Sweet marjoram, the FTA has okayed Metro to Reston, Dulles, and beyond. Maybe I’ll be able to take the day off to see the groundbreaking, after all. But the feds haven’t written the $900 million check yet. Stay tuned.

I scored 25 out of 34 in The Rather Difficult Font Game. Not good enough to make it on to the leader board.

On Sunday’s trip, we saw the results of hatching in three boxes. Myra and Chris were rewarded with views of chicks in two of them! The foliage has really greened up in the past couple of weeks, after what feels like ten days of rain. The patch and glue job on my right boot did not hold up, but fortunately I have another right (from my previous pair, which is lacking a left). New birds spotted or heard in the park: Lesser Yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes), Solitary Sandpiper (Tringa solitaria), Chimney Swift (Chaetura pelagica), Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina), White-eyed Vireo (Vireo griseus), Yellow Warbler (Dendroica petechia), and lifer #358 for me, Northern Waterthrush (Seiurus noveboracensis). Good ears, Paul!

Via things magazine: a thought-provoking post by Jeffrey Zeldman on the “outsourcing” of personal web page content:

[Imagine] a 1990s site whose splash page links to sub-pages. Structurally, its site map is indistinguishable from an org chart, with the CEO at the top, and everyone else below. …to re-use the org chart analogy, a site like Jody’s is akin to a single-owner company with only virtual (freelance) employees. There is nothing below the CEO. All arrows point outward.

I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m outsourcing my content, but it’s certainly the case that I’m managing a growing number of multiple online personalities. And I really like the simplicity of my TypeKey profile: that’s the URL that I include in my professional resume.

…in last week’s Economist:

• “Nauruan” is probably the only proper adjective that is also a palindrome.
• Dubai is selling the naming rights to some of its metro stations and its two lines.
  

  Dubai Metro Naming Rights offers you unmatched impact and visibility to take your brand to new levels of saliency and success. What’s more, it is an immersive marketing opportunity that allows you to communicate and interact with your consumers at various touch points spread across the station/Metro network.

• A panmictic population is one in which all individuals are potential partners.

Via ArtsJournal: a Rochester, N.Y. artists’ group is giving staged readings of the notorious stinker, Moose Murders, reports Campbell Robertson. The play closed after its opening performance on Broadway in 1983.

The number of people who claim to have seen the [Broadway] show, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, seems to have multiplied beyond physical possibility, like those who claim to have seen the Beatles at Shea Stadium or Game 5 of the 1956 World Series.

Willie D. Jones reports on research (preliminary, apparently not yet published) by the Virginia Water Resources Research Center that compares various energy sources and means of power generation in their efficiency of water consumption. That certain high-tech darlings of alternative energy, like ethanol, are relative water hogs is less surprising than the wide spread of computed values, spanning four orders of magnitude. While natural gas requires only 38 liters of water per 1000 kilowatt-hours generated, biodiesel was measured at 180.9 to 969 kiloliters of water per 1000 kW-h. On the generation side, the range is from 260 l/kW-h for hydroelectricity to 31000 to 74900 l/kW-h.

Marc Fisher picked up my plug for Huntley Meadows Park for the Post’s Community Handbook.

All aboard for the first annual National Train Day, 10 May. (Though it would be better called National Passenger Train Day.) Amtrak has scheduled events at four of its most important stations, the Union Stations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, and New York’s Pennsylvania Station.

I added Operator to my Firefox add-ons. Operator discovers microformat markup embedded in a web page: you can do some cool stuff, like extract contact information published as an hCard and export it to your address book, or you can discover what tags are used on a page, or you can add event information posted at Upcoming to your Google calendar.

I added this hCard to my Elsewhere page (and then punched it up to get the HTML to validate):

David Gorsline
nouveau@comcast.net
Reston, Virginia USA

And now, if you have Operator installed, you will see my info in the Contacts dropdown.

The expectation is that Firefox 3 will have microformats support built in.