I have nothing to contribute to the various discussions over Katrina except to say Contribute.

In other news... Todd is in town blogging the US Open for IBM. I "worked" at the Open a couple of times (loosely defined as: I showed up and hung out with the web team). I don't have any nifty stories to tell, once you've seen Chet write/rewrite a scoring system live while the matches are going on you lose the little details that make it into a story.

Ok, I do have something to add about Katrina: this is amateur hour at the White House. Yes, this was an incredible storm, but it was not unexpected. You make a plan and you execute on it....it's become that there was no plan. This crap about "just getting started" is just that, crap. 20,000 people survived the hurricane, only to be at risk of dying now due to the absolute lame-ass response by the administration. Blaming people for staying behind (when it's now clear that many people had absolutely no way of leaving) is disgusting. This is the cost of starving FEMA since 2000. This is worse than the response to Andrew in 1992. As a political gambit, the administration has nothing to lose, there's no more elections to win.

Ahem, so contribute to the Red Cross, or whomever you think will help people immediately. Don't contribute to an unrelated charity which just threw up a donate link to take advantage of the disaster.