HumidCity

This is horrible and should be passed on widely. Via LiveJournal New Orleans Community:

Compromise of FAFSA Data
A Boston-based company called Iron Mountain lost a significant number of Louisiana FAFSA records one month ago.

So, if you went to college in Louisiana anytime in the past 15 years, your personal data (name, SSN, etc.) may have been compromised. Mine has and I didn’t even go to college in Louisiana. You should check too, especially if you fall into any of the following groups:

• Anyone who has a Louisiana College Savings account (START Saving Program).
• Any resident of the state of Louisiana who has completed a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
• Anyone who has completed a FAFSA and included a Louisiana postsecondary institution as an institution to which FAFSA data should be sent.
• Anyone who has applied for or received a Tuition Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS) Scholarship.
• Anyone who has applied for or who has received student financial aid in the State of Louisiana.

The state has provided a tool to help you determine if your information was part of the compromise:
https://osfantweb.osfa.state.la.us/Notice.nsf/

In addition to following the instructions on the LOSFA site, everyone (even if your data wasn’t compromised) should consider signing up for a credit reporting service if you haven’t done so already. Also, make sure to sign up for one that will send you an alert within 24 hours; if we wait for a written monthly report, you won’t get the notice about the fraudulent attempt in your name until it’s too late. Here are the major offerings from each of the three credit reporting agencies:

• Equifax Credt Watch Gold
• Experian Triple Advantage
• TransUnion 3-Bureau Credit Monitoring

The original post and attendent comments can be found here.

Gmail is down again. This time for the past two days. If it’s on their end they owe their users some form of update on what the situation is. (Don’t tell me its BETA, its been on the net since well before Katrina and its an ad driven service.) It could also be the side effect of some sort of selective port blocking by Cox, or basic incompetence, or the fragile and unstable infrastructure of the city. I bet its Cox, my lovely wife informs me that she had no trouble accessing it from Tulane’s connection.

Damn annoying though.

Since the Storm the internet is our main way of staying in touch with scattered friends and family. All the “social” applications have taken on a new dimension. Displaced friends in Cincinatti and I watch each other’s current reading and movie intake, trading notes and comments back and forth through LibraryThing and Netflix. We share pictures in the same way on Flickr, even sharing our bookmarks with del.icio.us. And that doesn’t even touch the subject of blogs, online journals and MySpace.

All of these applications add community to the services they offer. Each alows you to interact and communicate on a common platform. While fun, and no doubt, useful to most, these have become an important means of staying in touch with each other and home. I can see that my friend Rachel is about to rent a truly awful movie when  I’m in Netflix and leave her a note saying it’s not worth the effort.  We can also add reviews as we watch things which they will see when going to rent it. Little bits of day to day interaction that allow a sembalance of normalcy.

We are a people who crave the society of our fellow New Orleanians: loud, boisterous, eating questionable things of aquatic origin, and with drink in hand. The City of Cyber Orleans knows no geographic borders. It stretches as far as our furthest displaced has gone and is accessible from any internet connection.  For those away its not home, but it helps. For those of us here it is a link to all our misssing loved ones.

Kind of like a William Gibson novel reinterpreted by Morgus The Magnificent.

It is all too easy to fall into the doom and gloom when posting about the state of things here. The reality is that there is good and bad, it is just very hard to see the good sometimes because the recovery/rebuild is so rife with unpleasantness. With that in mind here is a guest post from Marrus, a local artist who has done work for Valiant and DC comics among others. It originally appeared on the New Orleans LiveJournal Community and is reprinted here by her permission. The link at the end leads to the original post and the several pages of responses.

So without further ado, I give you Marrus:

Move to New Orleans!
After deeply considering all of your offers to relocate to various parts of the country, I hereby turn the tables on you.

Come here. Take a chance. Buy a house for a fraction of its original price and rebuild it to your specs (limited offer - real estate prices will bounce back in a year or two). New Orleans has exquisitely temperate winters, and summer is for air conditioning or an enforced two week vacation (which must be taken between June & November). This is Disneyland for grown-ups: amazing restaurants (yes, STILL), crawfish boils, inexpensive, fat oysters (they were free at the bar last night with $2 Abitas), wonderful live music everywhere, cultural festivals year-round, and a creative, liberal-bordering-on-subversive undercurrent that is unequaled anywhere in the world I’ve ever been. Folks here have entire rooms of their homes devoted to nothing but costuming, and if you’re of the creative persuasion (as I know many of my little frenids are) you’d have room to sculpt, write, paint, dance and LIVE like I suspect most of you can only dream of.

We have free flowing, amoeba-like parties that roll through the streets on Halloween & New Year’s & St. Paddy’s & funerals and whenever else the mood strikes us. We have a small town vibe where everyone from big towns comes to visit. I’ve bumped into friends from all over the country who I didn’t even know were in town, just by riding my bike down the street. (No, they weren’t avoiding me.) We’ll soon have some great tacquerias and ceviche if the Hispanic population continues to grow.

For those of you who do computer work out of your homes, this can be an amazing place to live. My partner has been able to continue working with northern clients on websites, but it costs a fraction of what you’ll pay in Boston or LA to live here. If you’re a network tech, the whole TOWN needs rewiring. And for any of you who can competently swing a hammer there will be money for you for YEARS.

There are vast swaths of the city that got a little bit of of water (like one or two feet), and a lot of folks don’t want to put up with rebuilding. There are deals to be had for those of you who want to come here with your big purple brains and your glossy dreams and your willingness to be a part of rebuilding one of the most vibrant, beautiful, alive cities in America.

Yes, the levees ARE being rebuilt. No, that storm last year was NOT a normal occurrence.

We’ll take the truck around with a couple of daiquiris from the drive-through and I’ll teach you about the neighborhoods.

So, what do you say? Hell, just fly down and check it out…see what you think.

Double dog dare you:)

Click here to see the responses and comments made on the original LJ post.

Like many of us I find myself gearing up for possible evacuation. Alternating between optimism and dread about the season I still try to be ready for the lack of action should anything ugly go down. I tell myself its only logical to be prepared.

With that in mind I thought I might share some of the things I am doing to get ready for another possible Era of Exile. These are mostly things involving using internet technology and services, but since you are reading this I’m willing to bet you can cope.

• We have too many photos to take with us when evacuating. There are album upon album filling the shelves of a small bookcase. In order to make sure that the images themselves survive. I have been madly scanning them and uploading them to my new Flickr account. $20 a year gets you up to 2 Gigs of upload a month along with all the other niceties it offers (sharing, organization, etc). This means I do not even have to worry about grabbing discs when we leave.
• In order to make sure that no matter what I have contact info for everyone I am using a service called Plaxo. It is an address book that automatically updates. One change to my own info (if displaced) is automatically updated in my friend’s and family’s adress books. A really good way of keeping current, especially if we end up scattered again.
• All our CDs are now relocated to easily carried binders (love CaseLogic!)
• If you do not already have one advise setting up a blog or online journal. You do not have to use it, but does give you a single web address to give everyone before leaving. Computer access is common these days so you should be able to update it periodically, even from the road. This is a good way of keeping friends and family updated if you are on the move. Livejournal is especially useful for this as it is very comunity oriented and was a center of networking during Katrina.
• Whereas we only had one cat carrier befoer the storm (only used it for vet trips) we now have a full complement of five. If you hunt around you can find really nice soft sided ones that are collapsible for about $20 each.
• A new and interesting product we discovered on the run last year are disposable cat boxes. They are thin plastic cat boxes with a small amount of litter in them. You peel off the paper seal, let the wee beasties have some privacy, and throw it out when you’re finished. These were a godsend in a number of vehicles, hotels, etc.
• If there are keepsakes or items of sentimental value that you know you will not be able to take when you leave, photgraph them. Throw the photos up on Flickr (see above) and no matter what at least you will have the image.
• A stand alone, web based email account with a service like yahoo, hotmail, or gmail makes sure you can always communicate if you can get online. I personally prefer gmail, but your milage may vary.

If you have useful or creative ideas for prepping for the season please leave them in the comments. In the meantime I’m off to light some candles and hope it is not needed.

I would like to announce the launch of two companion or annex sites as part of the Humid City project:

• Humid City on MySpace - Networked heavily into the New Orleans art and music scenes, this space will probably be the center of our work with helping revive the scene here. Those of you who remember the Silver Machine will feel right at home there, those who do not should check it out!
• Humid City on LiveJournal -  Bloggers write to people, LiveJournal people intereact and discuss things. This community will try to bridge the gap and provide a “sitting around the coffeeshop/bar,” atmosphere for conversations relevant to New Orleanians both here in the Forbidden Zone and beyond.

It is my hope to use the combination of these three platforms to create unity and a free flow of pertinent information while enhancing our sense of community.

Come by and see us. Get involved. New Orleans is important.

Please go read this extensive post by LJer dogemperor with numerous media sources citing how FEMA is refusing help from reputable organizations, turning away people with boats and buses, telling the Red Cross to stay out of NOLA because if they feed and water people they won’t leave, and on and on and on. Not to mention Shrub setting up fake feeding stations which were torn down after the media circus moved on. (Potemkin village, anyone?)

http://www.livejournal.com/community/hurricane_fema/430.html

People, this isn’t just disorganization. This is murder. Of our fellow Americans, by our government. When you’re done shouting expletives at the monitor, write your Congressmen and Senators. Send them these links. Demand the impeachment and criminal investigation of these officials who are playing cards and going shoe-shopping while people we care for are dying. People they swore to serve and protect. People who paid their fucking salaries with their hard-earned taxes.

Pretty much all of this community is essential reading. Go. Get enraged. Get involved. Get BushCo impeached and tried.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/hurricane_fema