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

It’s been a wonderful Christmas for me and for my family. Half a world away, however, tsunamis have claimed the lives 9,500 or more of my fellow human beings.

The BBC News coverage seems to be the most elucidating, since it’s got a map for those of us who don’t know our southeast Asian geography. I’m not posting this so you can go rubberneck, though.

It’s possible that your local church, Red Cross, or Salvation Army chapter will be collecting donations for the half million newly homeless. These people were poor to begin with (at least by our materialistic Western standards), and many of the survivors have seen everything they own swept out to sea. If you have the opportunity to donate to them, please be generous.

–Howard

(EDIT: yes, yes, I know. The death-toll continues to climb. It’ll climb further, too, once Famine and Pestilence get down off their horses and into the mix.)