For the last month or so I’ve been playing around with Arduino (“open-source electronics prototyping platform “) and Processing (“open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions”). Both are very, very cool. The Arduino programming environment is based on Processing, so learning both isn’t much extra effort.… Read More »
While analyzing a bunch of US Census data at work to build out an even more comprehensive geographical database for Voxify’s speech apps, I ran into an unexpected error. I wrote a Python script to parse a CSV file that contains population data from 2000 and estimates for 2001-2007. The code extracted the data I… Read More »
Some parts of Biloxi look to have substantially recovered from Hurricane Katrina. Other parts don’t look much changed from when I visited in December 2005. However, the Mississippi Gulf Coast seems to be recovering faster than Louisiana. There was a big difference in what I saw in Biloxi and Gulfport from what I later observed… Read More »
I was back in Biloxi at the beginning of March to visit my mother on her birthday. While there, of course, I had to partake in one of my all time favorite meals, the shrimp po-boy. This is a very simple meal, just some medium-sized fried shrimp with shredded lettuce, sliced tomato, and mayonnaise on… Read More »
Hurrican Katrina wasn’t bad for everybody. Super-sized contractors like Bechtel and Halliburton have found the Katrina clean-up work to be a great source of funds to make up for the contracts they lost in Iraq due to overcharging and general incompetence. CorpWatch has a lot of good info (Disaster Profiteering on the Gulf Coast story… Read More »
I’ve uploaded many photos to my website gallery and to this blog, but Hurricane Katrina has made me realize just how important it is to use my website to backup the photos on only one of my computers and the photo prints I have still yet to scan. Although Dreamhost’s servers are in earthquake country… Read More »
St. Michael’s church along the Biloxi beach also suffered a violent blow from Hurricane Katrina. While the upper parts of the church, including much of the stained glass windows that go all the way around the building, mostly survived, nearly everything from about eight feet down was washed away. This bell was near the front… Read More »
One of the many tragic outcomes of Hurricane Katrina has been the destruction of the historical treasures of Biloxi. Fortunately, many of these artifacts had been photographed because they were publicly accessible in the Gulf Coast Maritime and Seafood Museum. Of course, being located at the Museum put the artifacts directly in the path of… Read More »
This image has appeared in a lot of stories on Biloxi after Hurricane Katrina. The Golden Fisherman statue was originally located in downtown Biloxi in the mid 1970’s and was widely mocked at the time, perhaps because of the imagery of a fisherman casting a net into what was then a mostly run-down urban area.… Read More »
Point Cadet is one of the saddest sections to visit in Biloxi. At one point, we drove past three city blocks in which not a single building was left standing. This neighborhood with a deep, rich cultural heritage was once filled with many homes and businesses that survived Hurricane Camille. In the satellite photos after… Read More »