It’s about that time again. It’s suddenly interesting for the country and especially the media to take a little peak at what’s happening in New Orleans. Anniversaries do that. Some really great people have never left and really care about my city.

People like to focus on our corrupt politicians. I don’t really know how to respond to that. I don’t vote for them. Some of that is a racial, educational, and social problem. Perhaps some of this problem will be solved now that people who have moved away and don’t intend to move back have finally been pulled off the voting registrations. It almost made sense to bus people in to vote for past elections, but now it is fairly clear that the vast majority are not interested in moving back if they have not tried to make the move already. I don’t know how you solve our political problems. So many people vote entirely on party or race lines.

Although we’re hardly alone in this. Even in Middlebury, some of the smartest people I’ve ever met were the most close-minded when it came to politics. There were people that would rather call you names and walk away then discuss issues if you didn’t hold the exact same ultra-liberal view on a certain subject. It’s perhaps the saddest thing about Middlebury, VT because I learned so much discussing so many different subjects with friends — but politics were off limits unless you were a bobble-head.

Not everything is bad in New Orleans. Our public school system (mainly charter schools now) is finally on a path to actually educating our children. People are standing up and demanding that government improve – we’ve already fixed our levee boards and assessors offices. New companies are opening.

I’m interested in what slant most of the national media will take for this anniversary. They always push an agenda. It’s partially the presidential candidates’ faults because New Orleans is their soapbox. Times Picayune columnist Chris Rose always has some good observations on the current soul of New Orleans, but the other news outlets will likely tell very different stories.

I’m guessing that some of my friends would call me an optimist and others would call me a pessimist (I just like taking both sides). Although, I always seem to choose to be hopeful for the future of New Orleans. I don’t know if that really says anything about me or New Orleans, but I know what it means to me.

My iPod nano is dead. I was running today when the music started skipping as if the iPod were a CD player that I was shaking. Then it completely froze. When I tried to restart it, it gave me the “sad iPod” image. Amazingly it started “working” again after a break and being plugged into my computer. Because it wasn’t completely broken, AppleCare wanted me to wait a little longer before I ship it in. Now it won’t turn on again. I’m calling tomorrow morning.

The sad thing is that I have two friends who have submerged their nanos in water and those iPods are still working without problems. My guess is that mine doesn’t like the weather in New Orleans.

Magazine street is finally open. An inconvenient two blocks has been closed for construction for more than 3 years. To celebrate its opening, I drove the entire way home on Magazine today. Amazingly, I felt the urge to write about this event, although it will probably have no future bearing on my life. I probably won’t even take Magazine home again.

I guess it’s really feeling like summer now. It’s been in the 90s-100s with lots of humidity the last couple of weeks. Now it seems the hurricane season is going to make an appearance. At least football season is starting too.

Some things are just really odd today. I felt really good running this afternoon and I know that I had a good mile time, but when I checked for the exact time, my iPod said that I had only run 0.89 miles. I know that I had just run exactly a mile and it said I was a tenth of a mile off. That sucked.

My freezer has sudddenly decided that it’s going to be really cold. Clearly freezers are supposed to be cold and I’d rather it have a cold day than a warm day. I haven’t changed any of the settings in probably over a year. I don’t really mind, but its kind of weird that my ice cream is suddenly rock solid.

I wouldn’t say that the day has been that bad. I released a large bit of code that I’ve been working on for the last few months (although technically some of the files will say that they were started over a 1.5 years ago — it’s been a start and stop project). It’s hardly done, so it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but everything thus far is now released!

I even managed to fit in a haircut today, although I think Chris is still mad that I left for a half hour today. Oddly enough the messed up and I didn’t get my usual barber. But I think it’s pretty good.