Saturday, September 3, 2005
Did a little work for Corinna. Tried to figure out plans for a Hawaii vacation for me. (Patrick cannot go since he's in school.) Breakfast: waffles, potatoes o'brien, sliced banana, sliced pluot for Mom Ryan. I had the same but with scrambled eggs instead of waffles. With Mom Ryan's assistance, I quickly put together a Hurricane Katrina web page for Patrick and Mom Ryan listing the statuses and known locations of their family members. Since I know Google might not index the page for another month or so, I tried to see a place on the wikipedia entry for the hurricane I could add a link, but there didn't seem to be a section for that. A lot of sites now have this kind of info exchange set up, so I have linked to the ones I found. Mom Ryan and Patrick took a short walk while I showered. Mom Ryan wanted Chinese food for a very late lunch, so we went to Eric's Restaurant (415-282-0919, 1500 Church St): five taste chicken, walnut prawns, buddha's delight, brown rice, tea. $42.30 after a $6 tip. Patrick's fortune: Financial prosperity is coming your way. Mom Ryan's fortune was the same as mine: You will be a happy recipient of good news. Car wash at Divisadero Car Wash. Grocery shopping at Tower Market. Mom Ryan found out that her food stamps card still works. She paid for nearly the entire $150 in groceries. Patrick did some Chinese homework. I found some great high-resolution photos from NOAA on wwltv.com. The photos were taken after Hurricane Katrina had passed, and in many of them you can see how areas were or were not affected by flooding. The images were great except that they weren't always rotated with north at the top. Within about an hour, switching between Google Earth and the images opened in Photoshop, we were able to determine statuses for Mom Ryan's apartment building (not much damage, seemed to be dry), Dianne's house (probably badly flooded), Michelle's house (looks pretty good), and one of Dianne's offices for her Victor Manning Driving School (dry, and no roof damage, which contradicts earlier reports). Without Photoshop and Google Earth, it's probably really hard for people to get this same kind of results quickly. Mom Ryan and Patrick skipped dinner, but I had a late night meal: leftovers from Eric's. Paid bills. Checked up on the VPN pages from yesterday—they did not go live as expected, so I send an urgent message out to ask others involved to check up on it. If you're reading my journal daily, be warned I still have written notes from some of the recent days I will later go back to fill. I just filled in some for yesterday, but I have a lot more. Just before bed I notice that Google Maps now has some satellite map data of the Hurricane Katrina areas. When I search on "Chalmette, LA" Google includes a pink button labelled "Katrina" and it explains that the imagery shown is from Wednesday, August 31. For example, here's the [17th Street Canal breach][link defunct]. [Here is the official Google link to their Hurricane Katrina map resource][link defunct]. Very cool! It's probably only a matter of time before the geniuses at Google figure out how to let people switch from an address search result to a mostly current post-Katrina satellite image with the click of a pink button—that would be much easier than my NOAA+Photoshop+GoogleEarth solution! Bedtime.