Here we go again - Season 4 of the coolest show on TV. Jack Bauer is back and the first 4 hours of Day 4 are the most intense yet.

This excellent book details the challenges in creating the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Leading American architects, led by Daniel Burnham, designed and built what became known as the “White City”. At the same time, however, a sinister serial killer was prowling the Fair eventually killing somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly young women.

I put a new look and feel up over the weekend. I got rid of the three-column layout in favor of a two-column layout with a top-level menu nav. There are a number of subtle “under the covers” improvements: The Exposition (formerly Narrative) blog engine now outputs XHTML-compliant text. Previously, the parser munged the output somewhat, causing an invalid DOCTYPE tag. Google’s search bot doesn’t like invalid DOCTYPE tags and so many pages were not indexed.

Looks like drinking moderately on a daily basis is very good for a man’s heart - 41% better than not drinking. Guess it is time to break out the vino. And if there weren’t enough places to play Sudoku already, here is another, albeit, a good one. This is a great article on how to make exercising a habit - from The Happiness Project.

I support English as the official language of the United States. I do so because having an official language is more efficient and less costly than other alternatives. You only need to look as far as Canada and the European Union to understand why a single, common language is the best choice. The national languages of Canada are English and French, despite the fact that 90% of Canadians speak only English.

I had an urge to see an action movie last week and so Ahu and I went to see MI:3 midweek at the Loews Theater in Schaumburg. I’m not sure why this movie is doing so badly at the theater. It’s a really great action movie. There are a number of awesome stunts and a lot of good special effects. The plot isn’t really that bad - again, this is an action movie!

Anyone who spends time around me will eventually see me wearing gear from The North Face. Inevitably I find myself explaining why I buy stuff from The North Face. Most people I talk to think that North Face gear is overpriced. I agree that gear from The North Face tends to cost more than other brands of similar gear. However, the price is justified by the quality and reliability of the gear.

I saw something kind of silly today on my way to work. It was sprinkling slightly with occasional bouts of actual rain. A school bus winds its way around our subdivision and stops at various corners to pick up elementary school children. Today, a big black Hummer was waiting at a usual corner stop. The bus pulled up and two or three children got out of the Hummer and onto the bus.

A new version of Narrative is now in beta. This page was generated by the new CMS, built on Narrative, called Exposition. One big change you might notice is the new page naming convention, where the title of the article is transformed into the page name.

A very interesting article on a new physics theory that may lead to faster-than-light space travel. Found a gorgeous, very castle-like home in Telluride… Great article on not eating low-fat foods to stay in shape. Me likey. Cool Google Maps find of two SR-71 Blackbirds on the runway and another of Niagara Falls.