Rand Wacker

HOWTO Backup Your Mac With rsync

SF Bike Coalition suggestions on how to handle tickets issues for RIDE BIKE:

Got a Ticket?

My Haas Business School project team is conducting a survey for our Organizational Behavior class to determine the effect of cognitive overload on an organization’s productivity. Cognitive overload includes such things as work related stress, multi-tasking, various distractions (email, IM, phone calls), and data flurries–in general, anything that takes your focus away from your current objective.

Your responses will be aggregated with all other responses to learn about overall attitudes regarding this topic. No personal information will shared.

The survey will take no more than 10 minutes of your time. We will publish our final project in mid-October for those of you who are interested in our research findings. The survey can be completed on the web right here:

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=279474

Our survey collection period runs through this Friday, September 16th, and every response counts. I thank you very much for your time and interest.

Krugman’s op-ed in the NYTimes this week well-reflects what everyone is thinking about the abysmal federal response to this disaster:

Killed by Contempt - New York Times

You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago.

I’ve had a lot of good responses to my previous posts on both sides of the issues, I really need to get comments working again.

Funny

It took me a couple of days to fully appreciate the scale of the disaster in the South this week, mostly because I wasn’t following the news super closely and because I thought “this is an industrialized country, and there’s lots of warning, how bad can it get?” Obviously I was wrong, terribly terribly wrong.

I started paying more attention to the news this morning after I heard some disturbing rumors of a rescue helicopter being shot at last night. I figured this would be an isolated incident. Parts of today I’ve sat in stunned silence and thought, “it can’t get any worse,” but it did. Rescue by boats and busses being called off because of safety issues, trucks of medical supplies being robbed at gun point, people SHOOTING AT HOSPITALS. My god, how can this be happening.

AND WHERE IS THE CAVALRY? How are we to imagine that the government can protect us from/recover from a terrorist attack if they couldn’t save its citizens from a weather event THEY HAD SEVERAL DAYS WARNING FOR. Why were there not busses lined up in the city to evacuate people after all of the auto fuel ran out and the airport closed? Afterwards, why is it taking DAYS to bring aid in to the people who are left, get the injured out, and maintain order. WHAT KIND OF PLANNING COULD LET THIS HAPPEN!?!?!

Say what you will about the looters. After an event like this, AND WHEN IT BECOMES OBVIOUS THAT NO-ONE IS GOING TO HELP YOU, you’ll do whatever you can to help yourself. But who in the world starts firing on rescue and medical workers?!?!? Have Americans drifted so far from a civil society that this is even considered? The rest of the world must be absolutely shocked at this, and we are likely losing what little respect we may have had left as a culture.

I’ll say it again though, HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN? How could we ignore the ample warning, not listen to the experts, and not at least prepare even a little bit to dig out after the worst natural disaster in the history of the country. I feel as if we should be asking frickin Canada and Mexico for aid here, because its obvious that we can’t take care of our own.

In the meantime we have to do what we can to give people some kind of help. Donate to the Red Cross, give blood, do whatever you can to aid strangers who are stranded and homeless for the next several months. Also, re-assess our own disaster plans. Living in an earthquake-prone area and close to a more dangerous urban center, I’m thinking about what would be needed to take me and my family out of the danger zone at a moments notice if the only thing we can count on is our legs. Since our governments priorities are firmly focused elsewhere these days, we really don’t have much we can count on in even the worst of circumstances.

And I ask you again, how do you feel about Homeland Security and the possibility of a surprise terrorist action in the wake of this fiasco.

From CNN:

New Orleans hospital halts patient evacuations after coming under sniper fire, a doctor who witnessed the incident says.