Final flight check

I've been wrapping up all kinds of things before break. This is shaping up to be a fantastic trip. Here are some scattered results of today:

After class today I helped Dan Schned work on the material he is putting together for the Hiawatha Line program, where he interns this semester. He has very exciting giant orthographic aerial photo composites of the Minneapolis-Bloomington route and all sorts of info on the planned corridor developments. I really like to see all these new development plans up close. If it works, then Minneapolis will start to grow up again, not further out.

Unfortunately, they were on schedule to open most of the light rail line in April, but the transit strike prevents drivers from training and the cars from being tested sufficiently. This really makes it hard for the LRT people to keep anything going.

With some time to waste this afternoon, I drove into Minneapolis to look at the rail line, along with a potential extension into the U of M. Both these places would benefit greatly from improved access. I went up to see the VA Hospital stop, as well. I'm not sure if people will enjoy riding in the big tunnel under the airport, though.

This evening, David has been over here adjusting his great artwork for the living room. Now he's adding colored chalk on some of the characters. I will post a photo of this when it's finally completed.

Arun is truly an iconic mack daddy of our times. That is all I can say.

I haven't done much reading about what the hell to do in London. Brits have advised me to ask at the pub.

Also I may try to go somewhere else for a day like Paris or Amsterdam. Wouldn't that be nice?

Sadly I won't have a digital camera to document things. I'll get a PhotoCD made, though.

I am probably going to stay up really late again tonight to adjust myself towards London time--I mean GMT.

Hurrah!! Server goes down & gets put together as Neo-Con castle crumbles!!

Everything got pretty risky there for a little while, and many bits of the system were fouled up, including important Perl files. I decided to install OS X fresh on the machine, and in turn rebuild all the site's MySQL hookups, Perl modules and everything. Fortunately it somehow only took about 90 minutes to do all this. Is it flawless? I'm not sure, but it should work.

On Friday I am flying off to England. How sweet.

There has been a ton of news lately about the spoofed Iraq intelligence I love so dearly. Finally, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret) has written her definitive expose on what she witnessed in the Pentagon and around the Office of Special Plans. Everything here reinforced what I have been saying all along. I am really happy that the Kwiatkowski is living up to the exacting standards of personal integrity that all armed services people should strive for, and not enough have in this time of lies.

I have heard about her story for quite some time, and she has been referred to in a few stories I've linked to. A key passage from "The Lie Factory" which Senator Kennedy recently repeated on the Senate floor:

"It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," Kwiatkowski says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials-including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February-that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.