I hardly slept last night and I’m pretty sure that I know why.  Saturday night I met my friends at Pete’s bar before going out because there was a shooting there a couple hours before.  I saw my first dead body with bullets in him.  It wasn’t terribly gruesome as he was 100 feet away and obscured by police and coroners.  It was completely a drug related killing, so it didn’t seem extremely scary.  I think I fell asleep Saturday night without even one thought of what I had seen.  I guess last night was a little different.  The part that scares me is how everyone in that neighborhood wasn’t outraged and surprised.  No one likes a killing in their neighborhood, but I know that not a single person woke up the next day determined to do anything to change that.

I guess it makes me happy and lucky that I live in the neighborhood where I live.  Clearly it was a conscious choice, but not everyone is given such choices. Â I love that my neighborhood doesn’t have that kind of crime.  I love that if a killing occurred, all of my neighbors (including me) would be out making sure that it never happened again the very next day.  I’m extremely lucky.

Is it just me, or is it really tacky for a 60+ year old woman to wear a rhinestone pin that says “#1 bitch”?  She was really dressed up and the pin suddenly transformed her into white trash.  I’m mean and I harshly judge people, but come on.

So, we still don’t have power. Many random areas do, but not me. I miss air conditioning, refrigerators, and cell phone chargers. Luckily my phone takes care of internet and email.

We used a couple hours yesterday to check on various houses of family members and friends. No one really had any damage. Almost no one had power either. Looks like they’ll have to fix some transmition lines or bring up some more power plants before they can light up more of the city. That sucks.

Luckily, for my parents real anniversary, we were able to go to Luke for dinner last night. It might have been the only restaurant open last night. Certainly the best in the city open. The three people cooking in the kitchen were the sous chefs of Luke and August and John Besh. Besh was even bringing in a lot of the food to the tables because they were so short handed. It was an incredible meal and quite an experience. It’s also truly a New Orleans experience when you know almost all the customers at a restaurant.

I hope that today brings better things, although I clearly can’t complain too much. I do really miss sleeping in a house that isn’t 85 degrees.

The hurricane really wasn’t bad at all. We had a decent amount of wind in the morning and hardly any rain at all. We get more rain in afternoon thunderstorms. Very few trees fell in my neighborhood and things seem to be getting better. I had no at&t service for a lot of the day, but it came back on at about 6 or 7pm. Now I’m hoping that Entergy gets the power up soon. They prepositioned a lot of trucks at the zoo parking lot and att prepositioned a lot at the fly. So far, I’ve seen many more AT&T trucks on the road than Entergy.

As an aside why does my iPhone sometimes add the ampersand and sometimes capitalize ‘att’ and sometimes only one or neither?

I’m in New Orleans. At this point, not a whole lot is going on. Will and I went upstairs to the roof and everything was really calm.  We had a band of weather come through around 7pm that brought a lot of rain and wind.  It lasted for only 10 minutes, but we lost power briefly twice.  Definitely a harbinger for tomorrow.  It’ll be nice if we get a full night’s sleep before things get crazy.

I’m not worried about the storm.  I’m not looking forward to losing power, but at least Entergy is camped out at the zoo parking lot.  Perhaps that will give us some priority.  Anyway, good luck to everyone!

The city is obsessed with Gustav.  Or at least the people I’m around.  My office wants me to work from home to ‘practice’.  Being me, I’m not.  This isn’t to say that I’m not paying attention to the Gulf.  I know what’s happening, but it’s too early.  I’m just not concerned yet.  I think Friday afternoon is the first time that we’ll actually know something.  Perhaps I’m just still happy from last night.

I know that I’m kind of grouchy right now.  All I can say is that the last few weeks have taken their toll on me.  I released the big project that I’ve been working on for the last 18 months.  That felt good, especially since it didn’t have any real bugs in it.  Instead of having some much needed downtime, I was thrown immediately into a new project that also had to be released this week.

Let’s just say that I really hate Siggraph.  Every year we have some kind of new feature that needs to be ready for it which practically kills dev.  Then marketing and business development get to go play at the convention and parties, showing off our work.

Anyway, I’m hoping to really separate myself from work and New Orleans this weekend. I know that I haven’t even been that nice to my parents this week.  My weekend might be hectic, but in such a different way.  I’m excited!

My friend made this video. Hopefully it shows what good things our city is currently accomplishing. Everyone should do what they can to make sure that this doesn’t fail. This doesn’t just affect New Orleans, as the city is becoming one of the most important case studies for charter schools.

I’m starting to think that I’m getting dumb at math.  Sometimes I just don’t compute in my head like I used to.  I completely forgot how subtraction fits into the order of operations in a piece of code the other day.  I even questioned how much money I should receive back at the convenience store (only to stupidly look at it again and realize that I can’t count).

This is perhaps why I welcomed a math test so openly.  It was at Rendezvous on Friday when a large group of people, celebrating a friends birthday, handed out an elementary school multiplication quiz for us all to take.  It seems that the birthday belonged to a math teacher.  It was odd and random, but also a lot of fun.