The new machines in the 
BCRC are almost ready to go. Tom and I worked a half-day yesterday (and I went back in for a few hours later) to get the user preferences set up. I had made a rough pass, but Tom went in a found a half-dozen things to improve. After that, we found that X needed to be updated to beta 3. Mozilla 1.3 had come out since I set up the first image, so we updated that. We installed Real Player and Windows Media Player. We installed the add-ins to Office. I got the applications merged into the dist image, but it appears I forgot to the preference changes we made after installing the updated apps, so that still has to be done. Little by little, I'm getting on top of radmind. I should probably run a workshop on campus for OIT and other folks who try to support labs of Macs on campus.
Tom and I are planning to offer a set of open-house workshops in the BCRC to introduce people to the new capabilities offered by the updated hardware and software. The first one will be "OS X in 10 minutes" or something like that. (That was Randy's idea). Perhaps combined with that, I plan to demonstrate using Wikis and talk about blogging. Other topics on tap include sequence editing (using Seaview), sequence analysis using Perl, digital video using iMovie, and introduction to the GIMP. I think people are going to be blown away by the new capabilities we have to offer. As much as possible, we want to get other faculty and grad students in the department to offer workshops that we can support.
Another career diplomat resigns over the idiotic policies of the current administration. I read an article in our local paper reprinted from the Washington Post (Rick Atkinson?) which said that many officers believe that this war is the beginning of perpetual conflict that will last throughout their careers. I can't believe this is my country we're talking about. It's too depressing to write about.