With apologies to those friends who have a band called the Green Dot Project, I'll be posting from time to time on the Green Bus Project. The Green Bus is a 1979 Volkswagen Transporter Type II Canadian model with a Westfalia weekender camper conversion. Since 1980 Green Bus has been in the family. The stories of its past are too numerous to recount in one telling. Among those that stand out the most are the summers spent riding across the west, stopping in one national park and another, venturing into Canada and making memories to last a lifetime. Then there is the first accident I ever had at age 16 and the first year at college when Green Bus was my transportation. It marked our arrival in Colorado by the snapping of the clutch cable on Highway 36 on the way into Estes Park leading to a clutchless trip down Highway 34 to Loveland and on into Fort Collins. Read more about The Green Bus Project

Dave Taylor has a great article in April's Linux Journal titled The Failure of Wikis. He nails the underlying problems with this form of mediocre way of creating and editing content. Perhaps the funniest part of the page is, however, a reader's comment "If you still have problems I suggest you start hiring smarter people or get smarter friends." The irony is that is exactly one of the points Taylor made - that wikians think those that don't get wikis are just too dense to get it.

It is a rarity to find a wiki that comes close to being as good as a page with comments on it. Each trip I make to Wikipedia leads to much more time spent editing incomplete or inaccurate information than is gained in the gleaning of information originally sought.

Earlier this month a Florida woman was exonerated after spending two and one-half years in jail charged with child abuse. The video from the parent's "nanny cam" appears to show Claudia Muro shaking the child violently. However the nanny cam used shoots video at about 1/10th the rate of a regular video camera. This difference can change gentle back-and forth motion into motion that appears violent. The local CBS station has copies of the video footage.

With the advent of the inexpensive video camera the instances of using video in courts of law or public opinion have increased. At the same time the multitude of ways of capturing and processing video have grown more powerful and complex. These advances bring great possibility to the consumer while making it imperative that video be looked at with a critical eye to ensure it actually shows what is first perceived.

I am sure that most, if not all of you, have seen the attention that operation swarmer is getting in the media. The term swarm implies a lot of activity and, in that regard it accurately reflects my role in the operation. In other words, I have been flying my butt off.

I was scheduled to do my two week rotation in the planning cell during this time. That planning job is night shift work and involves preparing all of the maps and gps data for the next day's flights. When swarmer came up, however, planning moved a lot higher than me and I got back involved in flying. I have been flying, under night vision goggles, three of the last four nights. My crew has been doing everything from transporting prisoners, to dropping off troops to conduct raids, to picking up cameras and film for use by the media, to flying reconnosance along various roads. I know this sounds exciting but it is not really. It is routine flying. Routine flying, however, makes for good experience and I have been happy to get it. I now have about 200 hours of combat flight time, almost half of which is google flight. That is less than average for our company but pretty good for a new pilot.

I know that a lot of you would like the "inside scoop" on Operation Swarmer to help you make sense of the media hype. Unfortunately I am not in a position to give much additional perspective. Even if I was, I wouldnt really be at liberty to write anything about the operation in this forum. It is very hard for me to see from my vantage point what, if any, long term effect this operation will have on the war in general or Iraq in particular. It seems to me that the media is making it out to be a lot more than it is but I suppose time will tell. All I know for sure is that it is giving me a break from "battlefield circulation" missions and that is a good thing. Read more about Swarmer