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Notre Dame de la Serra

The Vault of the Madonna di A Serra is to be discovered on the heights of CALVI.
This vault of the XIXe century is at 6 km in the south-west of CALVI. One reaches it by the littoral road of PORTO.
It is a splendid view-point from where one can admire CALVI’s bay and the mountains of Balagna.
This place is to be visited without moderation more especially as in the vault, you will be able to listen to an excellent violinist in concert during all the summer season.

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[via Beta News]

Some information about the coming new version of Firefox:

Mozilla has announced its beta schedule for the upcoming release of Firefox 1.5, according to a posting on its developer news Web site. Beta 1 will be released on September 8, followed by a second beta on October 5.

Furthermore, the first release candidate of the browser is expected on October 28, which indicates the final version of Firefox 1.5 would likely come sometime during the month of November.

Some of the current enhancements include a better software update system to serve browser upgrades, the ability to reorder tabs through drag and drop functionality, and improved pop-up blocking.

Early alpha versions have also shown the ‘SnapBack’ technology that allows for faster navigation through Web pages. Also, better support has been announced for Mac OS X.

What happened and happens now in New Orleans, because of the hurricane Katrina, is pure horror, the hell on Earth. Again, a natural disaster, which is now hitting the US, after the Tsunami, and a lot of others…

Some much flooding. Homeless and dead people now (perhaps more than 20’000). A disaster…

I was *very* impacted by the thoughts of Russell in one of his last posts.
It is not the time for politics, critics or controversy. But, on the other hand, I think that we have to face the brutal reality…

I’m sorry, you can’t blame the people of New Orleans for living there, like some people have online. Everyone in the Bay Area – in most of California really – live on massive earthquake faults. Saying we shouldn’t live in this beautiful area because some day we might have a natural disaster just doesn’t work. What does work is preparation, as the catastrophe in New Orleans has shown us.

I won’t start in on the systemic problems where the poorest people were the ones that were not able to evacuate before the hurricane, and were essentially ignored for 24-48 hours after as well. Under President Bush the poverty rate in the U.S. has risen to an incredible 12.5% of the nation. We’re now watching the consequences of that massive number.

Found in the Wikipedia, just to confirm the input of Russ:

Evacuation issues.

[…] Evacuation was mainly left up to individual citizens to find their own way out of the city. Officials knew that New Orleans has the lowest percentage of people with cars of any major city in the United States. A 2000 census revealed that 27% of New Orleans households, amounting to approximately 120,000 people, were without privately-owned transportation. Officials also did not take into account the fact that New Orleans has one of the highest poverty rates in the United States at about 38%. These factors prevented many people from being able to evacuate on their own. Consequentially most of those stranded in the city are the poor, the elderly, and the sick

I hope that the US nation, with the help of other countries, will begin to manage the next steps better than now. It is *so* dramatic…

My heart goes out to all those involved in the disaster.

Donate now.

Gordon is organizing a survey about blogging and its impact and link with knowledge management. It takes about 5 minutes to answer this short survey.

It really helps if you could invest this short amount of time! Thanks in advance for your help.

http://www.adenquire.net/pd5g0022/

It is a very short survey (3-5 minutes) about the influence of weblogs on knowledge work. We think that it will help webloggers to understand, what they really do.
[…] Be sure, the scope of the questionnaire is academic and non-profit. The data you submit are kept strictly confidential and anonymous.
[…] P.S.: The summarized results of this survey will be published on our website

http://www.ku-eichstaett.de/Fakultaeten/WWF/Lehrstuehle/OP

If you are reading my blog for a while, you know that Seth Godin is a great source of inspiration for me. In fact, not just for me ;-)

Seth already gave one of his book for free – The Bootstrapper’s Bible (pdf still available here) – and encouraged his readers to host the file. Done. And quite succesfull: the pdf file was downloaded exactly 2’100 times from Dec.2004 till Aug.2005.

Seth made a second eBook called KnockKnock available…and again, incited his readers to host the pdf file. The book is a kind of “how to” in the field of … building websites ;-). Worth a read.

Knock Knock is now available for you to read for free. It’s a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively.

You’ll notice on the second page of the PDF that there’s a link that makes it easy to contribute to the Red Cross. I hope you’ll take advantage of that.

I have already talked about gVisit here and here. You know, the service which allows you to visualize where your visitors are coming from. After a donation (what you want), you can see your last 100 visitors on a map. Without donation, that means completely free, the service is limited to the last 20 visitors.

It is really funny to see how far this simple visualization is *much more* concrete as the ones based on reporting tools (to my mind). I am each time impressed by the quite international geographical distribution of my visitors. Yes, I mean you, my dear readers ;-) Not really a question of ego, more a small shock each time I have a look at the visitors’ maps. Which are, again, a more concrete materialization of the traffic….

It is also funny to observe the different distributions on my blog, quite “US-loaded”, and on my website, which is more “European-loaded”.

didierbeck.com visitor map

didierbeck.net visitor map

[via CICLOPS]

This unprocessed image was taken during Cassini’s close approach to Enceladus on July 14, 2005.

The image was taken with the narrow angle camera from a distance of approximately 103,230 kilometers (64,140 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees degrees. Resolution in the image is about 610 meters (2,020 feet) per pixel.