Up for Air

So I’ve been travelling two out of the last three weeks. I spent last week in Vegas for EMCWorld. Which I’ll detail later. I’ve had no time to really keep up with blogs or anything like that and finally skimmed my way through the morass today. During that time, Greg Peters has delivered on the Dumb , we’ve explored leaky levees, and more election stupidity than you can shake a stick at.

One thing about venturing into the great world outside of the Isle d’Orleans is the trepidation I had about encountering others and telling them where I lived. There are so many misconceptions about New Orleans and so little real news. And of course, there are the haters and the wingnuts. Would I encounter any? Would I be able to contain the rage that so easily bubbles to the surface and instead be a coherent witness and ambassador for my home?

I am pleased to say that to a person, everyone I encountered was sympathic and genuinely open and interested to here a bit about what has really been going on here. They all had an awareness that their understanding of “what is going on down there” is limited to traditional press reporting. Still, it’s hard to answer the inevitable “how’s the rebuilding going?” in any easy, short fashion.

Some wanted to hear a bit more than others and I always warned that I could literally go on for days on end about this subject. One guy was really surprised to learn that 80% of the people got out in advance of the storm and that from the perspective of those who had the means to escape, this had been the most successful evacuation yet. “When you see it on TV it looks like tons of people stayed behind.” “No,” I said, “the poor people who didn’t own cars and didn’t have any option to escape even if they wanted to stayed behind” “Wow. I didn’t realize that”.

I never once encountered the negativity others have when they’ve travelled or that I’ve seen on the net. I found it encouraging.

I had never been to Vegas prior to this trip. It was … okay …. It didn’t help matters that I was by myself on this trip. If the wife had been able to break away, we could have made a vacation out of it. As it was, I decided to hang on to my cash since someone else was footing the bill and get the most out of the EMCWorld geek experience. I’ll have a bit more on that thorough geeking out a bit later.


Scott Harney

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