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Annual
Chris Dent reflects on Glacial Erratics: One Year in this rainy clime.
Chopper
On September 2, Rocketboom posted 10 minutes of semi-raw footage from a helicopter flying over the deeply-flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans. The footage includes radio chatter, and the longest segment captures a military Huey picking up a group of survivors from a rooftop. The pilots of the various helicopters struggle to establish radio contact and when people on the roofs are spotted find themselves relaying GPS coordinates to ground control in Baton Rouge.
Plywood
…one more Katrina thing: a French Quarter resident had the presence of mind to shot his entire Katrina experience, and the resulting photoset is very much worth your while.
Frangipana
Wrong number
As expected, today’s Apple fooraw generated a big yawn from me. Another iPod! Imagine that! Whoop-de-doo!
And a phone with iTunes but no other Apple-designed user-interface features, except, I guess, the ability to synch contacts with Outlook. Which, one supposes, bemuses the Mac-owning folks out there that have been using Address Book over Outlook lo, these many years. The most interesting thing about this announcement is the fact that Apple bent enough to let Cingular advertise iTunes with the Cingular font in that orange box:
Which, I suppose, lends credence to the rumors that the phones release was delayed because Apple was fighting with the labels about licensing and pricing – Cingular would be in a better negotiating position regarding branding issues the longer Apple had to delay launching, I would think.
Ah, what do I know?
Time to reread
J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren seem to offer some twentieth-century perspectives on the events of the past week. I have been thinking of Dhalgren in particular all week. This NYT sketch of the evacuated city certainly echoes it. I certainly hope Delany takes the time to write about what we’ve just watched.
Flotsam
Someone highlighted a long list of the MetFilter threads on Katrina, and someone else added the comprehensive, longer list (ninety-three and counting) to the MeFi wiki.
Meanwhile, AZ links to two interesting New York Observer pieces on, respectively, how the Times-Picayune managed to do such a gripping job of covering the disaster (apparently, the blog post on the NOLA blog concerning the broken levee was in fact the T-P breaking the news) and on the remarkable media meltdowns that have marked the televised coverage.
…One More Thing
In light of recent developments, I can reveal this about tomorrow’s Apple hoopla: if it’s the iPhone, i’m iNterested. If it’s what it probably will be, a sub-gig iTunes phone with no embedded PDA or OS, I won’t even look at it. The only bright spot in the rumor mill to date have been the tales of ramped-up production on 2GB mindrives.
The Map, etc
Josh has run a Seattle-specific disaster-simulation (Oh, okay, actually, he ‘shopped a couple maps together, okay?) and shares his results.
I wonder if Google will add a GIS-based damage reporting layer to the app eventually? 😉