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Simpson Crazy has every Simpsons short from The Tracey Ullman Show available for download. Cool!

Well, I’m back from vacation. Actually, I’ve been back since the weekend, but this is obviously the first opportunity I’ve taken to sit down and make some posts. Thanks to Czar for taking the time to post (and to reintroduce himself) during my absence.

We had a nice vacation, and although it wasn’t as exotic as some of our recent journeys to Ireland and Iceland, Cape May (New Jersey shore) was very nice this time of year. The weather was beautiful, and since we went during the week we completely avoided the Labor Day Weekend crowds.

We took lots of pictures of the Victorian architecture and the surrounding beaches, and we got some great night shots of the rides on the Wildwood Boardwalk. I’ll try to post some of those pictures, but I realize that I still haven’t followed through on posting pictures from the Pax River Air Expo. Hopefully I can finally catch up on all of that soon, and hopefully I’ll be able to post more regularly now that things are somewhat less hectic.

Hi there DrikoLand readers! As Driko has mentioned, it’s been a while since I have posted much on these pages and it’s high time I did so once again. I know we have some new readers as well as some new guest posters, so I’ll briefly reintroduce myself. I’m Czar, an old friend of Driko and Shaft from college days (as well as their lovely wives Ulana and Mrs. Shaft, respectively). I live in Denver, CO, USA, and I do stage lighting and other related things for a living. I have had other careers over the years, most recently computer networking/IT, but I haven’t enjoyed a minute of that since about 2000, so I finally gave it up last year.

Oh, for those who are interested, I have a new venue of employment. It might not have quite the glamour of doing legitimate theatre (whatever that is), but unlike my previous gig, it comes with new challenges every day and I get to be creative and play lighting designer. And it’s where the money is. And my boss is also in charge of the lighting for the new art museum, so I’ll also be spending a lot of my time there starting this winter. Life is pretty good sometimes…

Anyway, that’s more than enough about me. Time for some actual blogging.

It’s been more than a week since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, causing unimaginable devastation to New Orleans and large portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. I expect we’re all weary of the 24/7 news reports by now, but I’d like to encourage everyone to donate money if they are able, and I’d like to provide a forum here to discuss the catastrophe.

Both the President and Congress are promising investigations on what went wrong during the first stages of the rescue and relief effort. Here are some of the things I expect they will find:

1. When a mandatory evacuation is ordered, state and local officials need to take responsibility to enforce it, and to provide transportation and other necessities to those who don’t have the means on their own.

2. FEMA needs to be much better organized, and have resources pre-positioned in strategic areas, ready to deploy as quickly and efficiently as possible. They also need the ability to improvise a solution to meet the needs of whatever situation is thrown at them. That being said, the very scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans and rupturing the levees has been discussed at the Federal level for years. FEMA really has little excuse for not anticipating this and being ready for it.

3. Communication infrastructure needs to be improved. This includes radio coms for emergency responders and coordination among government departments, agencies, and NGOs. If telephone landlines, cell phone transmission facilities, and Internet communications are vulnerable to a single disaster (flood, nuclear blast, etc.) there must be other solutions (e.g. satellite) available to meet the need. We also need a more streamlined bureaucracy for help requests from local officials to federal agencies, etc.

4. The absence of law and order causes society to revert to chaos and violence. If local police are unable to maintain control, the National Guard needs to be ready to step in quickly to restore order. If (and only if) the state governor requests it, the DoD’s Northern Command should back them up in short order as well. This last directive, I believe, did happen. The US Navy and other branches of service were ready with amphibious landing craft, helicopters, and humanitarian supplies, but due to miscommunication (mostly traceable to FEMA) they were not able to be used effectively for days. (See point #3 above.)

Comments?

Bob Denver, who played Gilligan on “Gilligan’s Island” died yesterday at the age of 70. I’m sure we’ve all watched his show at some point and laughed at his antics. He won’t be forgotten.

Well, my grand plans for a redesign obviously did not come to fruition this week. I’ll be on vacation next week, so DrikoLand will continue to be somewhat stagnant, although hopefully Czar and/or Shaft will find time to post in my absence. Or perhaps we’ll finally see the debuts of Ruprecht or Sir Bias? Hint, hint…

I don’t know whether I’ll have any Internet access while on vacation, so I don’t know whether I’ll be able to post pictures etc., but I have a lots of good pictures from the practice show for the Patuxent River Air Expo that I attended at work yesterday. I’ll definitely post a web page of pictures from that air show when I return. For now, enjoy a taste with the picture above. Pretty cool, huh? 🙂

By the way, the air show is today and tomorrow if anyone is interested in attending; it should be gorgeous weather for the Blue Angels and the other performers…

Happy Birthday, DrikoLand! I had grand plans of a redesign or something dramatic to celebrate the 10th birthday of my web site, but as usual I procrastinated too long and don’t have anything ready for today.

It still doesn’t seem real to me that I’ve been working on this web page for 10 years now. DrikoLand started as a generic home page in 1995 during my final years at the University of Maryland, with some link pages and lots of crappy animated .GIFs. 😉 Back then, the WWW and FTP were amazing new frontiers, and Netscape had just released its first browser. The addition of “original” content like my 80s pages, military aviation designation pages, and most recently, some of my photography, made the site a little more personal. In particular, the creation of my 80s page and its graphical homage was and is a labor of love. It has always been the most popular portion of my site, although I don’t devote nearly enough time to its maintenance. In June 2002, I joined the blogging community, and I still marvel at the ease with which I can add and edit content.

I searched through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to see if I could dig up some earlier incarnations of the site, but I couldn’t find anything from any of the former domains where my page was hosted (wam.umd.edu, olg.com, gmpexpress.net, us.hsanet.net). I did, however, dig up an old 1997 version of the site from my archives, which is where the old logo at the top of the post comes from. Doesn’t seem like much back then, does it? I still kind of miss the old green page, though… I was able to find some driko.org Wayback Machine entries from before I went to the blog format, like this example from January 2002. From those examples you can also see the first two-column blog format I used back in July 2002.

Since then, I’ve obviously transitioned to a three-column format, but I think I will be looking at modifying that slightly soon. First of all, I’d like to finally ditch the clunky HTML tables and go to a cleaner CSS format that is easier to modify and maintain. I have a couple of ideas in mind, and I’ll hopefully find the time soon to make that happen. I would especially like to update the photography portion of the site, as its design is downright ugly right now.

I want to take the time to thank Shaft and Czar, the occasional guest bloggers that have helped to take up the slack on the blog when I wasn’t around. I think I speak for everyone when I say that we’d like to see more of your posts. And speaking of guest bloggers, there are a couple of you waiting in the wings that need to finally make the leap and post! You know who you are…

Finally, thanks to everyone who has visited DrikoLand over the years, especially those that have taken the time to leave comments and/or drop me an e-mail. It’s those comments and e-mails that have helped to motivate me to maintain and update the site, a sometimes tedious exercise that has nevertheless been a lot of fun overall. Thanks again, and keep visiting! 🙂

The final episode of Six Feet Under aired last week, but we just saw it last night. I have to say that it was one of the best final episodes of any TV series that I can remember (M*A*S*H is the best as far as I’m concerned).

HBO has a page devoted to the final episode in which obituaries are written for all of the major characters, a touching addition that fleshes out the last moments of the episode.

I saved reading a post by Steven Johnston until I had seen the episode, and I definitely agree with one of his statements:

I had a genuine feeling last night watching the finale that I was going to miss these people, which I can honestly say I’ve never had with a television show before. I suspect I’m not alone in feeling that way.

Definitely not.

Caricature artist Roberto Parada’s impression of Homer Simpson is quite eerie…

“Bill Moyer, 73, wears a ‘Bullshit Protector’ flap over his ear while [W] addresses the Veterans of Foreign Wars.”

If you’d like to make your own Bullshit Protector, Boing Boing has kindly provided a link with do-it-yourself instructions.