Category: Daily Life

Busy Mom points out that you can donate spare change to the American Red Cross at the Coinstar machines in the grocery store.

Approximately 130 million Americans live within 2 miles of a Coinstar machine. If even half of those American donated just $1 in spare change to the Red Cross, it would raise more than $65 million to support American Red Cross lifesaving services in communities nationwide!

There is a caveat:

note that some Coinstar machines are not yet equipped with the donation option. To confirm that your grocery store can accept donations to the American Red Cross, please call 1-800-928-CASH.

Find the Coinstar machine nearest you.

Ugh, I’m plagiarizing the ARC page but the information is just too good.

How Can $1 Make a Difference?

66 pennies: Allows us to give a child any one of 11 "after the disaster" coloring books and a box of crayons.
$1: Buys one family expert safety information.
$3: Buys a comfort kit with toiletries for one disaster victim.
$6: Buys one blanket for a disaster shelter.
Quarters: Add up to dollars and $ 30 buys a pair of shoes for a disaster victim.
Dimes: Add up to dollars $ 65 buys a winter coat for a disaster victim.
$10: Buys one day of groceries for a family affected by a disaster.
$20: Buys a home clean-up kit for a family affected by a disaster.

I’m so impressed by my wife. She has worked very hard to help a family from New Orleans. She does this frequently making a call to someone she knows, writing an anonymous letter here or there, or pulling off some small miracle and always without seeking credit, thanks or reward. She is a really good person! I’m lucky and honored to have her for my wife.

What would you do if you were faced with running out of food for your family with no source of replacement food around? Sounds like a New Orleans question but it happens in other places. What would you do as you got in the tub and realized that there was no more shampoo. Then as you soaked you thought about your phones being shutdown. You pondered the refrigerator dwindling down to its last scrap and the dog’s bowl becoming empty. You realized that when the gas tank hit empty your travel would end. At sometime electricity would drop and you would be without means of recovery.

Yesterday, or the day before–they all blend now–someone even said this is a weekend and that its got 3 days in it–who would know, Amy sits in my lap and has these words:

Amy climbing into my lap: I’m going to disappeared your computer.
Amy extends those cute little arms and holds her fingers up so that her hand is 90 degrees to her arms and palms are parallel to the monitor. She then using her whole arm moves her hands in concentric circles: woo woo woo wooo.
Amy: There, I disappeared your computer. It’s gone.

With a laugh and a tear in my eye I wrapped up what I was doing and spent some time with Amy.

Student: Why can’t I get help?
Master: Have you asked?

The end is near.

From WhiteHouse.org

Wow! That’s a really BIG fan. Why’s that elephant standing in front of it?

Hello George! It’s back. You have terrorism on American soil during your watch again. The terrorists are in New Orleans blowing up the chemical factories. Your inability to bring order to the city is exponentiating the disaster. Please quit playing president and actually try to be a president for a few days. Sincerely, a voter.

There is a podium and camera crew set up in the parking lot of the State Trooper’s Office near West Town Mall.

Here’s an article that was written in response to Ivan. "What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans?"

If you want to read or listen to the radio chatter in New Orleans then the following links might be useful to you. You will need a program like mIrc or Chatzilla or Trillian to participate in irc:// but just a browser for http://. I will make this a more meaningful post later.

http://216.22.26.45:8002 | http://ods.org:8001/scan | http://tinyurl.com/dc4tx | http://64.202.112.69:8080/scanner | http://www.goodphuck.com:8088/listen.pls | http://us3.comclub.org:8000/no_scanner | http://stream.etherkiller.de:8000/no.mp3

http://nola-intel.org/

irc://irc.freenode.net/%23-scanner
http://216.14.30.229:8001/

irc://irc.freenode.net/%23interdictor-chat
irc://irc.freenode.net/%23interdictor

http://wiki.nola-intel.org/index.php/Radio_Info
http://wiki.nola-intel.org/index.php/Radio_Codes

You are now on irc.freenode.net #interdictor | http://www.nola-intel.org | This channel is for news and information submission only. We have set up #interdictor-chat as a place for chat. | #interdictor-digest | #interdictor-scanner -scanner2 | #interdictor-tech | #interdictor-relief | Media members, please send a message to a Channel Operator | http://www.nola-intel.org/pictures/ , http://ods.org:8001/scan feed 1, http://ods.org:8003/fema feed 2

Look closely at this satellite picture. People have used debris to spell out "help."

This says it all and it would be an injustice to even attempt to summarize his great writeup. But I will include his closing paragraphs:

So: A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration’s conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA’s preparation and planning functions were taken away.

Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It’s the Bush administration in a nutshell.

Please go read the details. I didn’t vote for him.

It’s http_referer not http_referrer. From dictionary.com:

referer

A misspelling of “referrer” which somehow
made it into the HTTP standard. A given web page’s
referer (sic) is the URL of whatever web page contains the
link that the user followed to the current page. Most
browsers pass this information as part of a request.