As if the word about Patrick/Transfatty wasn’t bad enough, today I got word that Joe Kral (and formerly of Test Pilot Collective fame) is having health problems as well…

On Monday May 15th, I went up to Portland, Oregon to work on a freelance project. On Wednesday, I was getting ready for bed when all of a sudden I had intense pain in my left side and I collapsed to the floor. I thought it was a cramp so I lay on the floor for awhile hoping the pain would go away. When it became clear the pain wasn’t going away, I woke up my friend Mitch (who I was staying with) and told him something was wrong.

Joe Kral Needs Help

I’ve been chided on a couple fronts lately about needing to update here, so I had been mulling about some “typical me” type posts about such thrilling topics as “I’m trying to move from jEdit to (Easy)Eclipse” and “here’s more lame tiny videos for BoringButShort.com” but instead I’ve been blindsided in finding out that a (throughly brilliant videographer and) online acquaintance has been diagnosed with ALS.

My name is Patrick. Sometime during the fall of 2004, I noticed an involuntary shaking in my legs. For a long time the exact cause eluded definition.

On May 24th, 2005, however, I was officially diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease), a terminal disease that results in the progressive degeneration of the nerves and muscles responsible for voluntary movement. It is a fatal and incurable disease. I was 30 years old.

So go check out a couple of his clips and do what you can to help out: Patrick O’Brien Foundation

Comedian Richard Pryor dies at 65

Comedian Richard Pryor died Saturday of a heart attack, his wife told CNN. He was 65. Pryor had been ill with multiple sclerosis. Pryor became a legend of comedy by tapping his rage and agonies for laughs. He was the biggest name in standup comedy in the 1970s, winning Grammy awards for his comedy albums. He also appeared in nearly 40 films. Pryor had long been in fragile health. He suffered a massive heart attack and underwent triple bypass surgery in 1990.

WashingtonPost.com: Post_Remix

Welcome to washingtonpost.com’s Post Remix site, affectionately known as mashingtonpost.com.

This site has two goals:

• To spotlight the work of outside Web developers who’ve made cool and interesting projects (”mashups”) using Post content.
• To provide information about washingtonpost.com’s various data offerings (APIs and RSS feeds).

Why are we doing this? Because we want to foster innovation, and because we want to see your ideas about new ways of displaying news and information on the Web.

Hat tip: ProgrammableWeb

…Find the Brownie

The objective of this blog is to find an important government job occupied by a person with no apparent qualifications other than strong personal, political, or business ties to a member of the administration.

Microsoft Windows Officially Broken

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. “It’s not going to work,” he told Gates in the chairman’s office mid-2004, the paper reports. “[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. “The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program. But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin’s warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers - the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.

Meth addicts hack into identity theft

SAN FRANCISCO — Methamphetamine addicts are using the Internet to commit identity theft, law-enforcement officials and medical experts in the USA and Canada say.

Ex-FEMA chief blames locals for bad Katrina response

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The former head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, who resigned under a hail of criticism about the slow response to Hurricane Katrina, on Tuesday blamed local officials and said his agency had done a good job.

“My biggest mistake was not recognizing, by Saturday (before the storm made landfall), that Louisiana was dysfunctional,” Michael Brown told a House of Representatives panel looking into the aftermath of the catastrophic storm.

Pssst! Where the devil is the exorcist meeting?

VATICAN CITY - Orthodontists have national conventions, as do lawyers and computer salespeople. So why not exorcists?

At the end of his weekly general audience on Wednesday Pope Benedict greeted Italian exorcists who, he disclosed, are currently holding their national convention.

Andrea is auctioning a print of one of her photos off in the Hurricane Katrina Relief Auction on Flickr. It ends shortly so get in there and bid quick!

In mildly related news: monday night was our first night of Introduction to Photography (yes, real film, chemicals, darkroom, the whole shebang) class at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts and it looks like it’s going to be awesome.

FEMA director Brown resigns

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Mike Brown, under fire over his qualifications and what critics call a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, resigned Monday, senior administration sources told CNN.

Brown was recalled Friday to Washington and replaced as the point main for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

Head of FEMA has an unlikely background

“He’s done a hell of a job, because I’m not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm,” said Kate Hale, former Miami-Dade emergency management chief.

The New Orleans Flood Map is a Google Maps application (API reference and developer key registration is over here) that lets you click around and find out how much water is over each part of New Orleans.

Also of potential interest: Google Maps of New Orleans (as well as the New Orleans Flood Map) now give you an extra viewing option that loads the satellite imagery of the city from August 31st.

Hat tip to Ernie the Attorney

“…the clusterf**k down there is beyond all imagining.”

Boing Boing - Katrina: account from an EPA rep

A couple personal favorites:

* Cell phone towers are on their way from Germany to get the communication infrastructure back in place. The EPA ordered 40 satellite phones to get their people in contact. Those phones have arrived, but no one ordered SIM cards and these phones are currently useless.

* They have found large numbers of seals in and around the houses in NOLA and no one is clear where they came from. An aquarium?

Want to file for aid online? Better run Windows

FEMA site requires assistance seekers to use Internet Explorer 6

The good news: If you’ve survived Hurricane Katrina, the government will let you register for help online. The bad news: But only if the computer you’re using is running Windows.

Yes, it turns out that to make a claim with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Individual Assistance Center, your Web browser must be Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 or higher and you must have JavaScript enabled. It even says so right on the page itself. One problem: IE6 isn’t available for Macintosh or Linux computers.