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.

Jornada 820

It's always a good idea to check new homes for corpses.  It seems a new homeowner in Toledo, Ohio had a nasty suprise waiting in the living room for him.  Boy, you'd think someone would check the house before just putting it up for auction.  All I have to say, is that the new homeowner is going to need some serious rental time with a Rug Doctor to get that smell out. This quote kills me:

Dean Nowakowski, 33, who lives two houses away, said the last time he saw Bearringer was more than two years ago. “I always wondered what happened to that dude,” he said. “It got awful quiet over there.”

I left work a bit early so that I could go to the eye doctor.  I'm glad I didn't do it earlier in the day, as I'm just now starting to regain my vision well enough to read my computer screen.  They dialated my pupils, and it took about 6 hours to wear off.  Prior to that, it looked to me as if someone had smeared my nice monitor with Vaseline, since I couldn't focus well enough to read anything.  It was worth it, as he discovered that the contacts I'd been wearing for the past two weeks were the wrong size.  The ones I'm now wearing are much more comfortable, and I'm 20/20, albeit a very fuzzy 20/20, since the contacts don't correct for my astigmatisms.  In case you're curious, my vision is pretty bad, my contacts correct -6.5 diopters in both eyes.  So, without them, I can see clearly for about 5-7 inches...

It looks like I'm going to have two PDA's now.  We managed to get a couple of Hewlett-Packard's Jornada 820 devices ordered today.  I say "managed" because it was rather a hassle.  The 820 is being discontinued, which is why it's so cheap, but there is no immediate replacement or equivalent to it.  The only place that seems to have them in stock is HPShopping.com, which does not take purchase orders.  Working for a University where the purchasing process is not a simple one, I can't just order equipment on the purchasing credit card.  HPShopping told me to contact the educational division of HP, who can take P.O.'s.  Of course, they don't have any of the 820's in stock, only the HPShopping.com division does.  The solution wound up being the Dean ordering the devices on her credit card, and then she'll have the University reimburse her for the cost.  What a pain.

So why do I need this, in addition to my "Visor"?  Well, they're two very different devices.  The Jornada is more of an alternative to a laptop, it's something you can sit down and type out some e-mail on, or surf a web page or two.  You can't do that so easily with the Visor.  But, at $540, it's a lot cheaper than a laptop, only weighs 2.5 pounds, and it can run 10 hours between recharging it's batteries.  You can display simple PowerPoint presentations with it, it's got a standard VGA-out port, and there are quite a few appliations you can run on Windows CE.

The Replacement

My new "Visor" showed up today via Fed Ex.  It's still blue, not ice, but at least it came quickly.  It took me just a 5-minute synchronization with my work computer to be back to exactly the same point I was when I dropped my old one yesterday.  The computer loaded all of my programs, data, and settings, I was really impressed.  The moral of the story is, if you kill your Visor, at least have a current backup.

Disaster

Maybe I should have purchased insurance for my Visor.  This site offers insurance policies for PDA's.  $4 a month to protect my $250 Visor? Yesterday I'd have said "no way", today, I'm thinking about it...

Iowa State is apparently going to offer a course all about the 2000 election.  It'll be an 8 week course next spring.  Too bad I'm not at ISU, I'd like to take it.  Maybe I can convince the PoliSci department head here to do the same thing.  I took Mansbach's International Security Policy course when I was at ISU, he's a great instructor, one of the best to be found in the University, in my opinion.  He'd be great for this course.  I've heard Schmidt's radio show a few times, and he seems like he'd be a good instructor too.

I've found one thing that my Handspring "Visor" can't do, it can't withstand a drop from five feet onto a hard floor.  The LCD screen is shattered, so I've called Handspring.  They're shipping me a new one, and I'll ship this one back to them, it'll cost me $85, so it's a costly lesson in Visor care.  How'd I do it?  I had just finished synchronizing the information on it with my computer, and was popping it back into my coat pocket.  Unfortunately the inside pocket of my coat was velcroed shut, and the Visor shot right out of my coat and onto the floor.  Hard.

I tried getting the Handspring rep to send me an "Ice" colored one as a replacement, as I'd rather have that than another blue one, she said that they normally didn't replace a product with something other than that exact model.  I pointed out that this was costing me $85, and that I wouldn't really do this on purpose just so I could have a different color.  She said she'd put a note on my order, but that she couldn't promise me anything.  I said that was good enough for me.

On a related note, the GPS module is now shipping for the "Visor".  Very cool, may have to save up to get myself one, it'd be nice to pull out my visor and see where I'm at on the map.

I posted my response to Doc Searls' bit about revolutions in software design.  Good question, Doc, I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think my answer is at least part of the picture...

Out and about in Omaha

Rather than go to the bars, Thursday night we wound up at Harvey's Casino in Council Bluffs.  It's a riverboat, at least in the sense that it can be detached and float when legally necessary.  I didn't realize we were on a boat until someone told me, I'd wondered why it was so cramped...  Anyhow, I'm not a big-time gambler, I usually stick to the nickel machines, but I did come out $4.50 ahead when we left.

Yesterday morning, Jeremy and I went to the SAC Museum. You don't realize how big a B-52 Bomber is until you're standing underneath one.  The U-2, SR-71, and B-17 also were very impressive.  It's worth a visit if you're near Omaha, admission was $6 for adults, cheaper for children under 12, and free for children under 5. My biggest shock was that the snack bar is actually reasonably priced, I got a donut and a glass of milk for $1.50, not too shabby for a tourist-trap.

Later we ate at Old Chicago, they've got 110 differnt kinds of beer.  I, not looking at the menu, ordered a bottle of Woodchuck's Amber Apple Cider, which turned out to be $4.25, the most expensive thing on the menu!  I stuck to the English import Woodpecker Cider after that, only $3.50 for a draw, a bargain in comparison.