Year: 2008

Politics is fascinating, which is why it’s probably the subject of so many of these posts of mine. For example, I find it fascinating* that voters in the Great State of Alaska would elect a Senator who had just been convicted of a felony. Apparently the numbers are still too close to call, but Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens appears to be ahead in the vote count. Yet scarcely a week before the election he was found guilty on all counts of failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions.

* But not in a good way.

It reminds me of that awesome election in the Great State of Missouri when voters elected a dead guy (Mel Carnahan) to the Senate over John Ashcroft. Mel had passed away just short of the election, and since the ballots had already been printed his name was still on them. In the end his wife served in his place, but I can only imagine how warm and fuzzy Ashcroft must have felt when he found out he lost to a corpse. Luckily he went on to a glamorous career as the second-worst Attorney General in history.

So anyway, I guess it goes to show you that you can never tell what the heck the voters are thinking. Or, in some cases, if they’re thinking at all.

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.”

— Jack Handey

Wow, the voters of Boulder County creamed the Republicans.

It’s not terribly surprising that the liberals of this area lean toward the Democrats, but this was a bloodbath.

In the Presidential race, my guy Bob snagged third place with 402 votes, narrowly edging out the perennial Nader.

I’m happy to see the Boston Tea Party garnered 14 votes, although the Prohibition and Pacifist parties only took home a single vote each. It would have been interesting to see how well Ron Paul would have done if write-ins had been allowed.

Ahh, the fun of modern technology: cracking open various electronics and looking at the nice shiny parts inside.

I have a stack of old hard drives and decided to pop one open and grab the magnets. These things are spiffy: they’ll literally slide across the desk and hop up on the hard drive (because there’s a strong magnet inside it). Now if I can just think of something to do with those silver platters…

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing… after they’ve tried everything else.”

— Winston Churchill

President Obama, eh?

It beats President McCain, I guess…

Wise words from a software developer:

All of my three or four loyal readers have been clamoring for me to add comments to this blog, and I finally caved to the peer pressure. Click the little paper-and-pencil icon in the top bar to post a comment.

Right now it’s wide open– no CAPTCHAs, no approval process, none of that other annoying anti-spam stuff. It’ll be interesting to see if I get obscene comments or if the spambots find me and start posting fun stuff about Russian girls on web cams…

The digital and analog worlds mix in this cool photograph from Flickr.

Laralee bought juice boxes to hand out to trick-or-treaters tonight. I was astounded. Juice boxes? Really? I mean, how exciting is that? I figured the kids would pause for a second as I handed them a little fruity drink, then drop it wordlessly into their bag, and make a mental note to themselves not to come back to that house next year.

To my great surprise, many of the kids were thrilled. They would run down the sidewalk yelling to their waiting mom, “Mom, we got juice boxes!” Maybe they were really thirsty from walking around so much, maybe there’s a rising generation of kids who crave healthy snacks (okay, scratch that), or maybe it’s just different.

In any case, it was kind of cool to see.