The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has a page providing high-level details of the aid they’re providing in Southeast Asia.

Link.

Among the highlights — missionaries (the nice young men in white shirts and ties) are serving as translators for those looking for loved ones in Thailand, and in Hong Kong the saints are assembling some 30,000 hygiene kits for distribution in Sri Lanka. This Sunday the First Presidency of the Church will encourage all members to be especially generous with their Fast Offerings (monthly donation of the value of two meals which are skipped as part of the monthly fast). Fast Offerings are used exclusively for welfare, and the Church is opening welfare coffers for use in Southeast Asia at this time.

It’s nice to know what the money is being spent on, and it’s even nicer to know that church members in the area are an active part of relief efforts.

–Howard

With the official death toll now uncomfortably above 100,000, John Budd of UNICEF said, of the relief efforts in Indonesia, “it needs to be almost a military campaign.”

ALMOST? Pull your head out, John. The ONLY organizations in the world equipped for this kind of operation are major militaries. You need aircraft carriers, infantry transport, massive supply lines, portable airfields, mobile hospitals, and that most maligned of temporary governments, “martial law.”

In Lucifer’s Hammer (Science fiction about a meteor-spawned tsunami that wipes out all Pacific coasts, among other things) Niven and Pournelle tell us that “civilization is three meals away from collapse.” The greatest danger the survivors, the refugees, the millions of homeless in Southeast Asia currently face is not pestilence nor famine. Those horesmen have already ridden into town, and they’ll reap their share. War, however, is the apocalyptic rider we must now concern ourselves with. The survivors are at risk from each other. Not all starving people will resort to murder to save their own lives, or the lives of their children, but not all of them have to. It only takes a few, maybe one in 20, or even one in 100. The only way to stop them is to be better armed, highly visible, extremely organized, AND able to feed everyone.

I’m not trying to make the survivors out to be warmongering, savage rabble. I’m simply pointing out that they are people, just like you and me, and they won’t just lie down and die if there’s no food to be had. Civilization is three meals away from collapse.

The UN, UNICEF, the Red Cross, and others are ill equipped to deal with the complete fall of civilization across a large swath of geography. They don’t have the full suite of tools at their disposal. I hope that the United States, for one, doesn’t make the mistake of simply handing the UN a wad of cash. We should be leading the charge with ships and planes, with personnel and materiel, and demonstrating that the most powerful military force on the planet is good for more than just hurting people and breaking things.

–Howard

Thanks go out to several LJ folks who kindly pointed me at pages upon pages of good information about troubleshooting my XBox. I learned lots.

The symptoms I’m experiencing point to three possible root causes:

1) Overheating. This is the most likely, because for the first year or so of use the XBox lived inside a glass media cabinet, and it got H-O-T HOT in there. I suspect that there are temperature-sensitive components that have now degraded and are performing unreliably, but none of the pages I read (or at least was capable of understanding on first skim) indicated WHICH components I should be concerned about. The suggestion was to open the console, dust everything out with compressed air, and keep it in an unobstructed cool place. It’s been living in an unobstructed cool place for the last three months, so I doubt disassembly will help much.

2) Bad DVD drive or dirty optics. Some of my symptoms correlated EXACTLY to this, so I bought (oh, the budget pain!) a lens-cleaning disk at Walmart. Yes, it’s a “dry” kit. They had no wet ones. I ran it last night, and then we watched a DVD with no trouble at all. Granted, one DVD does not prove anything, since the problem has been intermittent. Besides, we tried playing DDR Ultramix 2 again, and it hung on the “don’t fall off the playing mat” warning screen.

3) Bad HD or corrupted data on disc. Some of my symptoms correlated to this, so I followed tech support’s instructions and deleted all my game saves and rebooted. No joy: DDR is still broken.

The upshot of all this: if we want to get the $90 worth out of our DDR purchase, we’ll have to spend another $90 on repairs (that includes the shipping) and do without DVDs or XBox games for three weeks, or we can spend $150 or thereabouts on a new XBox, in which case we’d then have TWO controllers and a spare XBox for cannibalization should I feel ambitious at some future date.

Nintendo has Appled themselves. Their hardware is obviously superior to their competitors — our Gamecube has been trouble-free and crash-free for three years, and our N64 has been beaten up to the point that the I/O jack needs jiggling before it’ll display, but it still plays games just fine. Hardware superiority notwithstanding, I can’t get DDR or Fable for the GameCube, and that’s only the beginning of a long list of games that will never run on a Mac… er, a Nintendo.

–Howard

Okay, here’s the deal: our XBox is wonky to the point of nigh-uselessness, and I’ve got no idea how to take care of the problem.

Symptoms:
1) DVD playback is hit-and-miss, mostly hit. Sometimes, though, the machine won’t recognize DVDs. If you pause for more than a minute or two, you’ll have to reboot before being able to play again. If you pause and then frame-advance, and let it scroll at 1/4 or 1/8 speed, you can resume play just fine.

2) Lots of disk “scrubbing.” There are lots of times when I hear HD access scrubbing back and forth. Fable did this, and some DVDs do it.

3) DDR Playback often happens without the music, and the scrolling arrows seize up. As you might imagine, this is infuriating.

I suspect that this is happening because the hard drive is damaged. I also suspect that it would be cheaper for me to replace the XBox than to have it repaired. Coming up with the funds for this will be difficult regardless of which path we take, though, so the point may be moot.

So… anybody out there seen anything similar? I know, I know, Google is My Friend, and I could be looking this up myself, but I’ve got cartooning to do.

–Howard