Monday, March 05, 2007

I really need a pair of those Supa Saint shrimp boots to wade through this...

ImagineANON #1:

Wrong again bro. Not Domke. You will never guess who's Imagine Anon #1. Good luck trying though. And yes, you are pissing into the wind, becuase these people have done nothing wrong. Its really ashame you focus on things you think are bad and over look all the good this group has done for the city.

Do you know that a select few of these guys were extremely instrumental in setting up the Emergency Operations Center following the storm. They were instrumental in getting the first line of communications up following the storm. That many of thier houses were destroyed and famlies seperated across the country, and yet they put themselves in harms way, leaving friend and family behind to make thier way to the city to assist in any way they could. That they saved lives. That they put thier lives on the line daily after the storm for strangers.

How can you group all these amazing people together and call them crooks. I know you won't post this, but you have to realize these people have done MUCH MORE good then bad. They love this city as much or more than you and want to see it become what we all want it to; GREAT!


Gee...I feel so warm and fuzzy inside. Dude...I honestly don't give a shit who you are. In fact, I'd rather not know. However, are you gonna provide any substantive answers or are you gonna just babble on with this sycophantic crap?

Most of these guys don't even live in the fucking parish....don't tell me they care about this city more than I do.

They set up the first line of communicatons following the storm? That's rich, considering Meffert fucked the possibility to have a storm proof system in place before the storm.

I asked you some very specific questions....do you have answers or not? If not....move on man...go work on your shrine to Imagine.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

My guess is Meffert. If the pdf files showed any personal correspondence, check the common misspellings like "thier".

Anyway, this is what he was promoting:

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid14_gci1129846,00.html

Information Security News:

QUESTION & ANSWER
New Orleans CIO: It was the wild, wild West

By Charlie Russo and Ellen O'Brien, News Writers
27 Sep 2005 | SearchCIO.com

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, it was New Orleans CIO Greg Meffert's task to establish telephone communications between Air Force One and Mayor Ray Nagin. Cell phone towers had toppled and phone lines were dead. By luck, a member of Meffert's IT staff had established a Vonage account prior to the storm and accessed his Internet phone account once power returned. In order to set up a communications headquarters for the city, though, Meffert had to raid an abandoned Office Depot store and deploy more brawn than brains. With rescue efforts behind him, and still operating from a hotel ballroom, Meffert is planning an ambitious Internet voting system for displaced New Orleans residents to use during the next citywide elections. Here he talks with SearchCIO.com about surviving Hurricane Katrina -- and trying to bring New Orleans back to life.

How many of you went into Office Depot?
Meffert: Me, the chief of police, one of my guys and three other cops. We actually fought with looters while we were there. It was wild. It was wild. It really was.

Tell us what got you there.
Meffert: At this point we knew there was one Internet connection working, even though it was three inches away from water -- and we had emergency power. So we had literally one outlet and one Internet cord. One hot jack. So there's that Vonage account but we don't have a soft phone. So it's like, what do you do? And we thought well, we can just go to get the routers. You just think very linearly. Very mechanically. And if I was not a believer, by the way, in Maslow's hierarchy before this, I am clearly a believer now. That concept says 'The first thing is whether or not I'm fed. If I'm still hungry, all I can think about is food. And then once I got food, then I can think about whether I'm hot or cold and all these other things.' That's the way it felt.

And so the reason we looked at the Vonage thing -- we had this one Internet connection. We had a laptop with about one hour's worth of power. So we go out there and we say 'Where's the nearest retailer of Vonage equipment? Office Depot. Hey, OK, there's one on St. Charles.' And we go there. And there's all these looters in there -- and they took all the high-end stuff, the laptops and all that -- all the fun stuff. But they left all the geeky stuff. So eventually we still needed a major Cisco router, which we ended up ripping out of the back office.

And the police chief did that for you?
Meffert: He did do that -- with his bare hands! This is an extreme set of circumstances where you see things that would never happen in any other scenario. When would anybody forcibly remove a Cisco router from a rack by sheer force? It would never happen in any other scenario. But there it was. We got two screws out; we were using butter knives because we didn't have tools. We couldn't get the other two screws out. And the chief is a big man. He just said, 'Move aside.' He said 'You need this right here?' And he didn't know what it was. And we said 'Yeah we need that,' the Cisco router, and he just ripped it out. I've never seen anything like that.

I hate to be dramatic, but one of those cops who was with us -- he ended up shooting himself in the head. People don't realize...but it was really Wild West down here. It really was.

Did you evacuate your family?
Meffert: What happened was the chief's family and my family stayed behind at first. And my kids and my wife were still sleeping and so were his. And then he got the buzz on the radio that the levee broke. And we all had been through the slosh models and everything, so we knew this was officially the worst -case scenario. That meant 10 to 12 feet downtown in just a matter of an hour or two. Maybe a couple, three hours. Just an unreal type effect.

And so, we woke them up and we got them in the car -- and as they're driving you could see the water rising behind them. I looked at him and said, 'I totally know how the guys in the Titanic felt.' It wasn't a noble, know-you're-going-to-die thing. It was just 'You gotta get these people out.' But we had no idea what was going to happen. So in other words, I kind of made that connection. Those guys probably thought they were still going to live when they got their wives and kids off. It was just...you didn't know.

When you signed on with Mayor Nagin's administration in 2002, did you ever imagine this kind of scenario?
Meffert: Last week, he looked over at me and said, 'Did you ever think that you'd ever be doing this?' He must have said that a half dozen times. And I'm like, 'No.' I was acting mayor, for instance , for five days. Actually two stints, for five days and another four days, when he was away.

So, as acting mayor, you're usually just kind of sitting back doing paperwork. This wasn't like that. It sounds terrible...I was telling my wife; she asked 'What was the first thing you had to decide for the city?' I said 'Well, I sat down and said, 'OK, guys what's the major problem today?' Problem one: corpses are clogging up the sewer and water drains. Well, who in the hell ever prepares for that? There's no degree in that. We have snipers shooting at the helicopters. What do you want to do about that? Just incredible stuff for a tech guy.

A lot of your work now has to do with land lots. Is that data still available? Did you lose data?
Meffert: It was kind of a point of honor for us. The Web site and all the data -- actually the Web site stayed up even when the tornado went over things. We did not lose any of that data. It's just that the data is 70% irrelevant now. I can go and see the assessed value of a house is $200,000. Well, that house probably isn't worth $20,000 right now. So we've really moved more into kind of being less about the back office. We had to kind of and move away from that because it's not really relevant -- and move into pictometry and getting satellite photos and being much more about that. That's one thing -- in the midst of this tragedy you're getting a lot of things that never would have happened before. Right now, (one thing we're working on) -- and it's going to the point of one of the major things that we're going to announce here -- is Internet voting. Once again, if I told you, 'Hey, we're going to do Internet voting for real, in a real election, and you're going vote and use kiosks', you'd think I was smoking something.

But I have to do that now. Because what am I going to do? Open poll stations where there's three people in an entire city block? So out of this tragedy you're getting an opportunity to do a lot of common sense things. And without that pushback of people saying 'Hey, look, the old system works. Well, no, it doesn't. It's gone. The old system is completely gone.

Do you have practical plans for Internet voting in place?
Meffert: We do. So for us, at least 95% of our population isn't here. And we've already postponed one set of elections, kind of indefinitely. The model that we're looking to the most is, for instance, the airport check-in kiosks. Where data's not just secure -- it's also not going to a central area. So there's nobody who can manipulate the data. We're going to keep it, if you will. That data is going to be sitting on those kiosk machines in a secure way that only the secretary of state will be able to do anything with it. It's not going to one big database in the sky. To prevent any kind of abuse it's going to be a level of authentication that's equal or superior to what you do now. Those are the kinds of things that we're doing.

You have the resources to get that going and actually target it for an election that's on the books?
Meffert: Yeah, because it's necessary. It's not a gee-whiz plaything kind of thing. It's a real issue of how we get democracy to continue here.

Check out SearchCIO.com tomorrow for Day 2, where Meffert drills down into emergency IT operations.

Anonymous said...

Hahah! Spare us the hero story. You mean you DID YOUR JOBS just after katrina? I would have expected you all to do nothing less than what you did and it was expected, not some heroic marvel that you should be heralded for. It's called doing your job. That doesn't change the fact that you've been plotting funneling money like this since Nagin took office. I, personally, have known people who were in your war room sessions hearing all your schemes. Get real, save us the 'we're heroes' garbage. You were in the job positions after the storm that required you to do what you did. Nobody asked some of the local heroes to go out and pull people off their roofs in boats. They are the heroes. You were just doing your job, and had you done it BEFORE the storm, we would have all been in a much better position after it. Jeez, the City website wasn't even updated, we all had to go to the NOLA.com forums to get info. So spare us the dramatic stories about how you saved NOLA.

Anonymous said...

You really ae wrong. Meffert and the gang are not the problem.

There are much bigger fish to fry.

Anonymous said...

You'd think as hi tech as Imagine purports to be, they'd know how to run a spell checker.

"hey love this city as much or more than you and want to see it become what we all want it to; GREAT!" That's where they're fucked. NOLA *IS* great, despite these crooks. They just want it to become rich, so they can buy more boats.

Anonymous said...

Actually assholes, it was not their job to return after the storm. It was not their job to put life and limb on the line. You people are pathetic little trite nothings. Get a life.
You all talk so much, yet do nothing. Keep the blog going if it makes you feel important. I was almost to the point of answering your questions and giving you the info you really want, but its over. Guess you'll never know.

Jason Brad Berry said...

awwww.....somebody's skin too thin to play?

You weren't going to say shit because there's nothing you can say.

You have every opportunity to explain...up to you, bro. I have the entire email exchange between Meffert and Holcomb coming shortly.

My guess is it's in your best interest to bow out now. You came with no substance....you leave with no substance.

I thought "sharks" had thick skin?

Anonymous said...

ImagineANON #1, that's a perfect response - we would expect nothing less, nothing more.

you argue like a 3-year old, name calling and pouting, " I was almost to the point of answering your questions and giving you the info you really want, but its over. Guess you'll never know."

you exemplify exactly the problem Damabala was addressing and even better, you've proven his point about yourself for everyone reading this, which is simply that you - and your blatherings - are without substance. don't believe me? just read everything you've written here.

when (or if) you can ever participate in a real dialogue (you know, with facts) i'm sure we'd be happy to engage. for now, it sounds like you're taking your ball and going home.

or maybe you'll stick around and keep whining with more substanceless chatter.

either way, we'll be fine. and we'll celebrate when justice is finally served to those who most deserve it.

Anonymous said...

"And the police chief did that for you?
Meffert: He did do that -- with his bare hands! This is an extreme set of circumstances where you see things that would never happen in any other scenario. When would anybody forcibly remove a Cisco router from a rack by sheer force? It would never happen in any other scenario. But there it was. We got two screws out; we were using butter knives because we didn't have tools. We couldn't get the other two screws out. And the chief is a big man. He just said, 'Move aside.' He said 'You need this right here?' And he didn't know what it was. And we said 'Yeah we need that,' the Cisco router, and he just ripped it out. I've never seen anything like that.

..."

As in to say, here's the City's IT officer and Chief of Police ripping a piece of computer equipment from a rack, after having physically fought off looters, in the back office of a post-apocalypse Office Depot in order to connect the Mayor to the President of the United States, don't even have a multi-tool in hand between them but somehow have butter knives, instead of having a three-tiered system, is somehow heroic. Yes, thank you, Meffert & krewe, your 'boys', for this wonderful work you did for the people of the City of New Orleans. Those corpses in the drains are blood on your hands because you are part of the administration that could not be bothered to arrange for evacuations. you always think of yourselves. you are covered in blood. your reckoning time is coming. You will answer to God.


"one of those cops who was with us -- he ended up shooting himself in the head"

Anonymous said...

"They put life and limb on the line". For Vonage. How noble.

Anonymous said...

Hah. We talk so much but do nothing? Last I checked, Meffert was out of City Hall and Kurt out as well. If it weren't for us, AZ and the Times-Pic, they'd still be milking the system. Several City Council reps have emailed me saying that we're making a difference. Keep it up AZ, we're making a difference. I think we should all take some time to write to the leaders of various cities around the country and send them Times-Pic articles about Meffert to alert them that they don't want his dealings in their neck of the woods.

Anonymous said...

So basically, Meffert IS a criminal, as he admits to looting the St. Charles store:

"'Where's the nearest retailer of Vonage equipment? Office Depot. Hey, OK, there's one on St. Charles.' And we go there. And there's all these looters in there -- and they took all the high-end stuff, the laptops and all that -- all the fun stuff. But they left all the geeky stuff. So eventually we still needed a major Cisco router, which we ended up ripping out of the back office."

It's the whine about the "fun stuff" being depleted and the "eventually" that indicates more than the router ended up in their pockets.

"And then he got the buzz on the radio that the levee broke. And we all had been through the slosh models and everything, so we knew this was officially the worst -case scenario. That meant 10 to 12 feet downtown in just a matter of an hour or two. Maybe a couple, three hours. Just an unreal type effect."

What a hero. So they knew from the radio the levees broke, and they EXPECTED 10 to 12 feet DOWNTOWN in a matter of hours, yet no one moved to evacuate either the Superdome or the hotels where the locals and tourists were riding out the storm. Wasn't it DAYS after Meffert's kiddies got out that a tourist had to get word to national media they were stuck?

Anonymous said...

I love Imagine Software's website. Very hi-tech and professional.

http://www.imaginesoftware.net/

Anonymous said...

oh yeah i forgot. sign my black ass up for vonage.

Anonymous said...

If it was true that they put their life on the line if would have been for this and only this:

www.logistixco.com

Sam Jasper said...

I have been reading all this with great interest for a week. So many words, and still it's beyond words. I am so angry (of course I've been sick for three weeks and I'm cranky anyway, but still. . .)

I think Oludumare worded it wrong, this guy is taking his "balls" and going home, but not really since he didn't have the balls to engage in a real discourse on this topic.

On the other hand, you have clearly hit something while "pissing in the wind", too bad just taking a shower won't get the bad smell off.

Anonymous said...

Thomas, my network filters aren't letting the http://www.imaginesoftware.net/ page come up. Or is that your point?

LatinTeacher said...

Looks like Imagine's website was done by a 6th grader.

mominem said...

http://www.imaginesoftware.net/

Comes up empty for me except for the title "Net Methods : Home"

Of course it might be an IE only site.

Jason Brad Berry said...

Yeah....they dissolved the company due to it's high profile and the fact that they are all pissed at each other now. What was Imagine is now a handful of LLC's which I've tried to keep up with on previous posts.

Veracent, Netmethods, Intelliport, Logistix....and I'm sure there are others....they've become a Hydra.

Anonymous said...

Its kinda funny that lil'oya said, "Those corpses in the drains are blood on your hands because you are part of the administration that could not be bothered to arrange for evacuations. you always think of yourselves. you are covered in blood. your reckoning time is coming. You will answer to God."
There is no god, if there was he would not have allowed this to happen. And why should the city arrange for evacuations? Be like any other person with a LITTLE intelligence and leave when they say the storm is coming. My family left the Sunday before, why didn't these "corpses"? You people sit there with your hands out waiting for the government to give you everything. It is a shame that I bust my ass so you can live off my tax money. Thanks!