I’ve been meaning to write a full blog post on this blog for quite a few days now, because with the conventions, McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin for his VP, and now with the approach of Hurricane Gustav, there have been so many thoughts going through my mind. If you’ve been watching my Twitter this past week, you’d get an idea of what I’m talking about.

However, it’s clear that Hurricane Gustav is set to repeat history, making landfall in almost the exact same place at almost the exact same time and with almost the exact same strength as Hurricane Katrina did three years ago. There are many things that fascinate me, and hurricane seasons are one of those things. I’ve been spending this weekend tracking and watching Hurricane Gustav’s progress as much as I spent lots of time in 2005 tracking its record-breaking storms. There are so many things ironic about this storm that I’m just flabbergasted to thing about it.

But I’ll leave that to another blog post. I’m not a so-called “live blogger,” I prefer to wait until events have progressed and I’ve had the ability to digest all of the information. There are a lot of thoughts from this past week (and likely more coming up this week) that I want to blog about and I’ll be doing that later this week.

However, the important thing right now is that Hurricane Gustav is now just hours away from making landfall near New Orleans, and it looks to be a disastrous storm that even Mayor Ray Nagin is saying will be worse than Katrina. All I can say is that I hope that most people have managed to evacuate in time. For those who chose to stay, and for those who have left their belongings behind, my sympathies, hope, and prayers go out to you in the hopes that you will be safe. Here’s also hoping that the aftermath of this storm is not the kind of chaotic disaster that the country witnessed three years ago, and that it is not used for political purposes during the revving-up political season.

In short: be safe, and here’s hoping that this storm will strike as lightly and as quickly as possible so that all of you can rebuild your lives. Our thoughts are with you.

Tags: Gulf coast, Gustav, hurricane, Katrina, Louisiana, message, New Orleans, prayers, storm, sympathy

Hallelujah my prayers and feedback comments from the last eighteen months have FINALLY been answered! Google has just launched IMAP access for Gmail, bringing the revolutionary service into the 21st century, finally, and I’m just so excited that at last I’ll be able to enjoy fully synced up access between the Gmail web interface and my Mail client. I am happy happy happy!

Only one problem now. I’ve still got 113 message in my Mail.app account, and if I end up replacing the POP sign in with the IMAP sign in, what will happen to all my old e-mails? Hmm, I’ll have to figure this one out after I get back from Long Beach…

UPDATE 10/28: I’m going to have to take all of that back. Gmail’s IMAP integration is rather clunky and ended up causing more problems than it solved. I’m back to using Gmail POP, which I’ve kind of gotten used to.

Tags: announcements, excitement, Gmail, Google, IMAP, Mail, News, prayers