More Opera Soon, and an Update on New Orleans

I've been doing some pretty serious tinkering with Opera 8.02 for a few days now, and I'm sporadically compiling a fairly in-depth review of it. I've been typing in a few notes in the Notes field of Opera's panels bar, which is a nice little feature. There are quite a lot of things I need to say about it. Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is now a week away, but I won't be testing it; based on my experiences with Deer Park, it's probably going to be more trouble that it's worth for someone not directly involved with beta testing for the Mozilla Foundation. So I have plenty of time to kill writing up something decent on Opera.

In case you haven't seen it yet, there's an incredible blog being maintained from inside the hell that New Orleans has become called The Interdictor. It's run by the crisis manager for a company called DirecNIC. He and his crew are holding down a highrise and are making it a priority to make sure everyone knows what's going on down there. The most interesting thing is the right-turn in perspective they're giving us. If you're watching the news, you know already that every elected politician in the country seems to be doing everything they can to point out that things are not nearly as dire as the mainstream media are making it seem with their coverage. This guy, however, is pointing out that everyone he talks to is pissed as hell that the media is making things look much, much better than they actually are.

So a question organically appears here: Who has the incentive to lie, or to decieve themselves into believing one perspective or the other? The people on the ground dealing with the flooding, looting, crime, and lack of external support, or the VIPs who have to answer to the people in the voting booths?

Anyway, the blog is also worth checking out for this guy's masterful ability to come up with simple quotes that sum up an entire tragedy. "It takes a spectacular kind of asshole to set a fire in this environment." "It's hot as hell down there in the sun. Crime is absolutely rampant: rapes, murders, rape-murder combinations." "It is a zoo out there... it's the wild kingdom. It's Lord of the Flies. That doesn't mean there's murder on every street corner. But what it does mean is that the rule of law has collapsed, that there is no order... Anyone who is on the streets is in immediate danger of being robbed and killed. It's that bad."