Greg In The Desert

I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Portland Oregon on short trips several times this year. There is very rarely a direct flight from the Sunport to anywhere except a state directly next to New Mexico. This time I went through Denver International Airport for the first time. I was pretty interested to fly through Denver this time because of the conspiracy theories associated with it.

Lets start with the murals. I didn’t get a chance to see them, I wasn’t sure if they were past the security area and if I had time get to where they are. I’ve read about them and there many pictures up on Flickr. When you see the giant picture of the nazi dude with the dead children, well that’s just disturbing. There is another mural showing different people of the world bringing down this nazi dude. I think the point of which is to show what happens if the people of the world don’t come together to eliminate the bad guys. Still, this is pretty odd. It doesn’t help the rest of the conspiracy theories.

anomalies-unlimited.com is the main source for the conspiracy theories. As I read through the sites, its easy to dismiss many of their claims. First one being that “Denver already had what everyone said was a perfectly fine airport – Stapleton.”According to Wikipedia, Stapleton was serious too small and poorly designed to be the 4th busiest airport in the US, which is what DIA is now. I believe Wikipedia’s explanation more then anomalies-unlimited.

I won’t go through all the things that anomalies-unlimited points out. Some of it just doesn’t make sense that it’s part of a conspiracy. However there are some odd things they do warrant future inspection. Such as the fact that DIA was 2 Billion (with a “B”) over budget. Where did that money go? anomalies-unlimited seems to suggest that it went to a vast underground military complex that exists under the airport and that the purpose of the airport was really just to build this complex. Seems to me that one would build such a complex under a less busy airport.

My limited experience at the airport indicates that the airport is pretty well designed and huge. I think the A gates went from 1 to 99. Although I generally dismiss the conspiracy theories, I did note something strange at the A gates. There are these mosaic tile images of people standing and walking through the terminals located on the floor. They are kinda weird in that they are top views and you can only make them out if you get up high (there is a higher level one can view them). In between these mosaics are a border and on these boarders are words like “North America”, “Europe” and “Antarctica”. Next to these words are random symbols that seem to have no purpose at all. These are all mosaics which are pretty easy to make out, with continent names in upper case. Near some of these content names are other words in lower case and the tile colors are really close to the back ground making it hard to figure out what they say. The symbols kinda look like random characters from the Zapf Dingbats font. Perhaps these are codes to the Aliens that come through DIA to tell them which continents they need to go through when they arrive.

anomalies-unlimited.com does have one final item that I agree is strange, the odd tablet with a masonic symbol on it. Above that tablet is what appears to be a keypad. What the heck is this thing and why are there no better pictures of this thing than the poor quality ones on their website?

I’m trying to think back to my own graduation 15 years ago. It was held at the high school football field and I think there was a limit of how many people I could attend, something like 5 people (the class was 2000 people (update: 2000 is the total number of students in the school that year)). The Rio Rancho High School graduation is in some controversy due to the 8 person limit imposed when the school moved the ceremony to the Santa Anna Star Center. It was previously held at the “Pit” in Albuquerque.

The Santa Ana Star Center, which opened in November, will hold 5,500 of the graduates’ family and friends, while the The Pit held 11,000 for the ceremony last year, said Bill Duncan, Rio Rancho High activities director.

One thing that is annoying me is the woman I’ve seen on the news several times who complains that she cannot take all 50 of her relatives (she has a blog rioranchogradsunite.blogspot.com) to see her kid graduate. The Albuquerque Tribune says another person is upset because she ordered 40 invitations. Even if it was held at the Pit, there isn’t enough room for every kid to take that many people.

I know this is important to a lot of people and I don’t have a kid who is graduating nor 50 relatives that would come out for it even if I did. It appears that the school is willing to accommodate a reasonable amount of people (this problem isn’t unique to Rio Rancho High School). I feel it’s better to have the graduation in Rio Rancho, where the school is. I also feel that parents should be reasonable.

Some people in a Rio Rancho neighborhood hit by a water main break on Sunday are saying that the city isn’t doing its part to assure that they have clean, drinkable water. “It’s just getting really old,” said Renee Popovich, a homeowner near Rockaway and Pyrite in northeast Rio Rancho. “We’re not getting any support from the city to provide at least drinking water for the residents.” Popovich said that her children had to spend the night with friends so they had water to get ready for school on Monday morning. The break carved out a mini arroyo in front of several homes leaving people unable to back their cars out of their driveways. Rio Rancho officials say that they are aware of the problem and have recently removed asphalt over the water main in preparation for repairing the faulty pipes, which have failed several times in recent months.

The city came and fixed the water main break in front of my house pretty quickly. This break seems much worse than mine which might be part of the problem. Perhaps the city should do a better job of communicating to the residents the problems in fixing this and how long it’s going to take so it doesn’t end up on the news. Just sayin’.

I performed the Tiger upgrade yesterday, purchasing it from CompUSA (they were having a release party for it, but it was anything but a party). While Mail was importing my emails the screen saver came on. When I tried to log back in the screen stayed black but I could see the cursor. I let it set for 45 minutes finally deciding it was in a coma and force rebooted it.

When I logged back in I found a horrific site, everything had been set to factory defaults. The dock was at the bottom with the standard set of apps, the back ground pict was set to default. Mail had no sign of my accounts and wanted to know passwords and such. MY KEYCHAIN HAD BEEN WIPED OUT! DEAR LORD NOOOOOOOO!!!! Thankfully I make a nightly back up of my home folder, which I was able to restore a copy of my keychain. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to restore it using the Backup application, because it’s stupid. I had to break into the package contents of the back up and copy it. Mail is not working properly. It will not apply any rules to incoming messages and is pretty slow to display mailbox contents. It continually downloads the same messages and instead of showing their contents gives this message, “The message from username concerning ?Message Subject? has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it.” WTF?

Finally I had a heck of a time getting Safari to work. I had downloaded Saft a while back, which was still installed in Safari. It prevented it from launching, instead giving a dialog box with the option to disable it but not allowing you to click it.

Update 05/01/05 06:39 PM: What a nightmare this has been. First I want to think iBlog, because as I wrote this entry (now for the 3rd time) it crashed after saving the entry, and deleted the entry upon relaunch. I hear Ecto calling.

I tried several times to import my mail, dam good thing I make a nightly back up of my users data. But Tiger seemed to be eating itself, menu items started to disappear.. I had 25GB of free space when I installed Tiger, I was under 300MB when I gave up. System performance was horrid. Never got .Mac sync to work either.

There was only one thing to do, reformat and fresh install. Something I wanted to do anyways but it’s such a pain. I was planning on getting the thing set up right in Tiger and then cloning it so I could just import my user data, but that wasn’t going to happen. I copied what I thought I needed and to my various HDs and wiped the drive.

I’m running Tiger now and everything is much better. Still need to turn on FileVault for my account. Mail never did import everything correctly and I had to recreate all my rules. Email from the last 2 months are missing.