For the last few weeks the news has been telling us over and over again to make sure we have flood insurance, to make sure we’re “prepared”, and to make sure we have an emergency plan.  That’s because near a dam on the Green River, there’s (apparently) an earth embankment that’s likely to (somehow) fail this coming winter, resulting in a flood anywhere between three and ten feet deep.  (Update: Some news stories predict the dam over-topping; others predict the embankment failing.  It’s hard to know which is actually the official prediction.)

A few days ago, my wife commented that the news mentioned the National Guard preparing accomodations for 5,000 displaced people in the event of a flood.  Five thousand?  There are probably five thousand people in my apartment complex.  The flood zone is much, much bigger than my apartment complex.  Where are all these people supposed to go?

It gets even better, though.  Yesterday evening, the news played some comments by some woman high up in the local (city or county) government.  Her comments went something like this:

We need to learn from Hurricane Katrina.  After Katrina, the city ran out of body bags, and families were stuck with bodies for weeks and weeks.  We want to make sure that no families here are stuck with a body for weeks.

So much concern over body bags proves to me that they’re expecting a lot of deaths.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to tell everyone to leave the area?  That way, nobody dies! Gee, what a novel idea.

I feel like the local government is completely clueless about what to do about this flood.  Nobody has ever explained why they aren’t fixing the levy.  If money’s the issue, I’m sure the tens of thousands of people in the flood zone could all pitch in and fund repairs – I know I would be willing.

Update: I found a local news station’s story on the King County Council meeting.  This was the actual quote:

KIRO 7 Eyewitness News reporter Chris Egert said one council member asked about body bags while others made comparisons to Hurricane Katrina.

“I want to know what we have in the supply of body bags if somebody gets killed,” asked Kathy Lambert of the King County Council. “Do we have a supply of body bags so families will be able to deal with that?”

Update 2: Another news story on the same station’s site informs us that

Engineers are working 24 hours a day on a temporary fix at the dam, but they don’t know how well it will work.

I just read this post and found it quite humorous, especially this comment at the end:

And, of course, if you want to make things really awkward, I suggest printing out this article and trying to explain it to the guy peeing next to you.

There are times when you think you waste most of your time…  and then you read an article about optimal urinal allocation, and you feel better.

So I just realized something sad.  A few weeks ago, I downloaded and played the demo of Batman: Arkham Asylum.  It was released on one console or other a few days ago, and it comes out for Windows in a few weeks, so I was all excited for its release, and I planned to buy it on Steam.  Nothing sad so far, right?

Turns out Batman: Arkham Asylum is published by Eidos.  That’s the same Eidos that I’m strongly in favor of boycotting.  That’s the sad part.

I titled this post “Conflict of interest” because I want to support this kind of game; but I can’t support that kind of publisher.  Thus it is with a heavy heart that I must pass on this otherwise wonderful game.

A couple of days ago I added a bunch of features to my Slicehost API interface class (for PHP).  Most of you are about to say “Uh, what’s Slicehost?”  Click here.  (They’re the server hosting company I use.  If you sign up, please use this referral link or put “heron@xnapid.com” as the referrer so I get a referral bonus )

Slicehost provides an application programming interface to let you control your hosted servers (“slices”).  This API can do everything from creating a new slice, to restoring a slice from a backup, to deleting a slice, to managing the domain name resolution settings on your account.  (So when I bought orderingdisorder.com, I used the API to automatically add the DNS entries to my slicehost account so “the internet” would know where to find this site, rather than adding the entries manually.)

Anyway, my PHP interface class is just a PHP class that lets you conveniently access your Slicehost account from the convenience of a PHP script.  My last update added the ability to create, reimage, reboot, or rename slices.

If you find yourself needing the class, you can download it here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/php-sliceapi/

Or, you can grab it from the Subversion repository, if you’re into that sort of thing:

https://php-sliceapi.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/php-sliceapi/trunk

It is not amusing when people steal my drinks from the fridge.

That is all.