Alan Gutierrez

This was an article I drafted, but forgot to post, so I’m posting it way late…

There was an article today in the Houston Chronicle about a neighborhood meeting where Residents urge White to send evacuees home. It is disconcerting. It is especially disconcerting to hear the Katrina Fatigue sentiment echoed by a Texan who otherwise writes about Tsunami recovery.

Is there something amiss with our message if we turn off a blogger such as this?

We are not OK. But then, neither is Houston. Much of the Gulf is in disarray.

Can you expect city handle an influx of a quarter of a million people who are homeless indefinitely? It’s good that 150,000 have returned, but we know that some folks have nothing to which they can return. Rents are high. Public housing is covered in those clever steel contraptions that make entry impossible. The Road Home has not yet been paved.

It’s fashionable to pick on Texas if you are not fond of the current administration. In the last year, I’ve heard Texas described as the “world’s most maligned sub-culture”.

I love Texas. Central Texas. I’ve lived in both San Antonio and Austin. It’s a another corner of the Union that has a mix of culture, and a strong cultural identity. Good food for cheap. Real tortillas. Real music. If there was any other place that I’d live it would be in Austin, San Antonio or the hills thereby.

FEMA didn’t last a week in New Orleans. They left us.

From Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security:

For Louisiana, the savior state was Texas, which by Wednesday had opened forty-seven evacuation shelters and was preparing the Houston Astrodome for a flood of evacuees from the Superdome. Texas had a thirty-five-man water rescue team with its own boats that by Wednesday had already saved 1,100 people in New Orleans. It had also sent eight Blackhawk helicopters to the city, along with two Chinook helicopters and five fixed-wing aircraft. It sent a satellite phone communication suite, fifty game wardens with boats and trucks, four tanker fuelers, and fifty ambulances, along with 135 paramedics, nurses, and doctors. It deployed 300 military police and 120 combat engineers from its National Guard. It sent five airboats. The list went on.

The real pull quote from Houston Chronicle article is from Mayor Bill White.

“If people want do so something unlawful, then we need to catch them, try them, convict them and lock them up,” White said.

“If they’re just trying to get on with their lives, then we ought to respect our fellow Americans, and there’s not much of a home to go to.”

That is not the voice of a populist. That is the voice of a leader.

Watch this episode of NewsHour: Shelter for Katrina Evacuees for a sense of the man.

[FEMA Director] DAVID PAULISON: We usually don’t even pay for things this far into the disaster. It’s for immediate lifesaving and health issues, is what it’s supposed to be. So normally it’s used for congregate sheltering when they move out of their homes, they evacuate out of the homes into a congregate shelter or even some very immediate step into a hotel or motel. Here we’re almost six months now, so the emergency is over.

LEE HOCHBERG: But Houston’s mayor says that’s absurd.

MAYOR BILL WHITE: Not for these families that don’t have a house, the emergency hasn’t ended.

…

MAYOR BILL WHITE: Usually, the situation has been that every day, every week, I’ll have to call somebody locally, call state, call nationally. The national person will agree to something. They’ll send a national team down here that will include some of the most senior people– the administrator of FEMA, the COO of FEMA. We’ll reach certain agreements in principle and then we’ll have to call and call and call and bug them and have members of Congress call and have senators call before they’re implemented.

Mayor White opened up Houston and accepted the poorest of New Orleans. He has housed the evacuees and seen that the City of Houston is reimbursed by FEMA. When our public housing remains sealed with steel barriers, when we have a single Road Home office in Orleans Parish, and in all the talk about neighborhood planning, little is said about re-population.

Perhaps it ugly things are said in west Houston. Even so, is not the silent indifference of New Orleans a more damning condemnation?

I’m working on a report that is due on Monday. These things sneak up on me sometimes. It is explains why I won’t be able to participate in any of the weekend exciting activities. I won’t be able to see the debut of the Big Easy Roller Girls, which is a crying shame, since they are New Orleans’ new favorite sports fanchise. I’m also going to be forced to miss the first session gutting the home of New Orleans blogger Gentilly Girl. Let me know how it went, and know that I’ll be back into the swing of things, once I’ve caught up with a backlog of work.

Spoke with Dave Coustan yesterday, over dinner at Coop’s. Dave asked if ther there have been any notorious instances of astroturfing in the New Orleans blogs. I mentioned the carpet bloggers.

There is a group of people who have visited New Orleans and are writing breathless stories in a blog about secrets they’ve uncovered. I a recent video post, a they fear for their lives to write about them. It’s sounds like a radio drama of the days of old, where you couldn’t show horror, only describe it. It’s like Suspense).

They’ve adorned their post using the wealth of heartrending images available on the Internet, as if these were their own photographs.

There is little you can do about this. People are reading them. If someone contradicts them in the comment section, someone else writes a defense. Some locals have been helping them.

They have made content of tragedy. There is a market for everything, it seems. Another bucket into which to wring your sponge of daily anguish.

A local blogger even met with them, not understanding that they are producing a low-budget serial, that will say what it takes to increase page rank.

The long tail will find an audience that will listen to fictional accounts of Katrina, made up as they go along, and not respond with questions, but with emotions. It is participatory disaster porn.

American Airlines released a statement about one of these 9/11 movies.

bq.. The Disney/ABC television program, The Path to 9/11, which began airing last night, is inaccurate and irresponsible in its portrayal of the airport check-in events that occurred on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

A factual description of those events can be found in the official government edition of the 9/11 Commission Report and supporting documents.

This misrepresentation of facts dishonors the memory of innocent American Airlines employees and all those who lost their lives as a result of the tragic events of 9/11.

I find all such dramatizations of 9/11 to be distasteful acts in pursuit of profit.

Nina Paley is a wonderful cartoonist who has created an animation, a work in progress, called Sita Sings the Blues. The first animation is the only one I’ve watched so far, so that I might have something to look forward to throughout the coming week.

Something that I’ve always wanted. Universal flash cards. More or less how I imagined it. I’d like it to be better suited to language flash cards, however.

I’m implementing a B-Tree in Java. The project is called Strata. You can view the source, is is in the strata subdirectory of my subversion repository.

I’ve yet to choose a license.

This tree is the first indexing option in Momento, which is a large file XML database that I wrote last year, when I was in Ann Arbor.

Getting things done in Java is a challenge. There are many ways to get destracted.

Strata will index the normalized text of a specific node, and do so without concern about range queires. The only query supported at the outset is equality.

Then I can use Lucene to do full text indexing. In order for Lucene to be effective, you see, it must be a simple matter to retrieve the document. Indexing unique atom identifers, would give a key to fetch the document resulting from a Lucene query.

The research that I’m doing on B-Tree implemetnation can be tracked with my del.icio.us account, under the tag strata.

Thus, the objectives for Strata are as follows.

• Leaf nodes only to store references to file positions, not store the data itself.
• Branches also store only references to file positions, and hold a list of objects read from those file positions to use as keys.
• Thread-safe.
• File backed, paged.
• Supports efficent insertion and deletion, stays balanced.
• Equality comparison query.
• Compares byte buffer ranges, not objects.

At some point, it may be better to keep partial keys in the tree itself.

Update: I’ve written a description of the tree structure at my user page on the New Orleans Wiki, under a Software Development page.

I’ve spent the last week alone, trying to get caught up with work that is not directly related to Think New Orleans. I’ve not been paying much attention to the New Orleans bloggers, so excuse me if I’ve missed something that is important. There are plenty of comments in the wings of Think New Orleans and Blogometer. Thank you for leaving your comments, and moving away from email.