In watching the New Orleans coverage over the last few days, I’m starting to wonder at what point can you feasibly rebuild a major metropolitan area after such extensive damage? Some have bounced back from the big storms. Galveston in the 1900 hurricane is a good example, but Galveston also required a massive public works and recovery effort following the storm, with the construction of the seawall and the raising of the entire island to prevent further catastrophe. We cant even fund reasonable health-care and public radio. Can we pull something like this off, in this day and age ? Also in the time it took to rebuild the city, Houston had surpassed it as the port of choice, so it was never quite the economic powerhouse it was before.

Addtionally, what a lot of people don’t realize is the island used to have a second suburb city of West-Galveston, that was lage enough to have its own theatre, race track, etc., Which was completly washed into the bay. Indianola is an example of another town on the Texas Coast that simply doesn’t exist anymore after getting wiped out by these storms. Maybe the real kicker here is getting people to return. Will people want to go through this again even if it is 40 years from now ?

I realize the kind of infrastructure investment that a place like New Orleans represents, but when is the psychological factor too much? What if people simply don’t want to come back after this?

Regardless, all our good vibes go out to the locals there.

I done got me a promotion today !

It is our privilege to promote Wade Treichler to Communications Coordinator. There is no doubt Wade has worked incredibly hard to earn this position. Given that he has the most communication with EVERY team in this building, we are proud that he will be our representative on the management team. In addition, Wade will OFFICIALLY be in charge of all of our printing and website needs, a job he’s been doing wonderfully already.

Fatwade is pleased.

So, after 6 months of wrestling with my old CMS program, I realized I had completly screwed up the install, and need to start over ( I draw pretty pictures for a living, what do you expect ?). Anyway after a few weeks of battle and negotiation, the server and I have reached an agreement. We now have a site setup to allow comments, archives searched, and the other creature comforts of a modern day blog.

However my concession to the bastard server was to not be able to export all the old entries. I copied the last month-and-a-half’s worht of entries mannually, but the rest will reamin in enemy territory. Farewell good travelers.

Moving on, we will be refining the design over the next few weeks, so hang in there.