I stayed up too late on whatever night it was to watch a rebroadcast of the Powell speech on CSPAN. It was interesting and, I thought, very persuasive. Iraq is clearly not cooperating and appears to be "in material breach" as they like to put it. At the same time, I am more firmly convinced than ever that the shift in US policy, to unilaterally go after any country we don't like, is a terrible mistake that undermines all of the goals we espouse. It is like spanking your child to show them that hitting is wrong. Our blundering in the Middle East has greatly contributed to Iraq being the threat that it is, but if war is the medicine, I think the disease is better.
I chatted with a couple of colleagues about the charter over the past week. (If you don't what the charter is, you can read about the CoalitiontoSaveTownGovernment.) Both of them were leaning toward the charter. Neither had any more than a feeling that Town Meeting didn't always work very well. My response was that you can shoot the horse, but that doesn't fix the leg. I think that a big part of the reason that Amherst is a nice place to live is because of Town Meeting. The charter will make government much more efficient in all the wrong ways. I think that if we lose Town Meeting, Amherst will gradually lose a lot of what makes it seem so desirable now.
I updated the version of phpwiki I'm using for my journal. The new version has several enhancements, the most important being UnfoldSubpages, which lets me have the most recent several entries showing through to the front page. It also appropriate sorts the entries returned from LikePages. Both of these make the journal a lot more useful for readers. (Not that I have any objective evidence that anyone reads the journal but me). I also added a cool logo.
I also installed the newest version of BBEdit. The newest version knows how to use CVS, which seems like it could be really useful. I've been wanting to start using CVS for my development -- this seems like a good excuse. There weren't a lot of other enhancements, but I'm glad to support the development of BBEdit which is by far and away the most useful piece of Mac software I have.