I guess I have to write about this.  It’s pretty big.  Jordan finally resigned.  I guess he didn’t have much left to stick with.  They were about to liquidate his office and the state was going to take over prosecutions.  I guess it doesn’t pay to be racist. Things are looking up for the city now.

I guess it was a good weekend for Louisiana. While I’ve never been a Tiger fan, everyone is a little happier when they are winning. Of course I’m thrilled that the Saints won another game, even if it was a little messy.

The best part of the weekend for me was the election. The last few years of elections had made me start to question everything about my state and city because none of the good and smart people were being elected. Even started to question my own ability to judge candidates and people (oh, the horror). Finally we’ve had an election where the majority (and especially the important races) of the races were won by the best candidates. You might say that this is speculation, but you’d be wrong as my voice is treated as fact on my blog.

I have been really busy the last few weeks.

I’m just now starting to feel like I’m catching up and being somewhat normal. I went for a run today and discovered that it’s been over 2 weeks since I’ve been running. It hurts when you go that long.

I have to figure out who I’m voting for. It’s easy with a lot of the candidates, but it’s impossible to find any information on a lot of them. This means I have to wait until the Times Picayune gives out more recommendations. Unfortunately, waiting means that I probably won’t be able to pre-vote which is often a lot easier.

I’m thankful that work is slowing down a little and the weather is incredible now. Now I’m exhausted and going to bed.

I saw Nagin at Cafe Adelaide today! Amazing. I didn’t know that he still lived in the city. He even said hi to our table. If only he’d go do his job today.

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.

I have listened to probably too much piano already this week. The competition has been really good and it’s down to the finals. Of the three contestants selected to move to the finals, I can agree with 2 of them. The last was so much worse than a few other pianists, and I cannot understand why he made it. I’ll still go to the finals to hear their performances and see who wins.