Tuesday, April 05, 2011

The Beat Goes On

The local media have switched to disaster relief as the number one topic, knowing well we're not good at it. Katrina, Rita, the earlier tsunami, the floods in Pakistan, earthquakes in Italy, China, Chile, New Zealand... and now the big one in Japan, complete with out-of-control nukes.

Portlanders have realized they've stashed almost all their emergency vehicles on the east side, so if only one bridge remains, which is optimistic, they'll be OK. Of course emergency vehicles may not be apropos in unnavigable rubble.

Whereas national guards and emergency agencies need to be training, forecasting, planning, which includes deploying in "away teams" to share the work elsewhere, gaining valuable experience, the resources are caught up in nefarious "war games gone wild" where the species deploys its least-competent-to-cope technology: killingry.

When you're at the end of your rope, you resort to extreme measures and here we are, suffering big disasters, and our younger generation is already deployed, doing other things for Iron Mountain. They were pretty easy to recruit they tell me. So what else is new.

So many of these skills are transferable to civilian scenarios, which is why converting those military bases into girl (and boy) scout training camps makes so much sense, although not every circumstance is well simulated in the tropics. A "freezer building" might help, a place to acclimate before deploying to Oklahoma some winter.

Lindsey's lyrics have veered into dark allusions to this species incapability. We find it hard to look at ourselves in the mirror sometimes, and art helps us do that.

In other news, PyDev 2.0 for Eclipse is out. We've been tracking this, given its importance at work. I sent around some memos just prior, reminding readers of what we had learned during the last staff meeting, people flying in from Illinois, Oregon, St. Louis.