That’s what it says on my sticker, anyway. My experience was pretty good, I have to say. This wasn’t a huge election, and I think I may have been the second person voting in my district this morning. I will say this: Security issues aside, I rather liked the touchscreen voting machines. I think Santa Clara County’s are made by Diebold, but I’m not sure. I thought the interface they presented was very straightforward and easy to use, and the machine made several efforts to ensure that I knew exactly what I was voting for. The initial vote screens showed basically the same format as the sample ballot, and when you touched the box next to a candidate or issue, it turned into a green check. After you finished with the ballot, it showed you a nice screen listing only your votes (not the other options), and had you review them. Then you had to press a large yellow button to cast your vote. It was not as satisfying as the designers probably hoped.

I do have my concerns over the security and reliability of these systems, and I strongly hope that future electronic voting systems correct these issues. Santa Clara County is going to experiment with voter-verifiable paper receipts in the November and March elections, and the Secretary of State is considering requiring them statewide. I think that would be a good first step. However, I’ve been having nightmares over how a bad user interface on a touch-screen voting machine could make the notorious Florida butterfly ballot seem simple and straightforward by comparison. So I was glad to see that in this respect, at least, they did okay.

Ever since I was a little kid, I remember criminals and their hangers-on on TV and in the movies discussing the statute of limitations. When the statute of limitations on their particular crime expired, they would be free to return to a life of ease. For those shows that featured the exploits of authority types, the statute of limitations provided a drama-inducing deadline; if the criminals were not put to justice by the time the statute of limitations expired, they would get off scott-free.

So can someone explain to me how “expired” is the right word here? As I understand it, a statute of limitations is a law (that’s what “statute” means, right?) that says that after 7 years, you can no longer be prosecuted for insurance fraud (or whatever). So isn’t “expired” exactly the wrong word? Isn’t the seven-year mark exactly when the statute takes effect?

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.

I finally got bored of Snood the other day, so I downloaded Deimos Rising from Ambrosia Software. I’ve been playing it for a few days, and just now finally cleared enough levels to get to the point where I need to give them money to keep playing. This is the point at which I stopped playing Mars Rising when it came out years ago. In a nostalgic moment, I downloaded Mars Rising and fired it up (I don’t use the Classic environment much, but when I want it, I’m always glad it’s there, and always impressed at how well it works).

I discovered something strange: When I first started up Deimos Rising the other day, my first thought was how similar it was to Mars Rising. In fact, it seemed nearly identical. The only differences appeared to be that they’d made some new levels, added some new baddies, and made it run native on Mac OS X. Otherwise, the games seemed pretty much identical. When I actually ran Mars Rising, I realized how much memories can be affected by a few years of misuse. While the gameplay was very similar—similar enough that the Deimos Rising skills I’ve been honing the past few days got me all the way to level 4 of Mars Rising—the graphics were entirely different, so much so as to be almost a different game. Compare the screenshots of Mars Rising to those of Deimos Rising

Deimos Rising feels modern and “3D”, where Mars Rising feels old and “2D”. I suspect that they both seemed cutting-edge for their day, and that’s why my memories of Mars Rising fit so well into the Deimos Rising experience. But it’s amazing how clunky and outdated the Mars Rising graphics feel today.

Chuq and Eric both write about an email they received recently from someone interested in working at Apple (see Chuq’s entry for details). I received the same email, although unlike either Chuq or Eric, I didn’t respond to it. Not so much because I was annoyed that the person had sent a personal-looking email to several people, but because I’m lazy. Once I found out that Eric had responded to the fellow, I figured I didn’t need to. After all, I learned everything I know about working at Apple from Eric.

Actually, what I think bothered me most about the email was not that tactics the author used in sending it, but that it seemed like he might have wanted to work for Apple for the wrong reasons: “I’ve been a lifelong Apple
fan and I’ve wanted to work there since before I started high school.” Chuq recently compared Apple fans to Disney fans, and I think that’s applicable in this instance, too. There are people who go to work as janitors at Disneyland because they love Disney. This guy may be a great fan of Apple, but that doesn’t mean that he’d be a great Apple employee. He may have a particular interest or speciality, and if Apple doesn’t have a job in that area, but he takes a job as a receptionist just because he wants to work at Apple, well, I don’t think that does anyone any good. He won’t be happy, Apple won’t be well-served, etc.

If nothing else, some Apple fans may not want to work at Apple. There’s a bit of an inside-the-sausage-factory feel about the place. Personally, I think it’s a great place to work, but those who believe Apple can do no wrong may be disappointed to find out that in many respects, Apple is just like any other large company.

If I’ve learned one thing while playing Microsoft® Train Simulator, it’s that while driving Amtrak’s Acela Express, you can’t brake or accelerate enough to knock over a card table balanced on the head of a pin without having “jostled the passengers beyond acceptable limits.”

You can go from 85 kph to a complete stop in less than five seconds without the riders of the Tokyo commuter rail line blinking an eye. The passengers on the Acela route would probably come out of the computer and sue if I tried that on them. I am ashamed of my country today.

After several months of planning and deliberation, today I went over to the AT&T Wireless store and picked up a couple of new phones. A Sony-Ericsson T616 for me and a T306 for Laura. I like buying new toys, so this was lots of fun. And now I have a phone with GSM, a Web browser, Bluetooth, a color screen, built-in camera, and other cool things I didn’t have before. I’m not quite sure if any of these things will make me any more productive, entertained, or fashionable than before, but for the moment I feel good. And thanks to Apple‘s corporate account with AT&T, I got 45% off of my phone, and Laura’s was free.
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My high school sent me a calendar in the mail the other day. Flipping through it, I came across a roster of the just-graduated Class of 2003. Looking through the names, I recognized only two, and those as younger siblings of friends of my younger brother.

The other day, Beloit College released their annual Mindset List, which they distribute to faculty and staff to help them understand the incoming Class of 2007. It’s interesting how different elements of popular culture move at different rates; many of the items in the list I identify with (“Paul Newman has always made salad dressing”), but others make me feel really old (“Pete Rose has always been a gambler”).

Actually, I suspect part of the issue is that I apparently paid more attention in history class than the average high school graduate. Even looking at the 2002 list, which is only a year younger than I am, I find many items that do not accurately describe me, not because I lived through the appropriate events, but because I’ve read or heard about them. Then again, maybe that extra year is meaningful—I have memories of the Challenger blowing up, the Cold War, vinyl albums and beige M&Ms, all things the Class of 2002 aren’t supposed to remember.

Laura and I were about to pay $28 to buy tickets for next weekend’s Stanford Football game against San Jose State when I decided to try clicking on the Alumni link on the Stanford Athletics site. I’m glad I did; it turns out that alumni can print out a voucher to attend the San Jose game for free! Cool.

Incidentally, this will be the first official Stanford athletic event I’ll have ever attended. I’m not quite sure what I spent five years there doing, but obviously it wasn’t going to games.