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Reader’s Digest recently gave FEMA a raspberry for ineptness and inefficiency, claiming they lost “some $1 billion in potentially bogus Katrina-related aid. An audit found that the federal relief agency didn’t properly monitor where the funds were going.”

Surprisingly, the inefficiency aspect isn’t the biggest issue to me. The definition of “emergency” means you handle unexpected conditions to the best of your ability. And while audits are necessary, they don’t save lives in the trenches.

I think FEMA got a wake-up call, and learned some powerful lessons in the only way they *can* be learned. Too optimistic? Time will tell.

The raspberry, in my humble opinion, needs to go to any so-called American who tried to bilk the “system” in the face of the catastrophe.

In fact, I’d be in favor of stripping the citizenship of anyone convicted of defrauding FEMA during a declared state of emergency.

I’m not getting this hurricane season at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the peace and quiet. But this time last year you couldn’t risk facing east while you sneezed, lest you cause a tropical depression to spin up.

This year we’ve seen event after event start to loom, only to fade out like a cheesy ghost at the “Haunted Mansion”. Here it is almost the season peak and feeble Alberto has been the only thing to even drop some rain on our grateful heads.

*Something* is different between this year and last. Maybe salinity or temperature or pressure or sunspots, but *something*.

And I hope the Scientists and Experts are sampling anything and everything they can to try to figure out what.

Startling jury finding: the Houston woman who drowned her five children because Satan was in her body and she thought the act would prevent her from going to Hell, is insane.

Of course it took the legal system three years and untold thousands (millions?) of dollars to come to this conclusion.

Insanity, it seems, is going around.

Okay, from the outset I have to apologize. It’s my own fault; I *know* to allow extra time for construction when coming across US 192.

Truckers used to use 192 as a fast shortcut from the Orlando area to I-95. The DOT decided that they wanted them to pay tolls instead, so construction on 192 is scheduled for completion approximately when hell freezes over.

Worse, I missed the turnoff for the venue and had to loop about 1/2 a mile around the block. So I was 15 minutes late getting there.

I’d missed half the show. Literally.

My fault. I’m sorry.

The rest of the prejudging took about another 30 minutes. I’ve posted what I managed to get. Enjoy.

Okay, rather than start from scratch I decided to take the existing design and see if I could install the “brains” of the bodybuilding page (the part that builds and sizes all the links based on the page name and config file, and the extra information associated with each show).

The answer: yes, I could.

This means that contest pages (Mid-Florida and forward) should work in both IE and in good browsers now, and also should integrate more nicely into the style of the site as a whole.

So that worked out; though I’m still not completely happy with the apparent incomplete download on the pop-ups, I can live with it for now. I’m curious as to how the new layout works on screens with lower resolution than mine– drop me a note on the feedback link if you have a comment.

Hopefully I can catch up on some of the other latent projects over the next few days: I still have:
* the Space Coast show to put up,
* a very nice update to Sherry’s page to finish,
* a travelogue from my last Cincinnati trip,
* about nine brazillion photos of figure competitor Toni to go through, and
* a shoot of figure competitor Brandy Gardner to handle.

And oh, and the Ancient City is next weekend.

And oh, I’ve started my diet– not sure if I’m competing or not, but I’m going to train towards it anyway.

So much to do… (boggle)

I’ve just spent six hours of my life trying to figure out a way around the IE missing-images bug, and I’ve had no luck at all. There’s some combination of (presumably correct) CSS and MS-specific extensions that are causing the images to display partially or not at all.

I *did* find pages and pages of hacks to get around the mistakes in IE’s rendering engine.

I also came across an interesting allegation that says IE has been triple-dipping on image loads, making it look as though IE’s popularity is much higher than it actually is by registering more server hits than are actually needed to render a page.

I woudn’t doubt it. I’ve always found those high numbers to be very suspicious.

Damn you, Redmond, for foisting such a malfunctioning, non-compliant, MS-bound piece of crap like IE on an unsuspecting public. And if it turns out that the only reason we’ve been biting our tongues and adding workarounds for your busted code is because you artificially inflated the usage stats, well, that’s good too. The repercussions will be *very* entertaining.

For now, though, either get Firefox or keep holding down the “Shift” key while you click the thumbnails. I’ll figure something out eventually.

According to the news, North Korea’s Taepodong-2 ran out of steam about forty seconds after being summoned to action.

They were able to get it up, but not keep it up.

It happens to the best of us, from time to time.

(I’m probably going to lose my “PG” rating for this.)