Historical flight information:

My flight back from BWI was cancelled on friday, due to Rainstorm Ernesto. I ended up taking the overnight train back, but wondered, if I had stuck around at the airport, would any of the later flights have got me back? Flightstats gives you averages, and clearly has all the data, but the form doesn't let you look back more than a day. Fortunately, the query isn't encoded. The syntax is
http://www.flightstats.com/go/FlightStatus/flightStatusByFlight.do?airline=%28FL%29&flightNumber=494&departureDate=2006-09-01

The airline abbreviations are here. It turns out the later airtran flights did leave, albeit late, and presumably stuffed to the gills. As it was, I got a few hours sleep on the train, and got to watch sunrise over coastal connecticut, so it worked out all right. Either way I would have been non-functional yesterday.

Columbia, Maryland is creepy. It's an early planned community; 38 years old, and feels like a suburban college campus for grown-ups, all tree lined roads, with clusters of houses and condos set back from the road, with little town centers scattered about. Analyzing the creepy, I identified a few of the factors at work...

1: All the sidewalks were well lit and clean.
2: The trees were well spaced, and far enough from the sidewalk that it didn't crack.
3: I was the only pedestrian, even though the streets were busy.
4: There was no graffiti. I don't mean no obvious graffiti. I mean, I looked. The backs of utility boxes, the underside of (unused) pedestrian bridges, nothing. Not even painted over graffiti. 5: There was very little litter, and what there was was fresh.
6: There were enough parking spaces. All the parking was free, even the multi-level (and spotless) garages. The town appeared to be 50% asphalt, 30% small communities, and 20% landscaped trees But because there were trees everywhere, it felt forested, until you realized that all the apparent forest was just shallow screens of trees.
7: Finally, it wasn't like the midwest either. It sprawled, but it was planned sprawl. It all fit together. There were no wasted triangles of land, no bramble-covered vacant lots; even the drainage ditches were planned drainage ditches. It was all intentional.

I'd imagine it's a nice place to live, but unquestionably creepy. It's probably just like a brand new copper roof that hasn't turned green yet. Once it gets older, gets some more layers, once you can no longer see the plan superimposed on the land, (the entire place was graded... I didn't see a single slope that didn't look like it was put there by a bulldozer.), it will probably be lovely. But I have never been so tempted to buy a spray can and deface something. I sat in my hotel room trying to put together a good tag based on the word tourist. _
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