Friday, May 28, 2010

Simple Math

BP finally got its "top kill" act together Wednesday and began pumping drilling "mud" into the hole near the frog on the bump on the log at the bottom of the deep dark well. There were periodic stops and starts as pressure tests were done to evaluate the stability of the BOP. Understandable.

But last night on CNN, LSU's... See More... See More Ed Overton theorized that pressure tests were not the only reason the TK was supended. I confess I was distracted for the first part of Overton's theory, but the gist of it was that BP had run out of mud. Well, that would certainly be embarrassing, wouldn't it? I mean, these guys are engineers, right? Good with numbers and all that, right?

Well…

BP has reported that the initial "mud" pumping started out slowly (making sure the lines and BOP could handle the pressure) and was gradually increased to 65 barrels/minute. Over the past two days there has been about 16 hours of pumping at which point BP claimed they needed to suspend operations and "see what happens."

Except…

16 hours = 960 minutes.
65 barrels/minute x 960 minutes = 62,400 barrels.

According to NOLA.com:
"The company has also ordered 15,000 more barrels of mud to add to the 50,000 barrels initially onsite. Suttles said he did not know how much mud had been pumped into the well or how much had escaped."

50,000 + 15,000 = 65,000.

Sad but obvious fact = the dummies ran out of mud.

And yesterday they clamored for the cameras in order to explain that this temporary suspension stuff is all according to plan. Really? And they didn't think this would look awkward? No one at BP HQ thought "Hey, this plan to stop pumping in the middle of the night might look bad, y'now, since we been gaming these Cajun dinks for the last month. Shouldn't we mention this before hand so they don't think we're screwing something up?"

My other thought of the morning is that if they can pump 65 barrels/MINUTE in through two 3" hoses how is it that a 21" pipeline is spewing just 12-19,000 barrels/DAY?

Of course this is mere speculation on my part. What the hell do I know.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Bone Smuggler

Ha-Ha you big twat!

YOU HAVE BEEN HOSED!!

Try not to be so gullible in the future!

Luv ya though!

-M

Monday, March 15, 2010

Blurb, Widgets and K+36

I have been asked by Blurb to help beta-test their new BookShow widget which embeds book previews into blogs and web pages, so without further ado, here we go with my first book, the lower ninth: K+36. Note, this is a full preview of the book from cover to cover.


The first thing I notice is the ugly gray background and the inability to fit the opened book in the space allocated by the blog but the full-screen preview looks OK. Test it out and let me know if your browser has any difficulties displaying the preview. Thanks in advance for your time!

UPDATE: Blurb has also bestowed upon me a code for free shipping on orders placed by March 22! If you order your book before the 22nd, enter the promo code WESHIP for free shipping!

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Salinger Dead

JD Salinger dead at 91. The reclusive author died at his home (where else?) January 27, 2010. Let the Rights Wars begin!

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Stop Nagin Now!

New Orleans' Mayor C Ray Nagin is on the road again but this time he's not racking up any International Flyer Miles. C Ray is attending the US Conference of Mayors this week in Washington DC where he will present his recommendations for changes in the Stafford Act to President Obama and key Cabinet officials. The Stafford Act covers financial and physical assistance to areas designated as disasters by Presidential order. One of the areas Nagin hopes to improve is the alacrity of reimbursement by FEMA for recovery projects which have been completed and paid for with non-recovery funds.

One wonders if Nagin is aware of the definition of 'completed". In the three and a half years since Katrina, Nagin has been tinkering around with plans and placing his cronies in key positions of recovery projects which never seem to come anywhere near completion. FOX8/The Lens recently ran an interesting story on Nagins' machinations which can be read here.

Nagin has reduced the Claiborne Corridor funding from 4.5 million dollars to 2.5 million citing that the money is needed for "shovel ready" projects, however councilwoman Stacey Head states that those projects in her district are indeed "shovel ready" but have been delayed by the Nagin Administration.

Interestingly, the Claiborne Corridor money has found it's way into the coffers of the Lake Forest redevelopment projects of Cesar Bugos, A close, personal buddy of, you guessed it… C Ray Nagin! Nagin says political alliances had nothing to do with the funding increase. Still, the Lake Forest project has gone from 4.5 million dollars to 9 million. Curious, no?

Nagin has also drained the Recovery School District coffers of 10 million dollars leaving its block grant account at zero stopping projects dead in their tracks. At risk are the Federal City military academy, the downtown international business school and renovations to the CAC. (So you see, the Mayor does have certain powers over education in the city.)

Add to this Nagins' recent funding of Sean Cummings' "Reinventing Sean Cummings" plan, his appointing of cronies Irvin Mayfield and alleged coke dealer and soft-core porn photographer Bernard Wade to head the Municipal Auditorium recovery and his continued attempts to buy the Chevron Building for a City Hall he'll never even sit in and you have one severely disconnected son-of-a-bitch.

I urge the City Council to do whatever it takes to strip C Ray Nagin of all powers and duties for the next four months. It becomes clearer each day that Nagin exists only for the profit of himself and his allies and I shudder at what more damage he may do to this city if allowed to continue his rape of the our financial coffers.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Breaking News From Iokon's PollNOLA!

Well, not really. In fact, they haven't done anything with the site since early December. It seems the wizards behind John Georges' own campaign website are unable to find any news of note on the heated 2010 New Orleans mayoral election.

From Iokon's own PollNOLA press blurb:
IOKON Media is proud to present a quick and dirty little project that we’ve been tossing around for quite some time now. The project is called Poll NOLA and it was built in order to digitally track the reputations and press coverage of New Orleans Mayoral hopefulls for the 2010 race. Custom developed from the ground up, we utilized some basic WordPress features with a blend of our own creative programming, for an awesome collection of aggregated data from all over the web.

We know it’s tough to track so many candidates, their websites, tweets, press releases, blog posts, Facebook announcments and everything else social that these Digital Media newbies have going on, so go ahead and pop on over to Poll NOLA where you can follow the 2010 Race for Mayor of New Orleans.
Clearly Iokon nor PollNOLA has any concept of "soon."

Currently, PollNOLA has front page headlines for six of the two dozen mayoral candidates who threw their hats into the political arena: Troy Henry, James Perry, John Georges, Nadine Ramsey, Ed Murray and Leslie Jacobs. (There's also a rotating headline that Mitch Landrieu may enter the race and Irvin Mayfield won't!) Two of those candidates, Jacobs and Murray, have already picked up their political toys and gone home. PollNOLA has no mention of their withdrawal from the election. In fact, the only lead stories on the site are about the candidates announcing their candidacies!

PollNOLA does suck the Twitter feeds from Henry, Perry, Georges and Jacobs, (Though Jacobs last Twitter update is her withdrawal back on December 16th!) but if you really care about the election you're following those Twits already.

PollNOLA was thrown together in late August, 2009, and has garnered an impressive four comments. Total. On 119 press releases and articles "selected" from other sources as varied as Hullabaloo Online, NOLA.com, WWL, Gambit and Your Right Hand Thief. You know, real sources with actual content. Of course, there's not much chance of people sticking around to comment at PollNOLA since most of these reposts are teasers that end with a "Read the full story here" link to the original article. It's easier to avoid plagiarism lawsuits that way, I guess.

One thing I find incredible is that a site called PollNOLA only has four actual polls on the site. Three posted on August 21st, 2009 and one from September 14th, 2009. Curious as to how they have helped to inform the citizens of New Orleans, I participated in the latest poll on whether Ed Murray's digitized-hype campaign video was a good thing or not. After choosing the option that I didn't care in the least, a cute little text sentence replaced the poll: "Thank you for your vote, all results will be displayed soon!" That was about thirty minutes ago.

So I wondered, with all the expense of hiring people to slap PollNOLA together, throwing in some content leeching code, buying a domain name through GoDaddy and protecting their identity using GoDaddy's pricey DomainsByProxy service and whipping up those polls that just don't work… is it all worth it?

Results for PollNOLA:
mywebsiteworth.com - $72
websitevaluecalculator.com - $103
sootle.com - $1,315

For comparison, I also checked HumidCity:
mywebsiteworth.com - $53
websitevaluecalculator.com - $119
sootle.com - $291,972

AmericanZombie:
mywebsiteworth.com - $1,082
websitevaluecalculator.com - $119
sootle.com - $230,230

and Nation of Morons:
mywebsiteworth.com - $25
websitevaluecalculator.com - $103
sootle.com - $18,719

And if that doesn't clarify it, Google:
mywebsiteworth.com - $46 Billion
websitevaluecalculator.com - $4 Billion
sootle.com - $3 Billion

So, I think we've proven that website value calculators are about as useful for website valuation as PollNOLA is for content, but if I ever sell the Nation of Morons, I'll be pointing prospective buyers toward my Sootle ranking!

Oh, it's been about an hour now and the PollNOLA results still haven't posted yet. What a surprise. Like anything else associated with John Georges, I suppose we shouldn't hold our breath!

UPDATE! 01-26-10 49 days and counting (a full seven weeks) since new content has been posted to PollNOLA. Clearly there is nothing happening in the 2010 New Orleans mayoral election! The main ad square is still available on their front page! The results from the poll I participated in have still not shown up.

In honor of this post being hung at the New Orleans Ladder I'm adding their worth for comparison to PollNOLA:

New Orleans Ladder:
mywebsiteworth.com - $46
websitevaluecalculator.com - $119
sootle.com - $217,027