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For the person who came to my site googling for “What do trains look like nowadays,” I refer you to the the photo galleries at cleanairbus.com “train” tag on Flickr.
Update: Sadly, cleanairbus.com is gone, and with it the photos of trains. Flickr’s “train” tag will have to do for now.
Oh dear: High Vitamin E intake is associated with an increased death risk. Remember those old Squibb Natural Vitamin E commercials with a rock-climbing Richard Gomez, saying how it increased his sex drive? I wonder what kind of commercials Squibb is showing these days? More on that (Vitamin E, not Richard Gomez), plus links, from Antifaust.net and Doc Emer.
Goodbye to Yasser Arafat, and to his keffiyeh, too. (Jacoby sure is fair and balanced.) More from Salim, Metafilter, the Moonie Times, and DEB “grain of salt” KA.
John Piper on DesiringGod.org’s new logo. Excellent use of minimal imagery: four red arrows pointing to the heart of the very cross they form.
(Also note that CSS is used for layout, making the site easily readable in text-mode browsers, and laying down site content in an ordered hierarchy. An assortment of HTML problems currently keep the site from validating, however.)
I had such high hopes for the Penn Project through the months it was under construction. No way they’d be opening that stretch of Penn Ave in front of the White House to vehicular traffic ever again, right? So perhaps it would make sense to turn it into a sprawling pedestrian plaza — which is what I thought they were doing with the space. I passed by there on my way home today to check out the newly opened site, and was sorely disappointed.
At first glance, hardly anything has changed. I had expected that the whole stretch of Penn Ave from 15th to 17th NW would be paved over with colored granite slabs, turning the street fronting the White House into an extension of Lafayette Park. Instead, the granite slabs are just for the fronts of the Old Executive Office Building and the Department of the Treasury. The rest of the street remains mostly the same, with only minor cosmetic changes, some extra trees, and removed bollards.
Ah, well. My fault for getting my hopes up and not looking at the Penn Project page earlier, where I would have seen the whole plan from the start. My own misplaced expectations aside, it’s nice to have that open space in front of the White House back, now tree-lined and bollard-free. And the newly asphalted surface should make for some excellent inline skating.
More on DCist. Update: And yet more, plus link-back, from DCist.
The many faces of Yasser Arafat’s health: dead, brain-dead, not dead, comatose, deteriorating.
Also see Antifaust.net for more input and links on Health and Power.
If you’re a big fan of fajita burritos and usability, then Chipotle.com’s overproduced, inaccessible, barely navigable, all-Flash interface must drive you nuts. So, as a public service for Chipotle-eaters in Washington, DC, here are all the direct links you need to know:
Venus and Jupiter come within one degree apart early this morning. The conjunction actually peaked Thursday and Friday, but I only managed to wake early enough today to get this photo. ISO 50 this time, with a steady hand. More info on the conjunction from NASA.
Photo taken with a Canon Powershot A400.
Amy and I finally got inside the National Museum of the American Indian last Saturday. Pre-reserved entry passes are no longer required; you just need to line up at the entrance. We got to eat a nice regional sampler of buffalo, juniper salmon, and wild rice, and leisurely strolled around the various exhibits. Some photos here.
I’ll have more reflections on the NMAI soon, after I’ve tried another visit.
Boss got me a new workstation last week: Dell P4-3GHz with 1GB of RAM, running on WinXP. I was really expecting WinXP to be a complete nightmare to work with, but thankfully, starting up on it was almost as easy as with Mac OS X 10.2+, and I had our work development environment (Apache 2, PHP 5, CVS, a code editor, and every web browser on the planet) installed and running in less than a day, along with an internal wiki to document the process. Pity we can’t play games in the office; I’ll bet Vice City would run like a dream on this baby.