Kim Family search moves to Bear Camp Road (aka Merlin Galice Road) area

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Most recent news here Kati and kids are safe, James missing but trackers on his trail as of 11pm Monday.

Our 6pm local news just reported that the search for the Kim family is now focusing on the Bear Camp Road (aka Merlin Galice Road). It appears the family hired some choppers to fly the area today but the search is on hold now due to darkness.

I’m glad this area is the new focus for the search because it would seem to be a more likely area than any other route from I-5 to the coast. Family members are heading up from the San Francisco area as well. The logical approach will be to have cars drive each of the many spurs along that route to look for signs of the family car and continue with flights over the area. Some in SF have wondered how you could get “lost” in the modern age but you need to realize this is a huge and remote area. Hundreds of square miles of forest and steep mountains with virtually no traffic and hundreds of miles of logging roads.

Mapquest *right now* gives a “looks easy” set of directions along Bear Camp Road when you search for the shortest time route from Merlin to Gold Beach, but this route is not advisable in winter. Google Maps shows this route as well.

Update: The map they showed on local news indicated they are searching to the west side of the mountains just north of Gold Beach.

Tomorrow (Saturday) they’ll hopefully have good weather to fly over the logging roads that wind all through that area.

James Kim family missing. Could they have taken the infamous Merlin / Galice road ?

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Most recent updates from this blog are HERE 

Update 6 is here and is later info than below

I heard about the missing Kim family [ more recent Kim family missing] over at Techmeme [police information is here], thinking it’s unlikely I could offer any reasonable insight but it appears they were heading from Portland to Gold Beach on the Southern Oregon coast, an area with which I’m very familiar.

Online and printed mapping is sometimes problematic here in Southern Oregon and there’s a road that appears on many maps as a “shortcut” to Gold Beach. But in fact in winter it can be treacherous and often closes with snow. It’s the Merlin to Galice to Gold Beach route. Cell phones don’t work in this mountainous remote area along the Rogue River valley and the coast. A few folks have been lost (many more just scared out of their wits in bad weather) along this tricky route through the Siskiyou National Forest.

The troopers are probably examining this possibility (I’d say likelihood), and hopefully they’ll find the Kim family soon safe and sound.

Update: I called the Galice USFS District Ranger office and it appears the news had not reached there yet. They are advising against that route due to snow drifts that may not be cleared and confirmed that the route is not regularly patrolled. I’m going to follow up more on this angle shortly.

Update II: I just called the Northern Police dispatch number listed below and they did not seem well informed about local road situation, but indicated that the (Southern?) dispatch is following up. I’m going to call the Gold Beach ranger district to make sure they are aware of the situation. TuTuTun lodge, where the Kim’s were staying, is along the route I’m talking about (Via Lobster Creek bridge to North Bank Road) making it even more likely they may have taken the dangerous Bear Camp Road “shortcut” which has many logging road turn offs.

Update III: Gold Beach district said they’d heard of this on the news but I could not reach the road engineer or District Ranger to find out if people had checked extensively up there.

I fear this is a case where spreading the word won’t help much – rather a search of the many logging roads off of the Merlin to Gold Beach route is called for here.

Update 4: Update: As of 9 a.m. PST Friday, investigators said they were narrowing their search to Oregon’s Highway 38 as the family’s most probable route to their destination of Gold Beach. The Kims last spoke to an innkeeper there by phone about five hours before they planned to arrive.

Highway 38 seems less likely to me than Merlin Galice road, but I don’t have enough info to know if the police are using more than just intuition about the route. 38 is not nearly as hazardous as Merlin Galice / Bear Camp route, is travelled regularly, and unless they drove into the river there’d be signs of a crash. Without local info Kim could have correctly concluded that I-5 to Merlin would be faster than going via 101, and could also have (wrongly) concluded that the Merlin Galice route was short and safe.

Update 5: Leslie at CNET tells me that the SF Police are aware of Bear Camp as a possible location and appear to be searching in that area as well, which is good. I’ve contacted a friend in Gold Beach who will help spread the word as well.

Update 6

From the news report:

James Kim is a senior editor at CNET and hosts the web site’s popular Crave blog.

Police said friends and family knew them to usually keep in daily contact.

According to Det. Angela Martin of the San Francisco Police Dept., the family had lunch with a friend in Portland on Saturday between 2-3 p.m., then left to travel to Gold Beach on the southern Oregon Coast.

According to San Francisco Police, the family made two phone calls to a Gold Beath hotel that afternoon, the second call at 5:45 p.m. On that second call, the family reportedly asked the hotel clerk to leave a key outside since they would be arriving late that night.

That phone call was the last reported contact with the family. The Gold Beach hotel did leave keys out for the Kim Family but the keys were still there the next morning.

According to the Kim’s cellular phone provider, the phone was last used after the lunch in Portland. Calls to the Kim’s cell phone later Saturday went straight to voice mail.

The Kims were driving a 2005 silver Saab station wagon with California personalized plates of DOESF.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Oregon State Police Northern Command Center Dispatch at 800-452-7888, or the San Francisco Police Department Missing Persons Unit at (415) 558-5508.

Dvorak on Vista

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John Dvorak is not impressed with Vista’s advertising or prospects as a buzz-worthy application, saying the promotional web info …

looks like an advertisement for an expensive prescription drug for constipation

and suggesting the market impact will not be very big.

I actually think he’s wrong, and Vista will usher in some significant changes, especially as users integrate sidebar and desktop “gadgets” and we see the desktop and websites look more like myspace pages, littered with dozens of mini applications. If Vista realizes the promise of facilitating RSS and gadget centric information architecture I think it could be a significant part of the significant changes sweeping the online environment.

TechMeme, paid blogging, and Zunes

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Lots of interesting tech news today from TechMeme which is starting to distinguish itself as “the place” for tech insiders as Digg and Technorati increasingly seek to cater to a huge audience and Slashdot remains problematic because it’s not as robust with community input.

The New York Times reports that Huffington is adding “original” reporting to her extremely popular political blog. I wonder if this is as much for advertising credibility than quality, which clear thinking people know is not a function of whether you get paid to blog or not. Hey, wait a minute. A lot of bloggers (including me) are skeptical that paying people for blog posts, reviews and other online content serves the best interests of the blog community.

Yet nobody seems to frown on a journalist when they get paid to blog. Or, for that matter, run copious amounts of expensive advertising beside quality content as Mike does over at TechCrunch. For the time being I’m refiling my pay per post concerns under the folder “maybe right, but maybe just hypocritical pseudo-elitist nonsense”.

Also at NYT is this piece on the Third World Laptop project bringing cheap computing to the poor all over the world. It’s a very exciting concept that will certainly bring about big changes and also many unintended, unpredictable consequences. I remain confused as to why Bill Gates has opposed the laptop project because even though clean water and health and food are more immediate needs, the Laptops will connect the first and third worlds in ways that will *demand* more proactive participation in third world development by us rich folks. Also this project brings some of the best thinkers – people who often dwell in abstract and expensive first world problem solving realms – into the of “global poverty and development” department of innovation. Gates’ outstanding contributions in this realm are of global and historical significance so I hope he will eventually see how the laptop project is part of this excellent trend that is connecting the rich and the poor.

Aleks Krotoski has a great piece about digital violence over at Second Life where that blossoming virtual community is now under attack by opportunistic and malicious … programs. It’s not only art that imitates life, it’s virtually impossible to escape our human inadequacies even when humans are not physically present in the environment.

And those nifty Zunes can’t seem to crack the IPOD dominance in digital MP3 players. I often wonder how much of the tech trends are habit and how much innovation. Zunes seemed to offer better features yet they appear to be losing the battle. Ironically the neat song sharing feature using DRM restrictions seems to be backfiring on the Zune.

Yahoo beats Google at something other than … sports.

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Google is closing down it’s answers feature which has been very inferior in performance compared to Yahoo’s and was missing the point in Web 2-point-0.

Hey, I pointed this difference out about one year ago.   This is actually a very interesting example of how Yahoo is more 2.0 friendly and better at bringing people into the computer equation, and helps disprove Matt Cutts’ recent, mildly back-handed compliment suggesting that Yahoo is only better in sports.

More important is that it’s a small indicator of how the battle lines are getting drawn in what may be the most significant, fun, and interesting corporate battle in the history of commerce.   Who you gonna call . com?    Yahoo as community builder, Google as search behemoth, Microsoft as “where o where did our monopoly go?!”   Who will rule the net?    There’s room for many players so it could even be a combination or companies yet to be invented.

So, how about a price spike in Yahoo stock, which seems to happen with GOOG every time that Google farts.

Hey Wall Street!  Yahoo!!!  Look!  Hey!

Disclaimer:   I own some Yahoo Stock and have some old Google puts that will expire soon, worthless.
Serves me right for betting against brilliance, though I still think Google is priced using an irrational exhuberance stock picking algorithm and Yahoo is … undervalued.

Blogs – why listen to the man when you can listen to the guy sticking it to the man?

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Jeremy, over at one of the very best non-official blogs, is noting the challenges of corporate blogging which has been exploding thanks in no small part to the blog evangelizing efforts of another great non-official blogger Robert Scoble.

This reminded me of a nice talk I had with Google’s Adam at Pubcon where I was telling him that I’d rather read his own personal blog where he often has very thoughtful posts, or read Matt Cutts, than read the Google company line at the corporate blog.

Ideally I’d like to see Adam talk about Google stuff from his own perspective, as Jeremy has done so effectively over the years at Yahoo and Matt sometimes does at his blog. Corporate suits should take note of the amazing reservoir of credibility Jeremy, and a handful of other unofficial folks, have created with their frank, honest and introspective styles.

I’m still pretty much a corporate blog bigot, feeling that a large company blogs generally suffer from the items Jeremy notes PLUS the fact that usually it is very low level folks in charge of the blog and they simply can’t afford to rock the boat.

A notable exception is Bob Parsons over at Godaddy. I suppose his blog might be considered personal more than corporate, but this is my point. He’s wonderfully honest and insightful discussing Godaddy because nobody can kick his ass. He can write about the man without fear because he IS the man. His series about strategizing and running 2005 Superbowl TV ads was one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read about big ticket advertising.

So I’ll take Jeremy and Adam’s advice and check out the corporate blogs again, but I’m guessing I won’t be reading the man when I can read the guy who is at least willing to stick it to the man.

Real Estate or False Estate?

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I’d really like to buy some real estate this winter if the price gets right, but it’s a nervous time since prices appear to be on the way down for at least another several months and as I see it could fall or stay low for the next few years, even indefinitely if global tensions and US spending continue at the current levels.   This article suggests some really good deals in housing, though I think I’ll stick to the local market I know a lot better than these.

Bravo Branson

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Richard Branson, in this Forbes article, does a fine job of articulating how and why entrepreneurial capitalism and social responsibility can work together in vibrant ways.   Branson recently pledged to give *all profits* from his tranportation companies to projects that are working to alleviate global warming.     Although I’d rather see the money go to global health initiatives it’s admirable and exciting to see how socially proactive the “super rich” like Branson, Gates, and Buffett have become.     In fact it almost seems to be “infectious” which bodes well for a world desparately in need of innovative thinking combined with big money to fund clever projects.

I’d like to see a study of what may be a natural tension when Governments do a “really good job” at eliminating significant problems because it puts bureaucrats out of work and shrinks budgets.   Could this help explain why governments often seem to spend so much and accomplish so little when it comes to solving significant problems?

It’s all about the O

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Thanks Overstock.com !    I wanted to get my parents a memory foam mattress topper and Overstock continues to have great prices  –  $79 for  2″ foam.   This is about half the (otherwise good) Costco price for similar stuff.   Surfing around for more items I bumped into a 1G mem card for my Treo 650 at $26, also about half the going “good” price.    Free shipping made it a no brainer but then I realized “hey, there might be promo discounts” and a quick google search got me a link to an extra 15% off, which was very nicely tagged onto my existing shopping cart after visiting the (Overstock created?) coupon site.