On November 4th, I get to vote on El Camino Hospital District Measure D. This measure would “issue bonds in the amount of $148,000,000 for the purposes of new construction and altering, renovating and improving El Camino Hospital and related facilities.” I am, unfortunately, torn.

On one hand, I think supporting community services like hospitals is a good idea. The bond would pay for seismic upgrades to the hopsital, as well as enhanced emergency room facilities. As a long-time viewer of ER, I know how important emergency facilities are. I like the idea of El Camino Hospital getting a $150 million dollar upgrade, and as a community-funded hospital, it makes sense for the community to fund it.

On the other hand, I’m not that fond of municipal bonds. The community will end up paying for it with interest over the next five years. If I learned one thing playing SimCity years ago, it was that bonds were a bad idea: you end up spending all your tax revenue just paying off the bonds, and you have to take out more bonds to actually get anything done. Pretty soon, the city is bankrupt, an earthquake breaks out, there’s fire everywhere, and since you fired all the firemen to keep up with your interest payments, all you can do is pack up and move to Grenada.

In addition, according to the “Argument Against Measure D” in my sample ballot, the hospital doesn’t need the bond to pay for the project: It has enough cash on hand to pay for the whole thing. Further, the hospital is currently making a profit, so it could easily take out and pay off a loan itself, if it didn’t want to dip into its reserves. None of these arguments are even mentioned, let alone disputed, in the proponent’s rebuttal, which makes it hard to doubt them.

On the other hand, I definitely support the hospital’s project, and the bond will be paid for by property taxes. I don’t own any property in the district, and a minor tax increase isn’t that likely to affect my rent. So maybe I should just vote yes. Opinions?

EP stands for Extended Play. LP stands for Long Play. This is true of both record albums and VHS videocassettes. An EP album is shorter than an LP album. An EP videocassette recording is longer than an LP recording. Gah!

I got a letter recently from the Stanford Alumni Association, encouraging me to join. In addition to telling me what activities my membership would support, and what services I will enjoy, the envelope contained a letter telling me how the SAA was founded. Apparently, members the class of 1892, Stanford’s first graduating class, “ponied up $1.25—a considerable sum back then—to support ongoing contact with their fellow grads.” These days, the Alumni Association has an annual membership fee of $75, or $440 for a lifetime membership.

A quick Google search finds The Inflation Calculator, which informs me that $1.25 in 1892 dollars is worth $24.60 today. So, at $75, it seems like the price has gone up a bit. Not to mention the fact that I’m not particularly interested in any of the member services listed in the letter. Everything I care about the Stanford Alumni Association providing seems to be available free on their Web site. I suppose paying for membership would help support those services, but the price still seems a little steep.

To be fair, the inflation calculation above is based on the CPI, which is only one measure of relative value. EH.net tells me that $1.25 in 1892 dollars could be worth anywhere from $22.40 to $904 today, depending on your choice of metric. So perhaps the Alumni Association is a steal after all. I’m still not planning to join.

Since setting up this weblog, I’ve gotten a fair bit of comment spam here and there. It used to be pretty harmless: my entry about Adobe Photoshop Elements got an ad for someone’s book on Photoshop. Delete and move on; easy to identify and less frequent than people who accidentally post their comment or trackback multiple times. Also, easier to understand than the comments in Norwegian, Korean or German.

Recently, though, I’ve started getting comment spam of a more insidious nature:

Very quiet in this thread lately. More comments please.

I got this one twice:

here is a free tip:
if you don’t know what you are talking about don’t post online.
I’m sorry I don’t buy what you said but it’s to cheap.

The trouble with these comments is that they sound reasonable. In context, they’re a little odd, but people are odd sometimes. Maybe it’s just coincidence that the author’s URLs link to sites trying to sell something. Regardless, they felt like spam to me, so I deleted them. My weblog, my rules, right?

I’m not sure what I’ll do if it gets worse, though. I don’t want to spend much time policing my weblog, and I don’t think anyone sells spam filters for Movable Type. I could implement some sort of registration system, although that’s likely to discourage one-time commentors, which I don’t want to do. I could turn off comments entirely, although that would probably discourage them even more…

We got sample ballots in the mail yesterday for the November 4th elections. Didn’t we just have one of these? I wonder if the county deliberately waited until after Tuesday’s election to mail these out—I’m pretty sure they usually send them out more than a month in advance. I expect it would have caused some serious voter confusion to receive information about a November 4th election before the October 7th election. Especially for folks like me who didn’t know we had two elections this fall.

Of course, this time around the ballot items are less newsworthy; I get to vote on a community college board members and a hospital district bond. Important, possibly, but they aren’t going to make the front page of the New York Times. Maybe I’ll get another sticker, though. I got my first “I Voted” sticker last week.

As of an hour ago, our Dell Inspiron 4000 is now a Latitude C600. Magic. I followed these directions to flash the Inspiron with the Latitude ROM. So while it still says “Inspiron” on the case, it thinks it’s a Latitude. The Inspiron 4000 and Latitude C600 are exactly the same, except for the plastics, so this works.

I did this so that I could use the Latitude C/Port II that I picked up for $15 at WeirdStuff the other week. In their infinite wisdom, Dell has decided that Latitude docks can only be used with Latitudes, and Inspiron docks only with Inspirons. This in spite of the fact that most Inspiron and Latitude models differ only in color and configuration, and my Inspiron is physically and electrically compatible with the Latitude dock (except for a metal hook that needs to be removed from the dock because its mate is on the Latitude cases only.) Silly Dell. Of course, this is the same company that boldy innovated by designing printers to reject third-party ink cartridges, so I’m not too surprised.

I’m happy to get the laptop up and running with the dock, though. For $15, it seemed a good investment (Dell charges $249 for a new one), and gives the laptop a working power jack again. The laptop’s been running exclusively on battery power for the past five months (using an external battery charger), and the batteries are starting to die. Dell, of course, has raised battery prices to $155 each—I could swear they were half that when I bought the laptop three years ago, although I have no proof.