Allen J. Hall

Tropical storm Gustav is making it’s way past Jamaica today (floods abound). I’ll be sending up prayers for everyone to stay safe while Gustav is passing. The Jamaican Radio Station Power 106 may have more live news (the link for Winamp can be used in iTunes).

6-12″ of rain and possibly 25″ of rain are expected. Gustav may at anytime turn into a Hurricane, and is expected to do so today. (paraphrased from Power106 recent weather news)

The Go-Jamaica.com Blog has frequent updates on the current storm’s damage. The Jamaican Gleaner (no stories up yet as of 1:59 PM).

Update (2:19 PM) - Jamaican Power says that currently approx. 47% of their customers are without power.

Update (11:01 PM) - (from Power 106) Lots of downed trees, streets out, and people in shelters. Looks like the Banana crop has been severely damaged yet again. Major source of damage is Flooding and Mud Slides. Two main bridges down. At least 2-3 days to restore traffic to St. Thomas parish. 31 people are on roof-tops due to mud-slides (12 feet of mud)- air lifts will be required for them. Have been deaths- car with four passengers washed away. Recovered one body, and search for the rest. Number of people drowned. Double-figure death toll may be possible. Eastern Rural section of St. Andrew, Gordon Town area (road collapsed past Newcastle) most hardest hit. Paraphrased from an interview by Gary Spalding- Earlier this morning with the Prime Minister on Power 106.

Those of you who know the Rockett group well, have likely seen this video. It’s completely hilarious. Anyone who’s ever been in Graduate School will love it…

This post is not exactly the status quo for this blog, but I wanted to share with you two things. First, that there are some wonderful companies out there that are very helpful. Second, that sometimes spammers do anything they can to spam.

I’ve been receiving a few SMS messages from number 83960 that were pretty much junk, nothing useful there at all, and I wasn’t sure what was going on. Perhaps it’s a company I recently decided to try out (beta software for phone productivity applications), or perhaps it’s a spammer. My bet right now is a spammer.

This is a tale of amazing customer service, and what the real skinny on 83960 is… (read more by clicking through below)

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This is a quick post for Michele. A sort of aggregated post. I’ll have to add more in the future regarding where this comes from. Essentially, I’ve been intrigued in the past few years by the work going in conjunction with the Mind and Life institute. This institute is trying to bring about collaboration between Buddhist practitioners and Science Researchers. I myself am not Buddhist, but appreciate some of their intellectual pursuits.

In particular, I came across the work of Matthieu Ricard (who’s called the Happiest Man On Earth- what a title… must have serious responsibilities!). Videos for you after the link…
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Here’s a great Chemistry PSA that reminds me of a teacher I had at Grand River Collegiate Institute in Ontario. I’ll have to dig up his name. He described all the different types of bonding pretty much in terms of relationships. It was simplistic but genius. If I remember his name, or dig out the old year book, I’ll update this post with it.

For now, the hat-tip goes to Dr. Mike at Getting Things Done In Academia.

For those of you who have known me for a significant amount of time, you have likely received some form of Apple iCard from me. I used to love that service dearly. It was part of the .Mac suite of webpages from Apple. The beauty of the site is that it was populated with beautiful images, enabled you to use it whether on a mac or IBM (shudder), included absolutely no spam whatsoever, and was embedded as an image into an e-mail message that was sent to the e-mail you specified. It was simple, beautiful, and just darn worked.

Now, I have the unfortunate frustration of trying to find another solution that is similar and as easy on the receiver as iCards was. No fun, Apple. So, Apple iCards is no iMore because of the introduction of Apple’s often frustrating often hated MobileMe push service for the iPhone. [ptooey]

Sad day indeed.