Gotta check this: Smoothbeats.com: bumpin with the ill flava.

School is over for the semester. I managed to come through pretty well. Enjoyed the classes, and looking forwards to continuing in the fall.

I went apartment hunting and found new place for the coming year, a one-bedroom flat at on the north side of Lake Monona. It’s not on the lakeshore side of the street, but it’s pretty close, and it’s a nice area where lots of other grad students live. The address is 1346 Morrison St # 1, Madison, WI 53703-3812.

I’ve been climbing and sailing a bit already, and plan to do a good bit more this summer. Believe it or not, there is good climbing only an hour north of Madison, with hundreds of routes, and the lake sailing is pretty darn good too.

I’ll be heading to LA on May 30th for Desmond’s 2nd annual beach champagne party, and then up to SF for two weeks. After I load up the truck, I fly back to Madison on June 14th to start a summer class that runs until mid-July. I may have to zip over to Paris for a couple of days somewhere in there for AdMonsters Europe… By that point I’ll be moved in, and can take the rest of July off, before heading out to California again in early August for a little surf safari, and then up to Portland for AdMonsters IX. And then back to Madison for the start of the fall semester on September 2.

What am I reading? William Cronon’s Uncommon Ground and something called Road Ecology.

Tech note: I had a 128Mb SD card lying around, and I was envious of the little USB “memory keys” that have started turning up at school… It turns out that you can get an SD card reader that’s hardly any larger, and plugs directly into any USB port, without any drivers. The advantage is that, unlike a “memory key,” you can pull the SD card out and put it in another device with an SD slot, like a digital camera, Palm, or my Dana. This thing means goodbye CDR and goodbye Yahoo Briefcase. I bought mine for $15 on ebay. $15!!!

I finally finished my paper on Regional Planning in the Eastern Sierra and the Mammoth Airport case — and with that, I’m just about done for the semester.

In the meantime, the preliminary opinion issued last week was followed up by a final ruling in which the judge finds that the FAA failed to satisfy “National Environmental Policy Act requirements through its preparation of an Environmental Assessment and ordered the FAA to prepare and adopt a full Environmental Impact Statement before construction of the airport expansion can commence.” Nice work.