[vox] [fwd] SVLUG members involved in New Orleans disaster assistance

[Bill Kendrick]

FYI, seen on SVLUG's main mailing list...

----- Forwarded message from Ian Kluft -----

Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 21:20:03 -0700
From: Ian Kluft
Subject: [svlug] SVLUG members involved in New Orleans disaster assistance

Any of you who are on the SVLUG Volunteers mail list already saw that
Paul Reiber asked if we have ideas how to help some friends of his who
evacuated from New Orleans and are now among 300,000 displaced in
Baton Rouge.  An idea he brought up was to ask if anyone here can
spare room for them to stay while they look for jobs in Silicon Valley.
(I presume his friends are techies.)

I'll get that one started.  I have a spare room in my house.  Let's
do our part to rally the nation to assist with this.

I also talked with Chris Verges.  (He's the one who provided the wireless
network at last month's SVLUG meeting, with Symantec's approval.)  Many of
you may also know him as one of the people from Cisco who helped with the
meeting room during the last year that SVLUG met there.  He grew up in
New Orleans.  His family evacuated to Texas before the storm.  It sounds
like they're lucky ones - Chris used an online post-Katrina aerial or
satellite photo to verify that their home is not in a flooded area.
Not surprisingly, when Cisco asked for employees to join an emergency-
response team to New Orleans, he volunteered.  He's leaving soon so he
won't be at the SVLUG meeting next week.  He says he'll post updates on
his personal web site at http://www.headnut.org/ - he expects to be able
to update it regularly via the IP data/voice/video satellite link that
he and others on the Cisco crew will set up for the emergency relief effort.

I don't work at Cisco any more.  But I wish them all the best.  I probably
would have gone along with this or something like it.  But I can't just
after having started a new job.  So I'll find other ways to help.

We should all look for ways to help, big or small just as long as we each
do something.  I haven't heard confirmation from a historian yet but
I think the last time a major American city was so totally devastated
in a disaster was the 1906 earthquake that heavily damaged most cities on
a 200-mile stretch of the Northern and Central California coast, including
the Bay Area.  None of us is old enough to remember that - but it was
right here.

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
-bill!
bill at newbreedsoftware.com
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/