Well, clearly I should not have waited until today to advance vote. I arrived at the polling place at 7:30 am, half an hour after they opened the doors, to find a line of about 2500 people. I waited, with my seven new line friends, for six hours before I got to actually vote. The polling folks were very clearly unprepared for the turnout, with only 16 booths. I whipped through the touch screen voting process in about thirty seconds. I have now fulfilled my responsibility, and will now become a spectator. When I left the polling place around 1:30 pm, the line was longer than when I got there. (The polls also close at 7 pm, so if you do the math, some of those people are going to get shut out.) My feet hurt. Oh, and I don’t care who you vote for, but please vote. It’s a responsibility in addition to being a right. If I can wait in line six hours to make sure my ballot is cast, you can also take time to cast yours.
Things around the office have been really crazy this last couple of weeks for a variety of reasons. Reason number one is that it seems like tasks swell to whatever the current amount of available time is plus ten percent. Reason number two is that I am leaving town on Saturday and need to find a few hours before I leave to take advantage of Georgia’s new advance voting while still finishing out all of my team’s projects. Reason number three is that our office culture is one hundred eighty degrees opposed to one that fosters good development and specification processes. Features change, features are dropped, features are added, and while I do my best to keep things in check, I inevitably could do better. (That’s one that I have had to struggle with for the last 22 months, so I am not sure that it really counts.) Unfortunately, this means that I end up leaning rather heavily on those around me for support. We’ll see how this turns out, but Friday will, without a doubt, be a very interesting day.
Subtraction: When Losers Win I could not have said it better myself. Seriously.
Contrary to what you might expect from me, I am happy for the Red Sox and their fans. The imaginary curse has be obliviated, and the entire identity of that sports town is about to shift. No longer will they be able to cling to the “victim” status that they have defined themselves by for so long. Finally, this actually makes the whole Yankees/Red Sox thing a real rivalry. It’s not really a rivalry if one team wins all the time. Oh, and wait until next year:-)
Twice in the last two years to my delight, people who have disappeared from my life over time have re-appeared after finding my Web site doing a Google search for my unique last name. Most recently, a former college roomate and great friend who I lost touch with over the years commented on a post on my blog. However, he didn’t leave me any way to get back in touch with him. So Tyler, if you are reading this, send me an email at bumpnet – at – gmail – dot — com.
Just in time for my trip to New Orleans, where I will be staying at the Hilton, comes this report about issues with RSS Readers and the hotel’s ISP of choice. Great. I wonder if it’s too late to switch hotels. (via)
New template time. I got tired of looking at the other template, and found Binary Bonsai’s Kubrick via Flickr. I’ll be making more modifications moving forward, as this template set is a little more nimble than the previous one I was using, and includes the psd. Thanks to Michael Heilmann and Michael K. Pate for this handy resource.
This weekend, I am traveling a bit early to Macromedia MAX 2004. I would like to take some photographic walks while I am there, and if you have some hints for me to that effect, I would really appreciate them. Any further advice on traveling to New Orleans would also be welcome. If you are going to Max, and wanna hang out and have a drink, drop me a line. I will most probably be willing to buy you the first round.
It’s clear to me that with their announcement of a tool similar to Google’s desktop search, Microsoft continues to prove out their role as a copier of ideas. I honestly can’t remember the last time that I heard of a new product for consumers from MSFT that sounded innovative.
The WIRED Magazine Creative Commons CD arrived in my mailbox yesterday. Good stuff, with tracks from the Beasties, Thievery Corp. and Dangermouse, among others.
Well, clearly not our greatest day as Yankee fans today after the four game skip that ended with the Boston Red Sox celebrating at Yankee Stadium. First, my best to the Red Sox and Red Sox fans. The Red Sox showed an unbelievable will to win this series. Not only is the come back from three games to none unprecedented, they were close to out in both the fourth and fifth games, and came back to win both. The Yankees, despite losing the series, played well in all but the final game, in my opinion. They got beat by a better team, there is no doubt of that fact. Wait until next year:-)
I went to Amazon.com this morning. Last week, I was doing a bit of research into some search engine results display stuff, and spent some time on A9. This morning I was greeted with this message:
Robert Occhialini, since you've been using A9.com recently, virtually everything at Amazon.com is automatically an additional ?/2% (1.57%) off for you. Collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout (it will happen whether you use the shopping cart or our 1-Click Shopping). You don't need to do anything to get this discount except keep using A9.com as your regular search engine.
Bribery will get you everywhere.
I was in Indiana over the weekend, at Brian and Rachel’s Wedding. I think the photos speak for themselves, it was a beautiful service. For the second time this year, I got to see two amazing people who are perfect for each other tie the knot.
Google Desktop Search This should be interesting. Just installed. Very cool, very useful for business applications. Just did a search for one of our bigger projects and it got everything. This is going to make staying organized unnecessary to some extent. The integration with Google.com is great too. Too bad that it’s Win32 only, I would like to be able to use it on all my machines. Having said that, Tiger (the next Mac OS X) has Spotlight, which is very similar in concept, but very different in implementation.
Z-Trip’s Motown Breakdown Part1. A downloadable (mp3) Motown mix from one of my favorite DJ’s of all time. Give it a listen, don’t cost nothing.
My musical pick of the week is Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama, There Will Be A Light. In this age of overproduced studio music, this stuff rings true. If you buy the CD from his Web site, you get a limited edition with three extra songs. I did not know this when I bought my copy, so I have the regular store-bought version.
Bob Barr: “An agonizing choice”. I feel that he hit the nail right on the head with this article. In fact, this may be the first time ever that I have agreed with Bob Barr. For me, the hot button issue is the lack of fiscal conservatism. The fact that the rise in nondefense discretionary spending has been unprecedented under this president, with a Republican controlled Congress, is unacceptable. Couple this with the tax cut, and you have a recipe for fiscal disaster. I fundamentally do not understand what the thinking behind this could be. I’ve also had several people, some of them really smart folks, try to explain what they think the reasoning is. In every case the explanations have had massive holes in them. There is no excuse for this. It’s nice to see someone not afraid to express their opinion, even if it goes against their party, because the facts and situation dictates it.
Well, the Yanks beat the Twins, setting up another Red Sox versus Yankees ALCS. Going into this series, it’s quite clear that these are two very different teams from the ones that played each other last year at this time. The Yanks pitching is definitely suspect, and the Red Sox are hitting the ball better than they have all season. These two things may add up to a very dangerous combination for New York. I’ve got a lot of respect for this year’s Sox squad, and this one should be quite a battle.