![]() |
||||
|   | ||||
|
Previous Posts - You Suck Blogger - 523556 - Looking Back and Forward - A Pat on the Back - Finding Inspiration in an Undefeated Season - Loving Lolo - Confidence - Stress - Too Much Rest? - Big Race Day Sites of Interest - HRC - hollywooodfarmgirl - Ross the Intern - michaelmoore.com - margaret cho - meebo.com - cinematical.com Archives - April 2004 - May 2004 - June 2004 - July 2004 - August 2004 - September 2004 - October 2004 - November 2004 - December 2004 - January 2005 - February 2005 - March 2005 - April 2005 - May 2005 - June 2005 - July 2005 - August 2005 - September 2005 - October 2005 - November 2005 - December 2005 - January 2006 - February 2006 - March 2006 - April 2006 - May 2006 - June 2006 - July 2006 - August 2006 - September 2006 - October 2006 - November 2006 - December 2006 - January 2007 - February 2007 - March 2007 - April 2007 - May 2007 - June 2007 - July 2007 - August 2007 - September 2007 - October 2007 - November 2007 - December 2007 - January 2008 - February 2008 - March 2008 - April 2008 - May 2008 - June 2008 - July 2008 - August 2008 - September 2008 - October 2008 - November 2008 - December 2008 - January 2009 - February 2009 - March 2009 - April 2009 - May 2009 - June 2009 - July 2009 - August 2009 - September 2009 - October 2009 - November 2009 - December 2009 - January 2010 - February 2010 |
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
from chrissy "you know what sucks? when you're hot and you're a murderer." // posted by stacey on 9:45:00 AM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- missing the train the damn cab was late & made of miss the train. this meant taking the local with all those kids from fordham prep. these kids have on concept getting out of the way when people try to pass by. i really think high school kids need some sort of class in manners. // posted by stacey on 8:00:00 AM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tuesday, September 27, 2005 recent purchases stuff i've bought and think you should too. 26a: a novel by diana evans drive by james sallis to kill a mockingbird - DVD lost & found by griffin house // posted by stacey on 2:02:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- back at work yeah, i'll say it even though it is such a cliche. the vacation was too short. i even played hookie yesterday and took another pto day. the good news is that pvd has left early and won't be back until thursday afternoon. thank you lord! i had around 120 email messages waiting for me upon my return. many of those were repeated attempts to get information from me. these repeated attempts coming after the got my auto-reply stating that i was on vacation. i really wish that people would absorb the information they read, it would save a lot of time and headaches. also, when someone tells you that i am not in the office do not stalk them in order to have them stalk me. it won't work. the email has all been answered, and all the updates to the website have been made. yup, you guessed it -- i am done with my work. i am now going to read a book and keep an eye on the red sox game. please lord, let them loose. // posted by stacey on 1:44:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thursday, September 22, 2005 flight plan - the review first of all jodie foster kicks ass! i got to the theater at 6:30pm and the line was already on the other side of the block. the last time i saw a line that long was when the mac os tiger went on sale. at one point i was thinking that i would have to invoke plan b, which was to go see another movie. then we found out the the line was for two movies, the other being snoop dog's. by the time i got in there were not many seats left that were not in the front row. thank goodness ally and mother backed out. i got a great seat almost directly center. observations from the line while waiting to get in. new yorkers hate it when they are not in the know. this is especially the case when there is a long line to get something that may be very popular and that they may want to get in on the action. it was amazing how many people stopped to ask what we were doing in line. i think some the of the pretty dumb girls were hopping that it was try-outs for some new reality show. yes, i could definitely see some of them on fear factor or girls gone wild because from the looks of it their talent level does not go beyond showing their breasts and sucking cock. one dude even tried to sneak into the free movie. each ticket we received allowed for admission for two people. they also give out more tickets than what the theater can hold because they expect no shows and and single people to show up. they, being touchstone pictures and entertainment weekly want a full theater. when the theater actually gets filled they start turning people away. so this one guy was picking out the single people in the line and tried to act as though he was with us. after a couple of steps he would ask if he could get in with us. the us being the guy in front of me and the girl behind me. we all told him no when he asked. then he actually called us snobs. this from a person who was desperately trying to get into a free movie. his parting words, i'll get in anyway. well he never did. ok, what you have been waiting for -- the review. i don't think i'll be giving out any spoilers but just in case don't say you weren't warned. overall, the movie was good. i wouldn't call it one of jodie foster's best movies but it was better than panic room which i'll call her first action thriller. one of the things that always amazes me about jodie is the way she expresses so much emotion in a simple look through her eyes, mouth. you name it. i just want to eat her up when she does that. you get to see jodie punch and out wit people. the audience thoroughly enjoyed this. there were however, some major questions that were not answered. again, a spoiler alert.
but aside from these questions, it was a good movie to see to get away from all the shit that has been happening in the real world. jodie does not turn into a super fighter like some one from the matrix. she portrays a mother who would do anything to protect her child and with that i say don't ever piss jodie foster off. // posted by stacey on 10:45:00 AM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wednesday, September 21, 2005 flight plan ![]() flight plan Originally uploaded by scoopsy. this is where i started. the entrance is on the other side of the block. i didn't think i would make it. then i found out the line was for two movies. // posted by stacey on 7:18:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- vacation so far to date my vacation has pretty much followed the plan -- stay at home and don't do anything strenuous. monday i did leave the house to go to the bookstore only to find out that they did not have the books that i wanted. basically i should have stayed at home. in other words stick to the plan. tonight i'm going to the advance screening of flight plan. originally my friend ally was supposed to come but had to bow out for something with her child. damn kids. the back-up plan was my mother. the back-up plan because she always calls to cancels at the last minute leaving me with no back-up plan. well as expected she called to cancel. so i'll be going to the movie by myself. oh well, i'm used to it. the crappy part is that i'm not guaranteed a seat in the movie. this should not be a problem because i'll get there early enough and it is a movie theater after all. a megaplex at that. and now that all those really bad summer movies have left the stratosphere there are actually movies i wouldn't mind seeing like the constant gardner, everything is illuminated and maybe even the new reese witherspoon movie. she's not jodie, but she is cute and does have similarly pointy chin. // posted by stacey on 2:08:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thursday, September 15, 2005 flight plan entertainment weekly has hooked me up with two free passes to go see an advance screening of flight plan next week. i am jonesing. vacation and jodie foster at the same time. mmmmmm. // posted by stacey on 8:34:00 AM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wednesday, September 14, 2005 mercinaries in new orleans the department of homeland security has hired the blackwater mercinaries to be in new orleans are actually engaged in general law enforcement activities including "securing neighborhoods" and "confronting criminals." these men are trained to kill, not to evacuate people from their homes. but somehow people from homeland security don't seem to know that they have been hired. in an article in the washington post a spokesperson for the department of homeland security that he knows of no plans to hire blackwater. talk to the blackwater guys and they say different. read the info about on democracy now. the first link is for the transcript from sept. 12 with the journalist who wrote the article of the second link. overkill: feared blackwater mercenaries deploy in new orleans // posted by stacey on 9:12:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tuesday, September 13, 2005 i am the roach ![]() i am the roach Originally uploaded by scoopsy. this was our monday morning welcome back to work. thankfully it was dead. i could come up with a few metaphores about the roach and the state of our company but i won't. // posted by stacey on 7:54:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday, September 09, 2005 FEMA Chief Relieved of Katrina Command the jerk was finally relieved of katrina duties. not that he was really doing anything anyway. if the bush adminsitration really cared about this department he would have be fired immediately. // posted by stacey on 3:06:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Monday, September 05, 2005 new orleans coverage go to the huffington post for some excellent commentary and coverage about what is happening in new orleans. very eye opening, but given this administration not very surprising. // posted by stacey on 3:25:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunday, September 04, 2005 new orleans day 7 "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." George W. Bush, September 2005 National Geographic, October 2004 By Joel K. Bourne, Jr. Photographs by Robert Caputo and Tyrone Turner [photos not provided] The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big trouble—with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere. It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday. But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party. The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it. Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great. "The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are," Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse." The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk. "It's not if it will happen," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "It's when." Yet just as the risks of a killer storm are rising, the city's natural defenses are quietly melting away. From the Mississippi border to the Texas state line, Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and barrier islands faster than any place in the U.S. Since the 1930s some 1,900 square miles (4,900 square kilometers) of coastal wetlands—a swath nearly the size of Delaware or almost twice that of Luxembourg—have vanished beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Despite nearly half a billion dollars spent over the past decade to stem the tide, the state continues to lose about 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of land each year, roughly one acre every 33 minutes. A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the coast under. Delta soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to open water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The Mississippi's spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual deluges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees were raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of canals through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and freshwater marshes. While such loss hits every bayou-loving Louisianan right in the heart, it also hits nearly every U.S. citizen right in the wallet. Louisiana has the hardest working wetlands in America, a watery world of bayous, marshes, and barrier islands that either produces or transports more than a third of the nation's oil and a quarter of its natural gas, and ranks second only to Alaska in commercial fish landings. As wildlife habitat, it makes Florida's Everglades look like a petting zoo by comparison. Such high stakes compelled a host of unlikely bedfellows—scientists, environmental groups, business leaders, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—to forge a radical plan to protect what's left. Drafted by the Corps a year ago, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) project was initially estimated to cost up to 14 billion dollars over 30 years, almost twice as much as current efforts to save the Everglades. But the Bush Administration balked at the price tag, supporting instead a plan to spend up to two billion dollars over the next ten years to fund the most promising projects. Either way, Congress must authorize the money before work can begin. To glimpse the urgency of the problem afflicting Louisiana, one need only drive 40 minutes southeast of New Orleans to the tiny bayou village of Shell Beach. Here, for the past 70 years or so, a big, deeply tanned man with hands the size of baseball gloves has been catching fish, shooting ducks, and selling gas and bait to anyone who can find his end-of-the-road marina. Today Frank "Blackie" Campo's ramshackle place hangs off the end of new Shell Beach. The old Shell Beach, where Campo was born in 1918, sits a quarter mile away, five feet beneath the rippling waves. Once home to some 50 families and a naval air station during World War II, the little village is now "ga'an pecan," as Campo says in the local patois. Gone forever. Life in old Shell Beach had always been a tenuous existence. Hurricanes twice razed the community, sending houses floating through the marsh. But it wasn't until the Corps of Engineers dredged a 500-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) ship channel nearby in 1968 that its fate was sealed. The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, known as "Mr. Go," was supposed to provide a shortcut for freighters bound for New Orleans, but it never caught on. Maybe two ships use the channel on a given day, but wakes from even those few vessels have carved the shoreline a half mile wide in places, consuming old Shell Beach. Campo settles into a worn recliner, his pale blue eyes the color of a late autumn sky. Our conversation turns from Mr. Go to the bigger issue affecting the entire coast. "What really screwed up the marsh is when they put the levees on the river," Campo says, over the noise of a groaning air-conditioner. "They should take the levees out and let the water run; that's what built the land. But we know they not going to let the river run again, so there's no solution." Denise Reed, however, proposes doing just that—letting the river run. A coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans, Reed is convinced that breaching the levees with a series of gated spillways would pump new life into the dying marshes. Only three such diversions currently operate in the state. I catch up with Reed at the most controversial of the lot—a 26-million-dollar culvert just south of New Orleans named Caernarvon. "Caernarvon is a prototype, a demonstration of a technique," says Reed as we motor down a muddy canal in a state boat. The diversion isn't filling the marsh with sediments on a grand scale, she says. But the effect of the added river water—loaded as it is with fertilizer from farm runoff—is plain to see. "It turns wetlands hanging on by the fingernails into something quite lush," says Reed. To prove her point, she points to banks crowded with slender willows, rafts of lily pads, and a wide shallow pond that is no longer land, no longer liquid. More like chocolate pudding. But impressive as the recovering marsh is, its scale seems dwarfed by the size of the problem. "Restoration is not trying to make the coast look like a map of 1956," explains Reed. "That's not even possible. The goal is to restore healthy natural processes, then live with what you get." Even that will be hard to do. Caernarvon, for instance, became a political land mine when releases of fresh water timed to mimic spring floods wiped out the beds of nearby oyster farmers. The oystermen sued, and last year a sympathetic judge awarded them a staggering 1.3 billion dollars. The case threw a major speed bump into restoration efforts. Other restoration methods—such as rebuilding marshes with dredge spoil and salt-tolerant plants or trying to stabilize a shoreline that's eroding 30 feet (10 meters) a year—have had limited success. Despite the challenges, the thought of doing nothing is hard for most southern Louisianans to swallow. Computer models that project land loss for the next 50 years show the coast and interior marsh dissolving as if splattered with acid, leaving only skeletal remnants. Outlying towns such as Shell Beach, Venice, Grand Isle, and Cocodrie vanish under a sea of blue pixels. Those who believe diversions are the key to saving Louisiana's coast often point to the granddaddy of them all: the Atchafalaya River. The major distributary of the Mississippi River, the Atchafalaya, if left alone, would soon be the Mississippi River, capturing most of its flow. But to prevent salt water from creeping farther up the Mississippi and spoiling the water supply of nearby towns and industries, the Corps of Engineers allows only a third of the Mississippi's water to flow down the Atchafalaya. Still, that water and sediment have produced the healthiest wetlands in Louisiana. The Atchafalaya Delta is one of the few places in the state that's actually gaining ground instead of losing it. And if you want to see the delta, you need to go crabbing with Peanut Michel. "Peanut," it turns out, is a bit of a misnomer. At six foot six and 340 pounds, the 35-year-old commercial fisherman from Morgan City wouldn't look out of place on the offensive line of the New Orleans Saints. We launch his aluminum skiff in the predawn light, and soon we're skimming down the broad, café au lait river toward the newest land in Louisiana. Dense thickets of needlegrass, flag grass, cut grass, and a big-leafed plant Michel calls elephant ear crowd the banks, followed closely by bushy wax myrtles and shaggy willows. Michel finds his string of crab pots a few miles out in the broad expanse of Atchafalaya Bay. Even this far from shore the water is barely five feet deep. As the sun ignites into a blowtorch on the horizon, Michel begins a well-oiled ritual: grab the bullet-shaped float, shake the wire cube of its clicking, mottled green inhabitants, bait it with a fish carcass, and toss. It's done in fluid motions as the boat circles lazily in the water. But it's a bad day for crabbing. The wind and water are hot, and only a few crabs dribble in. And yet Michel is happy. Deliriously happy. Because this is what he wants to do. "They call 'em watermen up in Maryland," he says with a slight Cajun accent. "They call us lunatics here. You got to be crazy to be in this business." Despite Michel's poor haul, Louisiana's wetlands are still a prolific seafood factory, sustaining a commercial fishery that most years lands more than 300 million dollars' worth of finfish, shrimp, oysters, crabs, and other delicacies. How long the stressed marshes can maintain that production is anybody's guess. In the meantime, Michel keeps at it. "My grandfather always told me, Don't live to be rich, live to be happy," he says. And so he does. After a few hours Michel calls it a day, and we head through the braided delta, where navigation markers that once stood at the edge of the boat channel now peek out of the brush 20 feet (six meters) from shore. At every turn we flush mottled ducks, ibis, and great blue herons. Michel, who works as a hunting guide during duck season, cracks an enormous grin at the sight. "When the ducks come down in the winter," he says, "they'll cover the sun." To folks like Peanut Michel, the birds, the fish, and the rich coastal culture are reason enough to save Louisiana's shore, whatever the cost. But there is another reason, one readily grasped by every American whose way of life is tethered not to a dock, but to a gas pump: These wetlands protect one of the most extensive petroleum infrastructures in the nation. The state's first oil well was punched in south Louisiana in 1901, and the world's first offshore rig went into operation in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947. During the boom years in the early 1970s, fully half of the state's budget was derived from petroleum revenues. Though much of the production has moved into deeper waters, oil and gas wells remain a fixture of the coast, as ubiquitous as shrimp boats and brown pelicans. The deep offshore wells now account for nearly a third of all domestic oil production, while Louisiana's Offshore Oil Port, a series of platforms anchored 18 miles (29 kilometers) offshore, unloads a nonstop line of supertankers that deliver up to 15 percent of the nation's foreign oil. Most of that black gold comes ashore via a maze of pipelines buried in the Louisiana muck. Numerous refineries, the nation's largest natural gas pipeline hub, even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are all protected from hurricanes and storm surge by Louisiana's vanishing marsh. You can smell the petrodollars burning at Port Fourchon, the offshore oil industry's sprawling home port on the central Louisiana coast. Brawny helicopters shuttle 6,000 workers to the rigs from here each week, while hundreds of supply boats deliver everything from toilet paper to drinking water to drilling lube. A thousand trucks a day keep the port humming around the clock, yet Louisiana 1, the two-lane highway that connects it to the world, seems to flood every other high tide. During storms the port becomes an island, which is why port officials like Davie Breaux are clamoring for the state to build a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) elevated highway to the port. It's also why Breaux thinks spending 14 billion dollars to save the coast would be a bargain. "We'll go to war and spend billions of dollars to protect oil and gas interests overseas," Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors the size of two-story houses. "But here at home?" He shrugs. "Where else you gonna drill? Not California. Not Florida. Not in ANWR. In Louisiana. I'm third generation in the oil field. We're not afraid of the industry. We just want the infrastructure to handle it." The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing low taxes and high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn't come without a cost, largely exacted from coastal wetlands. The most startling impact has only recently come to light—the effect of oil and gas withdrawal on subsidence rates. For decades geologists believed that the petroleum deposits were too deep and the geology of the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on the surface. But two years ago former petroleum geologist Bob Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After much study, Morton concluded that the removal of millions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of saline formation water lying with the petroleum deposits caused a drop in subsurface pressure—a theory known as regional depressurization. That led nearby underground faults to slip and the land above them to slump. "When you stick a straw in a soda and suck on it, everything goes down," Morton explains. "That's very simplified, but you get the idea." The phenomenon isn't new: It was first documented in Texas in 1926 and has been reported in other oil-producing areas such as the North Sea and Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Morton won't speculate on what percentage of wetland loss can be pinned on the oil industry. "What I can tell you is that much of the loss between Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Terrebonne was caused by induced subsidence from oil and gas withdrawal. The wetlands are still there, they're just underwater." The area Morton refers to, part of the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, has one of the highest rates of wetland loss in the state. The oil industry and its consultants dispute Morton's theory, but they've been unable to disprove it. The implication for restoration is profound. If production continues to taper off in coastal wetlands, Morton expects subsidence to return to its natural geologic rate, making restoration feasible in places. Currently, however, the high price of natural gas has oil companies swarming over the marshes looking for deep gas reservoirs. If such fields are tapped, Morton expects regional depressurization to continue. The upshot for the coast, he explains, is that the state will have to focus whatever restoration dollars it can muster on areas that can be saved, not waste them on places that are going to sink no matter what. A few days after talking with Morton, I'm sitting on the levee in the French Quarter, enjoying the deep-fried powdery sweetness of a beignet from the Café du Monde. Joggers lumber by in the torpid heat, while tugs wrestle their barges up and down the big brown river. For all its enticing quirkiness, for all its licentious pleasures, for all its geologic challenges, New Orleans has been luckier than the wetlands that lined its pockets and stocked its renowned tables. The question is how long Lady Luck will shine. It brings back something Joe Suhayda, the LSU engineer, had said during our lunch by Lake Pontchartrain. "When you look at the broadest perspective, short-term advantages can be gained by exploiting the environment. But in the long term you're going to pay for it. Just like you can spend three days drinking in New Orleans and it'll be fun. But sooner or later you're going to pay." I finish my beignet and stroll down the levee, succumbing to the hazy, lazy feel of the city that care forgot, but that nature will not. // posted by stacey on 3:44:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday, September 02, 2005 a dog and her pillow ![]() julie.JPG Originally uploaded by scoopsy. // posted by stacey on 5:03:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- a cat and her sheep ![]() tictac.JPG Originally uploaded by scoopsy. // posted by stacey on 5:02:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- copyrights annette, aka a-rob and ar took this past week off for a nice vacation. believe me when i say that she deserved it. since last summer she has been doing the job of two people when her first job took up most of her time to begin with. yes, we are severely under staffed and this may never change. with the fearless a-rob getting her rest that left me to record all of the mother fucking copyright forms into the website. i will forever grovel on my hands and knees at a-rob's feet and profess that i am not worthy over and over again until she kicks me out of her cube. the copyright process is pretty simple. to be published by us you must sign a copyright release form. we are publishing the material, so we own it. just like if i am a writer for a magazine, the magazine owns the copyright, not me. now there occasions for certain government employees who have to get special permissions and agreements, but if you're not a government or super special r&d industry employee you must sign the fucking form! the copyright form is a legal document, so each one of the authors of the paper must sign the form. if the author is listed on the paper, they must sign the form. we cannot accept proxy signatures, so again, all authors must sign the form. this means, if someone like myself or a-rob sends you an email stating that we are missing a signature or that you cannot sign for your co-author don't get all mad. do not yell at me, do not whine at me, just send in the completed form. it really is that simple. // posted by stacey on 3:37:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thursday, September 01, 2005 new orleans in 2002 we had our major society conference in new orleans. we were based in two locations -- the new orleans hilton and the ernest m. morial convention center. the conference was a year after we were dealing with two tragedies of our own in nyc, sept. 11 and an american airlines plane crash. the people we worked with at the hotel and convention center were some of the best we had worked with. i spent the majority of the week at the convention center managing our technical sessions. this is where i got to know judy b. our convention center rep and our door monitors, some of the most incredible and caring people you could meet. our a/v company for all of our conferences is based in new orleans. we got in touch wth some of them yesterday and know that all the guys from the a/v company are doing ok. in fact they were making their way to one of the hospitals to see if they could help. while we were at the conference, they bought us lunch almost every day and let us use their set-up room so that we could eat in peace. the door monitors recommended great restaurants to get the best po' boys in town, they brought is in beads and homemade cookies. judy b. as we called her over the two-way radio went with us to a hornets/knicks game with tickets provided by the new orleans cvb. my thoughts are with them as i keep seeing all those poor people outside the convention center, the very sidewalk that i traveled on from the hotel to the convention numerous times a day. please don't forget these people and make a donation today. // posted by stacey on 7:22:00 PM // | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
![]() ![]() |
||