Doh! I erred on the side of pragmatism and decided not to read my loyalty oath or any of the other employment documents I had. I was just happy they agreed to pay me. I have learned that in a crisis I can be called upon to assist state officials in whatever the crisis is. If I am zooming down the highway to San Francisco after the big one hits to erect a shelter, hopefully I wont be pulled over and given a ticket.

I work for the state of California and I never get any opportunities to participate in the corruption! I must be going to the wrong parties.

I got a chance to talk to Curtis Wong and play with Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope software earlier this year at the American Astronomical Society meeting. It really blows away the clunky interface Google Earth has right now. It's also fairly easy to author some guided tours. I think it will be a great tool. I would, however, like to highlight the incredible open source planetarium software Stellarium (http://www.stellarium.org/), which I use for teaching right now. It also has a comprehensive scripting language and allows for additional images to be placed within it.

Email carpet bombing can get surprisingly fast results for relatively simple disputes. I once took a survey from Bayer for a $10 amazon gift certificate. After several weeks passed I contacted Bayer, but they said they had no record of me taking the survey. After a couple of exchanges I decided to email everyone at Bayer hq to try to get it resolved. I got my gift certificate the next day.