I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety.

Well said.

I think the best boilerplate piece of advice in the article is on purchasing plane tickets is the following paragraph:

My main advice for buying airline tickets is to always book more than a month in advance, as prices rise in the last month—especially during the last two weeks, when our data show that they go up by $70 on average. Flexibility in the time of day in which you travel and the airport from which you fly can be worth 50 percent. And finally, even if you’re committed to flying on a particular flight with a particular airline, it still pays to search if you’ve got two months before the flight takes off. Check the price every day, and if it falls by 20 percent, book it. A saving of 20 percent simply by monitoring the price on Orbitz for two weeks is an enormous return on invested time.

I’ve pretty much always bought plane tickets at least a couple of months in advance when possible, so overall I’d have to agree with his observations.

Of the big network coverage, I’d have to say the best I’ve seen is CNN. They are actually challenging the people who’s job is to provide relief to the area, rather than say Fox News who continue to kiss Bush’s ass for no reason and focus on looting rather than the lack of support. Leave it to BoingBoing to summarize how well Bush has done with this disaster so far with two simple pictures. I’ve also been streaming a bit of WWL Channel 4, New Orleans online.

One of the things that bloggers have been pointing out is biased news coverage, especially where news orgazinations have labeled pictures differently according to the race of the person. I’m not quite sure I buy it, given that the two examples in question are from completely different news agencies, one of them being in Europe. Also according to the experience first hand from a New Orleans Police Officer, some crazy shit is going down:

He’s only hearing bits and pieces. The people in the city are shooting at the police. They’re upset that they’re not getting help quickly enough. The fireman keep calling because they’re under fire. He doesn’t understand why the people are shooting at the rescuers. Here it is 5 days ago the Mayor said get out of town and nobody went and now they’re pissed.

The National Guard was at the Hilton, but now the Hilton is evacuated. When they said the CBD was gonna get 6 feet of water, it seems like everyone evacuated.

He turned the corner onto Canal Street and it looked like a flea market. People breaking into every store, going to the neutral gound (median) and trading and selling everything.

They broke into Winn Dixie Monday Night. Do they steal food? No. Cigarettes and liquor. Store was a mess. All the meats were going to waste so the districts went over there to salvage food for officers. Many cops have been eating MREs.

The Iberville Housing Projects got pissed off because the police started to “shop” after they kicked out looters. Then they started shooting at cops. When the cops left, the looters looted everything. There’s probably not a grocery left in this city.

Over 30 officers have quit over the last 3 days. Out of 160 officers in his district maybe 55 or 60 are working. He hasn’t seen several since Sunday. HQ is closed, evacuated. No phones to contact them.

Granted I have no place in being able to criticize, but it seems like no one was prepared for this event given that there seem to be more news outlets in the New Orleans area than rescue personel. I’m sure we’ll see a lot more support arrive in the next several days, but it looks really bad there right now. I’ve also been reading more and more about why so many people were stuck there, and I’m beginning to see why there are so many people still in New Orleans.

Here are some places I’ve been checking out for news updates:

• CNN
• The Survival of New Orleans blog: Experiences and photos from a DirectNIC datacenter
• WWL TV : New Orleans
• Tulane University
• BoingBoing
• NOLA.com

I’ll update this list as I come across them.