Walrus

As Yogi Berra said, "It ain't over till it's over."  It looks like the election debacle will continue for at least another week or so.  Gore won his case before a highly divided Florida Supreme Court.  I'm sure that George W. Bush is now having a bad day, and that his campaign is filing appeals as I write this before the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Gore camp has to be pleased, this could quite easily swing things in their favor, if the recounts produce the expected number of votes.

A co-worker showed me a pretty useful little program today.  It's called WeatherBug, and it sits in the system tray of your Windows-based computer, constantly updating and displaying current weather information.  Right now, mine is telling me that it's 16 (Fahrenheit) outside. Brrrr! The program also will beep if there's a weather advisory listed for your area.  You can double click on the temperature to bring up even more information such as wind chill, wind speed, humidity, radar maps, you name it! It's all free too, it's such a handy application, I'm considering putting it on faculty computers in the near future...

What I'm listening to today: This morning, I'm listening to the Star Trek: Insurrection Soundtrack.  While I don't like it as well as I like the Star Trek: First Contact CD, it's still a nice bit of moody instrumental music, great for just playing in the background while I'm working.  I think I've liked every single piece of music that Jerry Goldsmith has written for the Star Trek franchise, and this disc is no exception. Listen to a sample at the link above...

I see that Issola, the newest book in the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com.  I just put my order in, I've read every book in the series, and thoroughly enjoyed them.  I had the opportunity to meet the author at a convention a couple of years ago, he made quite the impression, walking around with a parrot sitting on his shoulder.  He was a nice guy to talk to, and seemed genuinely thankful for the praise I gave him for his work.  I've sent him a couple of e-mails as well, just with minor questions about a book I just finished reading, or when an upcoming novel would be published, and he's always responded quickly.

If you're looking to try something by Brust, pick up Jhereg, it's the first in the Vlad Taltos series, and is full of witty swashbuckling adventure.

It was twenty years ago today that John Lennon was shot and killed.  I don't remember it, since I was 4 years old at the time, but you can't help but wonder "What if....." 

On a related note, the new Beatles album, 1, is selling like proverbial hotcakes.  I don't currently own any Beatles albums, I may have to pick this one up, it's got all of their good songs, and it's been remastered for better quality, apparently...

Infamy

The Onion is mocking the lack of racial diversity at my alma mater.  This article (it's a joke, laugh!) has some great lines in it, but ISU isn't exactly the Aryan Nation.  I posed for some University pamphlet photos when I was a sophomore.  They asked for a "diverse group of students" to participate.  Twelve African-Americans showed up, and two of us white folks.  So, Melinda, the white girl, and I were in nearly every shot they took, as otherwise it would have really looked strange.  If you looked closely at the shots, you could see that all of the students in the background were also black, since the cafeteria was closed at the time, and they only had the other students who'd shown up to plant in the background.  I just found one of the pictures on the Department of Residence web site, here it is:

This bit was funny:

      "Photoshop opens up an exciting new realm of possibilities for America's institutions of higher learning," University of Montana president Karl Watson said. "Here at Montana, for example, we plan to Photoshop up to 10 percent more Latinos into orientation brochures. If we can get funding, we may also Photoshop handicap-accessible ramps onto exterior shots of campus buildings."

I'm not sure that is really a picture fom ISU, that sort of looks like Friley Hall in the background, but I don't think it is.  On the brochure I was on, I spent the longest time trying to figure out where the shot on the front of the brochure was taken.  It clearly featured Friley Hall in the background, but it just didn't look right.  Then it dawned on me, they'd flipped the negative to have the people pictured be walking from left to right in the image.  Of course, that made it impossible to place the picture, as it didn't exist the way it was pictured.  If you looked closely, the words on the building in the backround were all mirror images..

I've found a number of useful services on the Internet in the last few years, but one of the best I've discovered is Paytrust.  Paytrust is an online bill-paying service, and it saves me at least an hour a month in my time, as well as the hassle of buying stamps.  I have most of my bills sent directly to them (very handy if you're a student or someone who moves often), they notify me by e-mail when they receive the bill.  They scan the bill in so I can view it online, and I can then authorize them to pay it.  They print out a check and mail it, and the funds come out of my checking account.  You can automate the service too, for instance, I've scheduled my student loan payment to be sent automatically on the first of the month.  You can automate as much or as little as you like.  At the end of the year, I'm going to pay the $14 to have Paytrust burn a CD with the images of all my bills on it and mail it to me.  I'll simply file it away, and I've got a record of all of my bills for the last year.

You don't have to have all of your bills sent to them, either.  You can manually enter all of the information for sending your bill in once, then just click on that company, and enter the amount to send to them.  It's extremely customizeable, you can really do whatever you want...

So what does it cost?  It's a reasonable $8.95 a month, that's actually less than it sounds like when you consider that you no longer have to pay for stamps.  If you're like me and send out about 10-15 different bills per month for various things, then you're already spending $3.30 - $4.95, so the service may not cost you as much as you think it does.  If you're interested, sign up through this link, and I'll earn a free month of service, and $25 will be donated to charity.

Mud Bars

Daily Radar has a list of the Ten Worst Date Cars today.  These are vehicles you don't want to take on a date, they aren't manly, and you're not half as cool as you think you are if you drive one of them.  I can say that, since my trusty Camaro isn't among the models listed...

Though it's probably not right to do so, we evaluate people by the cars they drive as well. Judged strictly on male driver terms, the following are the 10 biggest pussy cars of all time:

How frustrating! Our e-mail server is down here at work (I'm not the admin, so I can bitch about it).  My IMAP client (Outlook 2000) grabbed the header info before the server went down, so I can see the subject lines to about 5 different e-mails which are actually important, but I can't access them...

An Amish man has been jailed for refusing to display bright colors.  Apparently, he didn't want to put a big orange triangle on his buggy, to comply with the state law governing slow moving vehicles.  While I'm all for religious freedom, if you're going to use public roads, you've got to abide by the same laws as every other driver using them, especially those which are safety related, such as this is.  He's not only endangering himself, but also other drivers, making it a fundamentally different argument than helmet or seatbelt laws...

He was jailed Tuesday after a county judge found him in contempt for not paying $119 from an April 15 citation. In deference to his beliefs, Swartzentruber will be allowed to wear a blue shirt and pants instead of the usual bright-orange coveralls, deputy warden John Prebish told the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat.

I got up early this morning and whipped up some "Mud Bars" to bring in for our pot luck today.  I really have to micro-manage the oven in my apartment, rotating the food every few minutes, otherwise I wind up with something that's half burnt and half raw...

Crowns

There are apparently several cases involving absentee ballots now being brought in the Florida courts, according to this story from CNN.  The suits are being brought by individual voters, not the Gore campaign.  It'll be interesting to see whether Gore sticks to his mantra of "count every vote" if his appeal to the Florida Supreme Court is denied.  I don't think he'll push it beyond that, he may concede at that point.  But does a concession carry legal weight? I don't think so.  If a court decides that one of these absentee ballot cases has merit, and throws out the votes, Gore should receive Florida's electoral votes, regardless of whether or not he's already given up.

I'm guessing that it's a good time to own stock in a voting machine company, as there will certainly be many state and local governments who want to replace their antiquated machinery after this fiasco.

I spent a good chunk of my morning at the dentist's office.  What fun!  I had my routine cleaning, and then was advised that I have a cavity that needs filling.  It's in a tooth that already has a big filling in it, and the dentist suspects that it's going to need a crown eventually, so why not just do it now?  Well, money, for one thing!  I've never had anything more complicated than a filling done to my teeth, and I don't really want to venture into the world of root canals, caps and crowns before my time.  I'm going to talk to the Human Resources folks and find out how much of this our dental plan covers, and how much I'm going to have to fork over out of my pocket.  I did, however, donate the toothbrush they gave me to charity.  I use an electric toothbrush at home, and a fancy one with bristles at about 16 different angles when I travel, so I don't really need a "plain" toothbrush.  The Honors program here is accepting them (only new ones, not used!) to donate to some charity group locally.  I kept my floss, however.

Hectic

Apparently, Gore has lost his arguments before the Leon County Circuit Court, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.  This is far from over, however.  The Gore campaign will almost certainly appeal Sauls' decision to the Florida Supreme Court, and there's still the matter of the absentee ballots in Seminole County.  CNN is calling this the "sleeper case", meaning that it could very well decide the outcome of the election, though it is receiving little attention at the moment:

The Democrats have an absentee-ballot challenge of their own. In Seminole County, a Republican election official allowed Republican functionaries to work out of the election office, adding required information on thousands of absentee-ballot applications that had not been provided by the voters. Democrats have gone to court to challenge all 15,000 absentee votes cast in the county.

Now this will prove interesting, since so many Republicans have criticized people who weren't smart enough to use the Palm Beach ballots correctly, yet they were allowed to amend incomplete ballots in Seminole?  I can completely understand people not filling out the forms correctly, but shouldn't a Democrat have been allowed to complete missing information on Democratic ballots?  All it takes is for 537 of those absentee votes for Bush to be thrown out, and things will get really interesting...

It's been a hectic couple of days for me.  I went to a wedding in Fort Dodge with my girlfriend this weekend.  I've been super busy here at work, spending all of those tax dollars on new computer equipment.  I took this morning to set up my new HP Jornada 820, which I'll review after I've used it some more.