ItSeemstoMe

Phuket 1st-Person Account

http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com/

Evelyn Rodriguez is superb writer with a keen eye and a sense of irony. She was slammed by the tsunami at Phuket Beach, had her knee gashed open so she could see the bone, had to hobble the streets of Bankok on crutches to get a temp passport and had the SJ Mercury report on her return as if it were an adventure vacation of some sort.   She talks  about how losing her clothes, getting too little sleep and having no shampoo become trivial whle seeing the trauma and personal losses of others. I've been reading dozens of personal experience reports, but hers is the most moving, the most informative and the wisest.

Resolution Postponed

I had a bunch of things I was going to post yesterday and today including some really funny New Year's resolutions.  Some how they all seem inappropriate and much less funny than they sounded a few days back. I had some observations about $500 Macintoshes and about a photo of Rober Scoble looking like a rock star, surrounded by local beauties, but photos coming out of 11 afflicted nations of South Asia seemed to over shadow them.

I'll table my personal wit and pontifications for a few days, and keep posting any information, links or thoughts about this horrible close to an otherwise uneven year.

I was going to wish everyone a joyful and prosperous new year.  Instead, let me just wish you a safe and healthy 2005,

US Aid Raised to $350m, Source Says

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7215327

The United States will provide $350 million in aid for victims of the devastating tsunami, a government official said on Friday. Details of the aid package were still being worked out and it was not clear whether the money was in addition to the $35 million already pledged, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

I'm not certain why this had to be leaked under conditions of anonymity, but this is a good step, a ten-fold increase in the mousepile contribution announced a day earlier by President Bush.

The U. S, is also reportedly dispatching two airline carriers to South Asia, which may help in getting supplies to the millions who need it but are cut off from roads and land-based supply lines.

Bacon's to Track Bloggers

BL Ochman reports that Bacon's , the granddaddy of newspaper clipping services will soon start tracking 250 of "the most influential bloggers."  They won't say who they are or how they were selected, but managed to send a backhanded slap at Technorati, PubSub et al, buy saying no one currently does an adequate job of determining who is influential.  We shall see how this erstwhile paper-based company managed to show up the neophtes in the Information Age.

Personally, all efforts to determine who is most influential and who represents the A list is tantamount to turkeydoo.  If I wrote in technology and I only had four readers or links, and they were Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Scott McNeely and Steve Jobs--how influential would I be?  The issue really is who do you wish to influence?  The power of the Blogosphere seems to me to be in our collective number, not our individual scores.

In any case, Welcome Bacon's seriously.  Your clips will help educate mainstream business of the power and influence emerging from the Blogosphere.

eBay Revokes Microsoft Passport

Microsoft Calls It Quits

By TechWeb News

eBay announced it will soon drop support for Microsoft's Passport for log-in to the site and will discontinue alerts sent via Microsoft's .Net alerts. Microsoft responded by saying that it will stop marketing Passport to sites outside its own stable.

Microsoft has decided to stop marketing its sign-on service to other Web sites, the Los Angeles Times confirmed Thursday. The pull-back, which had been long predicted by various analysts, follows a stormy life for Passport, which among other things, suffered a pair of security breakdowns in the summer of 2003 that could have led to hackers stealing users' IDs.

It seems to me that Microsoft is changing its strategy and backing off in areas, outside its own permiter.  First IE seems to be standing still and taking a pounding from Firefox, Now Passport and .NET seem to be tanking taher than responding. It's not only security, I think, but a good way to keep DOJ off their backs.  I would guess, we'll see little upgrading on Mac, Linux and other platforms as well.

Where to send Tsunami relief Aid

I've check a few, and this one seems to be among the most comprehensive.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/m/a/map408/tsunami.htm

It also makes a great recommendation: Let Google use Adsense to make donation transactions easy and universally accessible.

A Case for Slavery

My virtual friend Daniel Cruz reports on a Southern Christian School's booklet giving the pro-slavery argument, including the observation that:  "it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence."

The Lone Democrat

Students at Cary Christian School, in North Carolina, are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures." The principal of the school, Larry Stephenson, has said that the school is just trying to expose the students to different views like how the South justified slavery. He goes on to say that the booklet is used to explore what the Bible says about slavery. "You can have two different sides, a Northern perspective and a Southern perspective," he said. Stephenson did say that slavery was wrong and the south was wrong for the slave trade, he just thinks that you should have both sides of the story. He also says that the booklet can help form pro-slave arguments in case of a debate on the subject. "A student may be assigned an opinion they may not agree with, so they will understand both sides," Stephenson said.

    Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, doesn't seem it that way. He questions how the school can condone a booklet that asserts that slavery "was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence." "What these men have written is an apology for slavery," he said. "They're putting window dressing on an abhorrent institution."

    Here are some excerpts from the booklet:

"Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence." (page 24)

"Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care." (page 25)

"But many Southern blacks supported the South because of long established bonds of affection and trust that had been forged over generations with their white masters and friends." (page 27)

    A life of plenty? Yeah, that's a booklet I want my kids to be reading. I wonder if "Mien Kempf" is required reading at this school as well. I mean if you talk about Holocaust/WWII you have to understand the other point of view no? Perhaps the kids go into Satan worshiping so they can argue on Satan's side in a debate about good and evil? They hid behind these pathetic and lame excuses to try to push their beliefs that slavery had its good points to these kids. There was nothing good about slavery. How does making people work for you against their will good? Having no freedom and tried brutally  is a good thing? These are the same people who would cry tyranny if they took a Nativity scene down from a public square. Pathetic. 

Tsunamis, Ironies & Continuity

Whenever humanly destructive disasters occur, I cannot help but notice the ironies everywhere. For example, I was moved by David Rohde's lead in this morning's New York Times on the Tsunami which spoke grimly of the "waters that stole tens of thousands of people ... on Sunday, spewed their bodies back onto beaches on Tuesday."  Rhode, who won a Pultizer for his coverage of Bosnia a few years back was in Sri Lanka.  He seems to show up wherever the most human suffering has occurred and he consistently reports the facts unemotionally, in ways that tell the readers of the horrors. Surrounding the main article were companion articles on how the whole world has been effected, and of the grim challenges, of feeding, treating and clothing people, the challenges of identifying and disposing of the bodies, and so on. 

I went on yp read the rest of the news.  A front page teaser told me of an inside review on a four-star, sushi bar, where the starting price per plate was $350.  Then there was an article about the wonderous joys found in champagne costing more than $100 per bottle, and of course a lengthy report of the death of one person--Susan Sontag's who's death will draw as much coverage any of the people discovered dead so far, or the hunfreds of thousands touched by personal loss, or the countless more who will sleep hungry and unsheltered tonight or suffer diseases aftermath diseases.

Earlier today, I was going to climb on top a soap box a write about how petty, it all seems at a time of so much destruction. But after a few hours thought I realized that this is as it should be.  I remember shortly after my father's funeral, how my brother and I slipped into a side room, away from the people who had come to his home to console us.  We were watching the last quarter of a Celtics-Lakers Championship duel.  My father would have been with us as well.  I remembered also having had  the honor of drinks with John Naisbitt on the night before PopTech less than a month after 9/11.  "Everything has changed," I lamented and he looked at me like I was among the dimmer lights on the ceiling. "No, only one thing has changed. Everything else is the same," he said.  "The rest of our lives are exactly as they were."

He was right of course, most of us will feel sorrowful pangs and experience reflective moments about this.  An already dampened holiday season may feel a bit more sad.  Extra prayers will be uttered by those who pray.  But overall, our lives will go on.  We'll enjoy our families and friends, care greatly if our favorite teams win games on New Year's Day, take in a movie or watch som TV.  Life will go on.  It always does, and in the largest sense, this is a very good thing.

End of the World Postponed

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_update_B_041227.html

The same folk who predicted Earth could get smacked with an asteroid in 2029, have decided they were wrong.  In the words of the Saturday Night Live's Emily Litella: "Nevermind!"

"A newfound asteroid tagged with the highest warning level ever issued will not strike Earth, scientists said Monday.

The giant space rock, named 2004 MN4, was said on Dec. 23 to have an outside shot at hitting the planet on April 13, 2029. The odds climbed as high as 1-in-37, or 2.7 percent, on Monday, Dec. 27.

Researchers had flagged the object as one to monitor very carefully. It was the first asteroid to be ranked 4 on the Torino Scale, a Richter-like measure for potentially threatening space rocks. The asteroid is about a quarter mile (400 meters) wide, large enough to cause considerable local or regional damage were it to hit the planet.

All along, scientists said additional observations would likely reduce the chance of impact to zero for the April 13 scenario, but they did not expect any significant new data to allow such a downgrading for days or weeks."

FDA Blesses New Drug. It Makes Me Nervous.

Pfizer Drug Wins OK for Blood Infections

" Drug maker Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE - news) on Tuesday said it won regulatory clearance to sell its anti-fungus medicine Vfend to treat serious hospital-acquired bloodstream infections."

This used to be the sort of thing, that I would have cheered as good news.  But recently, FDA approval doesn't carry the credibility it used to.  Maybe this is what the incumbent president meant by getting government pout of peoples lives.  Unfortunately, without a watchful government regulator in certain areas, we end up taking the lives out of the people, the drug companies claim they will save.