Macon

New Orleans is surrounded by water-Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, and the Gulf of Mexico. The city sits an average of six feet below sea level and the city's safety has always depended on one of the world's most complex levee systems.

On August 29, 2005 at 11:00 a.m., the destructive force of Hurricane Katrina came ashore near the Louisiana-Mississippi border. The storm's strongest winds were about 125 miles an hour. Katrina's front-right quadrant, which contained its strongest gales and peak storm surge, slammed the coast line causing a vital levee in New Orleans to fail and water to spill into the 17th Street Canal and the city to swamp.

When questioned after Katrina hit New Orleans, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the Army Corps answered, "It was fully recognized by officials that we had Category Three [hurricane] level of protection. As projections of Category Four and Five were made (for Katrina), officials began plans to evacuate the city. We were just caught by a storm whose intensity exceeded the protection that we had in place."

Was there an opportunity for the City of New Orleans, the State of Louisiana, and for the federal government to have avoided this situation? Had anyone of these groups taken the time to strategically consider the possibilities if a hurricane greater than a category three made landfall and what might happen with the current levee system? If none of these groups were thinking about it, strategic thinker Joel Bourne was. In October 2004, National Geographic published an article titled Gone with the Water by Joel K. Bourne, Jr. This article was published almost a year before Katrina hit, which brought reality to Bourne's insightful doomsday hurricane scenario for New Orleans. This is a textbook example of being ahead of the curve.

When questioned after Katrina about the state of Louisiana's attempts to modernize the levee system, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock brushed off ideas that recent federal funding decreases or delayed contracts for levee upgrades made any difference on levee performance when hammered by Katrina's overwhelming power. Instead he identified a danger that many public officials had been worrying about for years, which was that the levee system had not been designed to survive a hurricane of Katrina's power.

Through in-depth research and analysis of Strategic Thinking, it is possible to go beyond the normal broad organizational, government or corporate strategy and bring Strategic Thinking to the individual level. Strategic Thinking involves the capability to portray scenarios that project a picture of what lies ahead. It involves constant attention and observation to the trends, patterns, and cycles that are going on around us continually and allow us to gather information. Being attentive, someone is is able to make educated and reasonable predictions about the future. With this understanding the individual can be ahead of the curve and chart a course to advance, improve, prepare or protect the individual or organization for future events. Once a course has been outlined, the goal is to then mobilize and sustain an effort to reach your target objective. Hurricane Katrina illustrated for us all a vivid lesson of how important it is to become more strategic and pro-active.

As seen by the Hurricane Katrina disaster, if you want to be a strategic thinker, you can not always hop on the bandwagon and do what everybody else is doing. It means being ready to take smart risks, even when it means foregoing instant payoffs for the long term benefits of a predicted event. If anyone had been willing to risk breaking from the popular opinion and calling for improved levees in New Orleans, billions of dollars would have been saved and thousands of people would still have homes.

While many people can be blamed for the failure of the levee system, the key now is to take a more pro-active and strategic approach to other obvious problems that exist.

With regards to the future of Hurricanes, there are already many predictions. Forecasters fear the Atlantic seaboard could suffer many years of of relentless pounding and that this previous year was only the beginning. So, while many organizations need to be taking action, so should anyone who is involved in this process.

You should probably ask yourself a question. Are you being warned of future storms, or does the future look bright and promising?

As you are contemplating your future in life and other areas, you can strategize better now which will help out immensely in the long run. These things will put you Ahead of the Curve.

What is Strategy? Find out by joining in the conversation of new strategic thinking. CMOE has delivered small business strategic planning solutions to many successful companies. Learn the strategic planning steps that you need in order to become successful by visiting their blog.

For many men to go on a fishing trip is an attractive offer, not only for the fishing but for escaping from the duties and requests of their family. Fishing should be available for women, too, as women need relaxation in nature and solitude as much as men do.

Fishing for recreation is an efficient way of getting rid of stress. When you are fishing you are absorbed in the activity and at the same time have relaxed time for reflection on what ever matters for you.

Fishing is often linked to fishing trips, organized fishing trips of different levels of sophistication or just your own fishing trips. Fishing gives the option for solitude as well as for social time, as many are sharing your interest of fishing. Obviously many men join to go fishing and so should women do.

It is easy to be fishing with a friend and to enjoy the company and at the same time get the relaxed atmosphere that is so attractive by some kinds of fishing. It doesnt matter that much how successful as an angler you will be, because in the hobby of fishing it is the activity and the nature experience much more than the actual catch that gives the quality of fishing.

Fishing shouldnt only be a mens sport and stimulation. Fishing is so many different kinds of activity that some sort of fishing should be attractive to most women.

Fly fishery in lakes and streams is a good example of a type of fishing that attracts many women. Fly fishery is an elegant sport that will appeal to many potential women anglers, also because it isnt easy. The fishing rod is a special light weight type and the fishing technique is a beauty in performance. Did you know that fishing could be so elegant?

To me the need for a more equal share of escape time for fishing away from home between women and men should be emphasized in many families. Try to propose a fishing trip for your girl friends next time you are planning something for yourself.

As a family activity fishing is also a superb activity. Kids and their parents can enjoy time together in nature when fishing, and the challenge of fishing is stimulating for most children.

For children their feeling of success with fishing will be very much depending on the fish they are actually able to land on a fishing trip. Children arent as patient as grown ups on fishing trips and that will give some extra challenges on a fishing trip of the whole family.

When children become interested in fishing they will also be motivated for leaning a lot of ecology, nature conservation and sustainable development, all important areas of knowledge that will enhance their schooling and joy of life.

Get easy fly fishing tips here and more fishing tips at Fishing-Tips.net and ideas for your next fishing trip here with info about fishing trips to Canada, Alaska and to other states and countries beyond your immediate neighbourhood.

Soren Breiting is an outdoor activity freak, trained as a biologist and woking with environmental education and nature photography for decades.

What is an Adsense site?
An Adsense site is one designed with the sole intention of displaying Adsense ads; pages with little or no content at all, full of reciprocal links to other pages within the same site. Their link structure looks like this:
Marketing page (links to)
Christian Marketing page (links to)
New York Marketing page (links to)
Gay Marketing page (links to)
Search Engine Marketing page and so on...

No content, just keyword-rich pages that target the best paying Adsense ads. This has been a traditional way of making money (lots of it) with Adsense. The problem is that users end up wasting their precious search time when they are actually looking for content, not ads or landing pages.

There are even software packages that can build thousands of pages like those in a matter of seconds (cloakers, equalizers etc.) and the process of publishing those pages is simplified (they even have FTP clients on those packages).

But Google has grown a brain of its own and is using duplicate content filters, duplicate structure filters. Anything that looks pre-made, unnatural, un-human is being banned or penalized on its search engine.

The point is, one can publish such sites, but will probably not get them listed. Not having them listed means NO TRAFFIC and NO TRAFFIC means no Adsense clicks.

By the way, do not trust sites that tell you that their pre-made pages have built in RSS feeds that add fresh contents that do not look like they are linking to external sites and can cheat duplicate content filters. Remember that duplicate structures trigger red flags too. I even wonder if Blogs can trigger these filters since they use the same structures. Probably not, since Google uses smart algorithms to identify such pages.

This proves that on the future GOOD CONTENT WILL BE KING not massive pre-made sites.

Francisco Santander Owner of the Blog: Webmaster's guide to success