Maybe it’s just me, but it strikes me that, if you’re looking for a mascot for the water and sewer department, choosing one that’s narrow, tubular, and brown might not be the best idea.

The folks at the Western Virginia Water Authority apparently didn’t share my apprehension.

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No, it’s not what you think. Meet Piper the otter.

Here’s the overall winner of the Visions of Science Photographic Awards, shot by David McCarthy. Do you know what it is?

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For the answer, click and drag your mouse over the hidden text below.

-> A grain of salt and a peppercorn.

I got a neat toy delivered today, courtesy of the folks at Dymo. Dymo, as you might realize, makes label makers — turn the knob, click the letter, repeat, then tear off your embossed sticky label. You’ve probably used one.

So why did Dymo see fit to send me one? Because it’s not just a label maker, it’s the Cool Clicks, “the world’s first talking labelmaker.”

There could be a reason no one else has made such a thing.

The Cool Clicks (and props to Dymo for not spelling it “Clickz”) is designed for kids and is supposed to be — seriously — educational. “Voice capability catapults Cool Clicks beyond labelling into fun learning.”

Hmm. Maybe fun for the kids, turning out label after expensive label to stick onto their siblings. While the kids are supposedly learning about letters, parents will undoubtedly be rushing around the house after hearing it chirp “D-O-O-D-Y” for the umpteenth time.

The thing is, Dymo makes great, useful products. Yeah, you can load stickers into your printer, or get one of those expensive Brother label makers, but embossed labels are quick and cheap and easy. There really isn’t anything that does what Ye Olde Label Makers do.

Unfortunately, these days resting on your laurels isn’t what makes stockholders happy, so companies have to find new ways to recreate and re-launch and feature-bloat their products. And we end up with talking label makers.

A friend asked me about a house for sale in the Roanoke area, wanting to know about the neighborhood. Not knowing off-hand where the address was, I clicked on the “Map and Directions” button of the Realtor.com listing.

Here’s what I got. Useful, huh?

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“We spent a lot of years putting cameras where people didn’t know they were, and I didn’t have a problem with that.”
–Former CIA director Robert Gates responding to a question about how he felt about putting cameras on public streets

I mean, the Mac users.

Desperate, as always, to find fault with anything that isn’t unabashedly pro-Mac, the folks at Mac Daily News have complained about my USAToday piece that dares — dares! — to say the iPod has competition.

And like good little lemmings, MDN readers start sending me nasty notes based on the comments they read.

Never mind that the column is inarguably pro-iPod; it simply wasn’t pro-iPod enough.

This is why so many of the tech writers I’ve talked with say they just don’t want to write about the Mac. Who needs a cult banging on your Inbox?

The good thing is, they’re always good fodder for a fun follow-up column.

Read more over in the USA Today Follow-Up section.

What is wrong with Mac users and Apple fans? I mean that — I’ve never seen the like. Calling them “blind lemmings” doesn’t always seem strong enough.

Get this: I write an incredibly positive commentary about the iPod nano, calling it “a beautiful piece of hardware” and “better looking than its competition.” I had nothing but praise for it.

And yet, the Mac lovers find fault. Why? Because I dared to suggest that the iPod is getting some decent competition.

In a note entitled “Andrew, what competition?” one writer took me to task (!) because, he said, the iPod’s buttons are well layed out and has a great interface.

The fact that I pretty much said this escaped him. Problem: I suggested that other companies were — Jobs forbid! — also starting to make decent products.

“So far you’re in the minority with your opinion,” he wrote. My opinion was that the iPod is a terrific piece of hardware. That’s the minority?

The creed of Mac lovers: If you don’t A) praise anything by Apple unconditionally, B) praise it at length, and C) put down anything by a competitor, you’re an idiot.

Amazing.

Another genius wrote, “Whether you like the iPod nano is not the issue; what is evident is that you are unqualified to to write a critical review of music players. Simple as that.”

This because… why? Answer: Because I didn’t heap enough praise on an Apple product.

I got this nonsense from Mac lovers before, when — I kid you not — I failed to play up Apple’s role in the Virginia Tech supercomputer.

The curse-filled notes I got came to my Inbox because, again, I simply didn’t heap enough praise. (The writers also thought, incorrectly, as it turned out, that I had some minor factual errors. They were wrong, as it turns out, but why should facts get in the way of a good cult-like rant?)

So here we go again. And now I understand why so many of the tech writers I’ve met say they hate to write about anything Apple does. Because the lemmings come calling.

Note (added 9/19): Welcome, Digg folks!

Oh, my.

I was sitting in a seminar today on how newspapers need to keep themselves relevant. One of the things that came up is the idea of a paper providing “conversational currency” to people — things to talk about at the water cooler.

Online news sources certainly do a lot of things that newspapers can’t. Immediacy comes to mind. But newspapers have one advantage: There are lots of online news sites, from professional journalists (CNN, USA Today) to blogs, to other stuff. But most towns and cities have one, maybe two, newspapers. Ask people where they get their news, and the folks who get it online will likely name a variety of sites, while the folks who read the paper (and, yes there will be overlap) almost all name the same newspaper.

To me, it’s not about “conversational currency.” It’s about the importance of a common ground to keep us together. The more we have in common, the better we relate and understand one another.

Think of a first date. If you don’t know the other person, you start off in that awkward stage, looking for that common ground. When you hit it, you pounce — “You like anchovies, too?!”

You start to build a foundation of things you have in common, bringing your personal experiences to bear. If you have nothing in common, you can’t converse.

The more people (read: individuals or societies) have in common, the better they communicate. But it doesn’t have to be experiences in common. It can simply be information: “Did you read that article in the Times?”

You don’t even have to agree; you just need some things in common. When two people first meet, whether socially, in business, or in politics, the first order of business is to find that common ground. Without it, there’s no way you can understand each other.

One of the big problems I have with lots of surveys is that the people taking them are doling out bullshit. Come on, if you ask people what they look for online, what percentage is actually going to say “porn”?

Everyone reads those magazines for the articles. Everyone is interested in the environment. Everyone reads at least two hours per day. Everyone is racially sensitive and non-prejudicial.

Bullshit. People either tell pollsters what they think the ideal answer is (a variation on ‘what they want to hear’), or they simply try to sound smarter or less pruient or less lawbreaking. (Illegal music downloads are down according to polls. Well, sheesh, with all those lawsuits going around, who wants to say ‘I download pirated music’ on a questionnaire?)

So it’s true for what people want in their lives. I live in a city with a very cute downtown that’s undergoing yet another revitalization. New stores are opening, and old office space is being converted into apartments. A vibrant downtown is just around the corner.

See, when you poll people, they say they want a ‘vibrant downtown.’ That sounds really good. In reality, though, they drive a half-hour to a mall (covered, air conditioned, full of familiar stores) rather than go downtown.

They say they like little, local stores — especially bookstores and coffee shops. In reality, they go to the monster Barnes & Noble, the ubiquitious Starbucks, or the giant Lowes or Home Depot.

The little stores give cities (and their downtowns)(downstown?) a nice quality — a braggable quality. “Oh, my, what a lovely downtown your city has.” But someone else should spend their money to keep it that way; most people would rather save a couple of bucks at Wal-Mart than give their business to the stores that give their cities character.

By the way, I’m not a hypocrit (not about this, anyway). I buy books at the little downtown bookstore, and shop at the little downtown hardware store, and get my haircut at the downtown barber.

To me it’s a small investment in a better downtown, although I know deep down that unless our downtown is covered, given a parking garage, and otherwise ‘mallified,’ it will slowly disappear like so many others.

The photo below of one Kimi Reynolds, Katrina refugee, has been in lots of papers — the face of despair.

Hopefully not too much despair, though. Ms. Reynolds was, apparently, able to get out of danger with several pairs of brand-new sneakers I’m sure she just purchased.

If you look closely, you can see the tags still on ‘em.

The federal government is now trying to stop press access to New Orleans.

From Scientific American, October 2001, comes “Drowning New Orleans” which begins:

A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city

And from National Geographic, October 2004, comes “Gone with the Water” which includes this:

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

So much for “no one could have foreseen the levees breaking.”

I installed an update for PerfectDisk, the excellent defragmenter I use. When it was done, it popped up a message listing what was new.

Among them:

What’s new in PerfectDisk build 7.00.042

* Corrected a bug in the boot time defragmentation. PerfectDisk records the current time on shutdown and compares it to the system time at reboot. On Windows XP, Service Pack 2, the system time at reboot can be earlier then the system time at shutdown. Raxco was unaware that Microsoft was able to travel back in time.

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FEMA director Mike Brown is showing himself over and over to be utterly and completely clueless and incompetent. His total lack of information and inability to take any kind of timely, effective action is indicative of the federal government as a whole.

If there’s ever a disaster — natural or man-made — I think it’s clear that you’re better off being in Indonesia than in the U.S. As CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien said to Brown, they had food and water drops two days after the tsunami. And that was unexpected.

We knew about Katrina for days before and did nothing. This is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a part of the Department of Homeland Security — it’s sole purpose is to be there for us in the event of a disaster.

And it failed.

Here’s the CNN piece on the total disconnect between reality and government officials.

In case that disappears, here’s a 4-MB MP3 of the interview.

Via the Survival of New Orleans blog comes these comments from “Bigfoot,” a life-long N.O. resident, made on Thursday, Sept. 1:

Three days ago, police and national guard troops told citizens to head toward the Crescent City Connection Bridge to await transportation out of the area. The citizens trekked over to the Convention Center and waited for the buses which they were told would take them to Houston or Alabama or somewhere else, out of this area.

It’s been 3 days, and the buses have yet to appear.

Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.

There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like — all of them in dire straights.

Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.

The people are so desperate that they’re doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians.

The buses never stop.

Before the supplies were pitched off the bridge today, people had to break into buildings in the area to try to find food and water for their families. There was not enough. This spurred many families to break into cars to try to escape the city. There was no police response to the auto thefts until the mob reached the rich area — Saulet Condos — once they tried to get cars from there… well then the whole swat teams began showing up with rifles pointed. Snipers got on the roof and told people to get back.

I listened to an NPR reporter absolutely take down Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.

Chertoff had insisted, on the air, that the people at the New Orleans convention center were not in desperate straits, and that food and water was coming in.

When the NPR anchor told him that a reporter had just said there were thousands of people at the convention center desperate for food and water, Chertoff told him not to believe rumors.

‘This isn’t rumor,’ the anchor said. ‘This is a reporter on the ground there who has been to refugee camps.’

Chertoff repeated the scripted bit about help being on the way and that people should go to designated areas for help.

So NPR put the reporter, John Burnett, on the air. ‘Let me be clear to Secretary Chertoff,’ he said,

There are, I estimate, 2,000 people living like animals inside the city convention center and around it. They’ve been there since the hurricane. There’s no food. There’s absolutely no water, there’s no medical treatment. There’s no police and no security. And there are two dead bodies lying on the ground and in a wheelchair beside the convention center — both elderly people, both covered with blankets now.”

Further, Burnett said, the convention center is where people are being told to go — they’re being told it’s a designated help zone (or whatever they’re calling it).

This is a test of homeland security. We knew for days that Katrina was going to hit New Orleans. And, three days later, we still can’t help them?

Have you seen the pictures? Are you reading the reports?

“Living like animals.” Snipers attacking hospitals. “Lord of the Flies.”

This is the United States of America, dammit. And we’re letting this happen in one of our cities?

What would have happened in a terrorist strike? Or in a disaster without warning? Where are our homeland security dollars going?

There are a handful of National Guard there; they’re all in Iraq. Ditto for the Army. Another handful — about 1400 per day for the next three days — are going in, according to Chertoff.

“Anarchy,” read the CNN headline earlier today.

This isn’t anarchy. This is chaos.

Gas station owners are evil, price-gouging thugs, right? After all, they raised prices in the middle of the day — charging more for what was already in their tanks!

Not so fast. Yes, some stations jump the gun a little on raising the prices. But they aren’t getting rich.

Gas stations typically make a few cents per gallon, at best, on gas. If you pay by credit or debit card, the merchant has to pay three or four percent.

As the manager of one station told me, “We’re probably selling it right at cost,” and if someone pays by credit card, “it’s like we’re paying them two cents a gallon to take it.”

Gas is a “loss leader,” meaning it doesn’t make money, but gets you into the store where hopefully you’ll spend a few bucks on snacks, beer, and other profit-making stuff.

What about those mid-day price jumps? I got the skinny from a station owner — the guy who actually writes the checks and buys the gas.

Every day at 6:00 the wholesalers set the price for the next day… sort of. They tell their retailers, and those retailers can place orders for the next day.

Chances are, especially now, those retailers are going to get a fill-up; there isn’t much left in their tanks overnight. But if they want gas at that 6:00 price, they have to move fast: Once the gasoline futures market opens at 10:00, prices start to fluctuate.

“Fluctuate,” ha. Let’s be frank: They start to go up.

A station that asks for a fill-up mid-day might find itself paying the higher price.

So station owners try to hedge their bets by checking the gas-futures market during the day to get a hint about those 6:00 prices. Some choose to raise prices mid-day to account for what they expect.

At noon today, gas was already at $3.17 wholesale, which means it will be at least $3.19 retail tomorrow.

That gas-station owner may not be your best friend right now, but maybe it’s some consolation that he’s not getting rich off you.

(FYI: Exxon-Mobil stock closed at $61.68 per share, up $1.78 on the day.)

Holed up in New Orleans, a blogger is posting about what’s going on in New Orleans.

Not pleasant reading. And scary, scary stuff when you realize that this was a test of how the Department of Homeland Security should handle a major disaster.

New Orleans had days of warning, and look what happened. Now we know that if terrorists strike a major city, the government is likely to be utterly ineffective.

Makes you wonder where all that homeland security money went…