Michael Rys : General

First Wars, then Tsunamis, Famines and Hurricanes, and now Earthquakes

mrys — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 05:19:00 GMT

The last year has been tough on many. Many people have been and are getting killed in wars and conflicts (Iraq, Sudan/Dafour), got devastated by Tsunamis, starve due to famines and loose their lively-hood and sometimes even lives due to Hurricanes and Taifuns such as Kathrina and Stan. And now we have the devastating earthquake in the northern Pakistan/Indian/Afghanistan area. My thoughs and wishes are with all the people that have suffered greatly and I hope they will be able to rebuild.

I am glad that Microsoft is very generous in matching donations (and now even time) and that it has a yearly Giving Campaign (hint: it is currently on. MS employees: please consider giving [internal link]). I would recommend that everyone who can give, thinks about giving to at least one of the causes to help the affected and asks his or her employer to provide matching funds. As often, unless you can provide a specifically needed skill, it is often better to donate money.

Here is a list of some organizations that can benefit (feel free to add in the comment section, but please only list no-strings attached, well-regarded organizations):

And please do not forget the long-term issues (refugee issues, long-term famines, forgotten wars, inequality and injustices, the need for environmental protection of our biosphere) over the short term catastrophs.

Thanks.

Hurricane Katrina: How to help

mrys — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 08:24:00 GMT

I am deeply saddened by the suffering of the people in New Orleans and surroundings, South Alabama and Mississippi. My heart and best wishes go out to all the people bearing the tremendeous suffering and losses after hurricane Katrina. I encourage everyone to help as much as possible: Call your politicians to get their act together to bring help quickly, donate to your favorite charity (here is a link to the Amazon Red Cross Donation page and here is a list of other organizations and how Microsoft is helping), get involved in efforts to help, and help your local emergency service to keep itself ready for the next disasters...

For more of my take continue here (be warned, it is not a happy post)...

Some Tsunami/Quake Disaster Relief.

mrys — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 11:01:00 GMT

I have a list of resources (some suggestions for donations and some online resources) to help in the Tsunami/Quake Disaster Relief. If you have not already done so, please help by donating money or time and get your employer to match it.

Welcome to my work related blog site

mrys — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 06:11:00 GMT

I decided to finally join the http://blogs.msdn.com community. However, I will contine to mainly blog at http://sqljunkies.com/weblog/mrys and only syndicate the work-related entries on SQL Server, XML Standardization, XQuery, and other XML Technologies here. Until I can do this automatically (I have bugged Scott many times already to add the feature to automatically republish an RSS feed), I will post a short synopsis with a link here and request people to comment on the sqljunkies site.

Over the next few posts, I am going to send topically aggregated summaries of already published article.

Feel free to contact me if you want me to write about something related to the topics above.