The Operation Plowshare research alone has taken up several months, but has been a great deal of fun as well.  Frankly, when you've spent as much time with a topic as I have with Civil Defense, the novelty can begin to wear off.  I think it might have happened around the decade mark, but I digress.  Plowshare, with all its wacky lunacy, has reminded me why I enjoy this subject as much as I do.  To think that there was a time, not too long ago, when major universities offered classes in 'nuclear engineering' (as in, civil engineering using nuclear explosives) is mind-boggling in its sheer 'what the heck were they thinking'-ness.

All of which is to say that my long-awaited (by me, and likely by me alone) book is progressing nicely.  I did want to take a moment to mention a great new tool I discovered recently, Zotero.  Zotero is a plug-in for Firefox that allows the user to organize and keep within easy reach all of their research materials - it can even generate a bibliography (following a number of styles) from selected works, a great time-saver for the writer.  The iTunes-like interface allows for a practically flat learning curve, assuming of course that one is familiar with iTunes.  Anyhow, one of the best features is Zotero's ability to take a 'snapshot' of a webpage the writer may want to reference at a later date.  This produces an exact copy, stored on the user's local drive, as insurance against the page changing in the future.  Users can even use a special set of Zotero tools to highlight and annotate these saved pages.  There's much more info at the Zotero site, which is linked below.  Check it out!