It’s becoming common practice for those impacted by disaster to use Google Maps to either organize efforts or search for views of homes/neighborhoods, but I was surprised when tinkering around with Street View to see my now razed home still showing up.

Some background:

As I blogged in September 2005, the site Scipionus.com allowed me to type in my address and find this information:

My parents chose to move permanently to Mississippi instead of rebuild and when I went home over Christmas they saw the house had finally been demolished. Here’s a pic of my brother who visited NOLA in January:

While I’m all about the Internet providing more accurate and authentic information than traditional media, I have to say that, especially during this time of finalizing the dissertation, it was comforting to see my home still there…

Check out the baby Bacchus football!

And, finally, the pre-game chant is revealed!

WIN! AGAIN! WIN! AGAIN! WIN! AGAIN! WIN! AGAIN! WIN! AGAIN! WIN! AGAIN! WIN! AGAIN! WIN! AGAIN!

Thank you, Drew and Sean!

And thank you, Cokie Roberts!

NOLA’s future is bright and I couldn’t be happier! Just wish I didn’t have to wait til JazzFest to get down there to celebrate…

Speaking of which, other than Twitter, which I can scroll through pretty quickly, I plan to be offline a lot for the next few weeks. There are dissertation deadlines to meet and with only about 20 pages left to write up, I’m not stopping now!

In addition to readings from our three course texts: Rhetoric and Human Consciousness, Rhetoric and Style, and Rhetoric Online, the semester will bring in PDFs of readings like Tania Smith’s “What Connection Does Rhetorical Theory Have to Technical and Professional Communication?”

I also plan to show Thank You For Smoking, The Invention of Lying, Shattered Glass, and, if there’s time, SuperSize Me.

So much to cover and so many arguments to analyze, but I think my upper-level undergraduates can handle it!

It also helps that I’ve got 85-minute class periods.

But I should know better. If there’s anything the city of New Orleans and Saints fans all over know to do, it’s to BELIEVE!

After reading that headline, this is how I feel:

Anyway, since I am in this dissertation state of mind that means I’ve been in a Tampa/USF mood too, checking in with the graduate program assistant [Lee is amazing!] and talking to current grad students and former faculty. I even checked my USF email account to make sure my final tuition payment went through and was surprised to see a blog comment notification. For months I’ve been trying to log in to my blog.usf.edu space with no success. That’s part of the reason I even started this new space and bought my domain name. Just last week I even checked the main blog.usf.edu site and saw nothing. I figured they took all of them down to save on server space. I don’t think there were many active bloggers using the service. After seeing that blog comment email though, I tried one more time and saw my Doctor Daisy blog as a newly revamped WordPress site! I no longer have my fleur de lis theme over there, which you can see in the web.archive.org version, but that’s OK.

Taking this discovery a step further, I decided to explore the export/import tools since both of my blogs are Word Press. Short story short, it literally took 3 clicks and now this space has ALL 475 of my USF blog posts.

WordPress ROCKS!

Now to update my blogrolls!