this reminds me of the Dead Kennedys classic, Kill the Poor. I don’t think Labruzzo would grasp the irony:

Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the neutron bomb
Its nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
But no less value to property
No sense in war but perfect sense at homeThe sun beams down on a brand new day
No more welfare tax to pay
Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light
Jobless millions whisked away
At last we have more room to play
All systems go to kill the poor tonight

Gonna
Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight

Behold the sparkle of champagne
The crime rates gone
Feel free again
O lifes a dream with you, miss lily white
Jane fonda on the screen today
Convinced the liberals its okay
So lets get dressed and dance away the night

While they
Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight

So I was taking a look at chron.com, just to see how things were really going in TX and I came across this picture.

And I thought, “Oh, man, they got the X’s.”  Just reading that front page felt so familiar and looking through photos like the one above is just eerie.  I know there’s a lot going on with the financial market disasters and political theater, but there’s a helluva lot going on down in South LA and TX.

So what’s your Sarah Palin Baby Name?  Find out with the Sarah Palin Baby Name generator.

This Time Magazine article asks the question “Could Florida Survive the Big One?”  I think the answer is “no.”  Americans, it’s time to consider abandoning the state of Florida.  We can just move Disneyworld and Universal Studios a few hundred miles inland to somewhere near Atlanta and it’s all good.

Florida is just kinda out there like a sitting duck. I’m not a geographical, hydrological, meteorological or any other kinda expert but it’s pretty obvious when you look at a map.  It’s going to happen one day.  And it’s going to be really expensive. Why should the rest of us pay to clean up what we know is inevitable? All those “snow birds” need to stop expecting the rest of us hard-working taxpayers to bail them out. It’s time to cut our losses.

Clearly Florida is way too risky. The insurance industry sure thinks so:

Industry actuaries say the problem is simple: Florida’s insurance rates, high as they may be, are not high enough for a state with an estimated 25% of America’s high-risk property.

And as an added bonus, no more “hanging chads” messing with our electoral college.

This is in response to the inevitable post-Gustav, post-Katrina editorials I recently read but will not link to.  I will, however, link to this excellent Louisiana Weekly rebuttal:

Actually, we’ve been back for a while but much too mentally drained to post. We felt an enormous wave of relief opening the door to the house and seeing everything just as we had left it. That moment of opening the door on return was so vastly different from our last evac and return.

The timing of Gustav was just too eerie, too unsettling, too close. But, as my wife said, this time we cleaned the house before we left. You don’t clean a house you don’t think you’re coming back too. When we bailed our mid-city house for Katrina, we didn’t waste time trying clean before screwing down that last piece of plywood.

So the wife went to our friends home near Jackson, MS and I went to work in Little Rock, AR. Neither one of us liked the idea of being separated at such a stressful time. For me it was a case of hurry-up and wait. I rushed to Little Rock and then we just watched and waited to see if anything bad would happen forcing our hand and requiring action. Managers would come up with various doomsday scenarios and we’d answer their questions and return to our temporary cubespace and track the storm’s progress.

I made the mistake of looking at CNN. I had forgotten how incredibly bad cable news is. Not just Fox. All of it. Absolute garbage. But twitter, on the other hand provided real news. And via twitter we found a link that aggregated all the local TV news stations so we could get decent, straightforward reporting. This and of course WWL 870 radio. So while CNN and the like were reporting “OHMIGOD the levees going to break and flood the lower 9!”, WWL’s Lee Zurik was standing directly in front of the supposedly broken floodwall with a Corp official — on the upper 9th ward side.

Still weary, a little worse for the wear, but also blessed and thankful. Because while Gustav mostly spared us, it did great damage to our Terrebonne and Lafourche neighbors that you likely won’t hear about on any national news report.

Linky-loo:

• Social Media Proves Itself as Emergency Tool – a bit more on Twitter, etc.
• How the Internet is Changing Natural Disaster Reporting
• The eye of the storm : Leaving new Orleans is not an easy choice – Blogger Maitri on the reality of evacuating.
• Maitri on her trip to the devastated Isle de St Jean “Their loss is our loss, and every bit of aid helps.” Their fate is our fate, the same refrain….
• Karen Gadbois on the same trip
• My flickr page has some Gustav evac and return photos

As if it’s impossible to forget. Especially today with the deja-vu Gustav playing with our fragile heads.