Well, I wanted to change the "feel" of this site, so I'm in the middle of a redesign. It's going to take a while to roll all the changes across to all of the pages, so please be patient and don't get too dizzy as you whip back and forth between the new gray pages and the old green pages.

A bunch of things that caught my eye that have to do with television: CBS may have to dump Round 1 and Round 2 of the NCAA tournament coverage to ESPN/ESPN2, and whatever doesn't fit there would go to on TNN or TV Land. The Academy Awards are still scheduled to go on, even if the war starts by then. Oprah Winfrey wants "The Bachelorette" stars Trista Rehn and her intended, Ryan Sutter, to get married on her show. Oh, no - Discovery Kids is putting together a new series for 8 to 13 year-olds: "Trading Spaces: Boys vs. Girls". If you have a TiVo, did you know that when you zip through those commercials that you actually recall those ads at roughly the same rates as people who see them at normal speed in real time?

Anybody else out there a little disturbed by this Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) bug going around? I mean, I don't have much doubt that it's just a naturally occurring bug (versus an engineered one), but it's just a bit nasty and a bit scary. Hopefully it can be identified. At least they've figured out it's not as infectious to the public as airborne viruses. One tourism industry official estimated new tour group bookings to Hong Kong had dropped between 80 and 90 percent over the last few days amid growing fears of the disease.

Back in the last Gulf War, I had purchased aeronautical maps of the entire region, from Iran to the Mediterranean, just to be able to tell where things were and what kind of terrain they were talking about. Well, I dug them up again and scanned a few areas in case you are interested. First, a couple of caveats: 1) These are aeronautical navigation maps - if you know how to read one, you'll understand some of the notations. If you don't, at least you'll see what some of the area looks like 2) Though these are Aeronautical charts, please note: <disclaimer>Not for Navigational Use</disclaimer> 3) The maps are old - 1985 and 1990, so even though the terrain and towns/cities would not have changed, other items like the main 6-lane highway from Kuwait through Iraq didn't exist on the map. I'm sure some of these airports that are listed don't exist either 4) Files are in PDF format

Map 1 - Baghdad - area around the city of Baghdad, Iraq (1.69Mb)
Map 2 - Basra - area around the port city of Basra, Iraq and the gulf (1.727Mb)
Map 3 - Kuwait - the country of Kuwait, up to the city of Basra, Iraq (1.725Mb)
Map 4 - Qatar - the countries of Bahrain and Qatar (1.828Mb)
Map 5 - Tikrit - area from city of Baghdad to Tikrit (Saddam Hussein's hometown) north to Kirkuk (1.804Mb)

For a very complete set of maps, look at the University of Texas at Austin library on Iraq Maps.