I'm a news junky.
With my wife, I watch CNN for at least 2 to 3 hours a night. My start page on the Internet has the names of various news outlets from around the world.
I'm also signed up for a number of national news sources, generally newspapers, that send me newsletters they believe to be of burning importance, accompanied of course by pitches from their advertisers.
I start my day, after breakfast, immersing myself in all manner of death and destruction, dastardly deeds, political intrigue and bizarre behavior imaginable. By the time I'm done perusing the virtual newspaper, I'm ready for two fingers of Grappa d'Oro, but I look up and see it's only 11:30 a.m. I have to wait a half-hour before popping the cork; after all, I'm not uncivilized.
I think this mental self-flagellation is like the beating-your-head-against-the-wall joke; it feels so good when you stop.
Vacillating between my natural Irish euphoric idiocy and the news-induced clinical depression is the price I pay for being addicted to news. Then along comes a story that renews my faith in the basic goodness of human beings-albeit there are too few such stories, and too far between items-but comforting nonetheless.
I received my email newsletter on technology from washingtonpost.com and began skimming the headlines. Much of it is devoted to the geeks who understand such terms as C++, link rot, nesting, etc., but now and then I find something in English.
The headline that caught my eye read, "A Computer Game for Real-Life Crises: Disaster Simulator's Maker Gives It to Municipal Emergency Departments (By Mike Musgrove)."
The story is about a company, BreakAway Games Ltd., that released the final version of a product called Incident Commander and is providing it free-of-charge to all municipal emergency departments as part of a deal with the Justice Department.
The Feds seeded the project for the software with $350,000, and BreakAway socked $1.5 million of their own money into development of the program.
The game is designed to help prevent catastrophes like Katrina by tutoring users to set up budgets, line up resources, set up lines of communications, along with other activities that assure on-the-ground efforts are supported and successful, all in a simulated emergency situation.
Now, I'm not so naïve as to believe that this was a purely altruistic venture on the part of the company, though I suppose that's possible. The more likely scenario involves a kiss and a promise from the Feds that, in addition to the seed money, they will toss some business in BreakAway's direction for helping them with emergency preparedness after the total failure in New Orleans, and that's okay; businesses make deals like this all the time.
On the other hand, the company is taking some risk. We tend to change the makeup of our government every couple of years. Down the road, the folks who made this deal on the Fed side may not be there to follow through on any promises.
So, in my mind, BreakAway Games Ltd., after what I'm sure was a business risk analysis, stood up, donned their corporate conscience and put immediate profits aside to do the socially responsible thing, agreeing to give this program to emergency planning in cities around the country, and for that they deserve to be applauded.
It's 11:55 a.m., and after reading that story, I might just leave the cork in the grappa until around 2 p.m. That, and the emerging sunshine, makes for a pretty nice day.[[In-content Ad]]
