papa's got a brand new spring

BANG! Either someone discharged a fararm (i.e. "shot sumbuddy") inside my garage or the torsion spring has broken. Fortunately (?), it was the latter.



Just a second or two after I lowered the garage door (Friday night) I knew what happened. Only once before have I heard a garage door spring break, and it's not pleasant. Since I'm frequently as mechanically adept as President Quagmire is at mispronuncifying nuke-u-ler, I opted to call in a pro to replace it. Odds of my losing a limb or two was high.

One of my neighbors already set my expectations for installation cost, and he was only off by a few dollars. I might've saved some money by buying the spring (rather than pay the pro's markup), but the odds of me getting the correct one were slim-to-none.

Now, I should have 3-8 years' service with the Shiny New Spring, depending on how much I use the opener. As the installer explained, it's like brakes on a car. If you don't use them, you'll never have to replace them (apparently the spring is only tense when the door is up). This replacement comes with a 90-day parts-and-labor warranty, which should be just long enough to determine if it suffers from metal fatigue.

unrelated #0/2: It's time to bring out those coat hangers; abortion will soon be illegal again! (see "Senate Confirms Alito to Supreme Court"). If you think Alito has any intention of not overturning Roe-v-Wade, I have a slightly used garage door spring to sell you:


unrelated #0/3: Most entertaining blogpost du juor: The Southern Strategy (Leiter Reports)

Dick's Last Legacy

One week from now, I'll be trying to stay awake listening to an hour-long concall. Yes, I'm going back to work, after several months eating bon-bons and watching Oprah.*

* okay, so I never did either of these during my "time off". No, not once. But it does make for a good story.

Unrelated: kudos to Geoff for the pointer to Rachel's blog, including this gem:

What good is it being a superpower with no enemies to fight, no spectres to scare a population with, no justification for liberty-curtailing laws that make it easier to manage people?

Me think's Rachel's spot-on with this analysis. As much as I loathe being a conspiracy theorist, I'm seeing far too many signs to think otherwise. Sure, President Quagmire doesn't have the brains to make ice (see Southpaw's blog for yet another example), but that doesn't mean that RoveCheney aren't pulling His strings, sufficient to manipulate both He and the growing majority of Americans who are undereducated simpletons. Another example of the intentional dumbing down of the populace: Intelligent Design.

Years ago, I held out hope for a bright future for this country. In the past 10 years or so, I've spotted too many indications that we'll not live up to that lofty goal, in part because Those In Power will do whatever it takes to Remain In Power. Like Cheney said with regard to Global Warming: "What do I care? I won't be alive then anyway." Such a legacy.

* Okay, so both the Slate report, and Will Ferrell's piece are fake. You honestly think Cheney would be stoopid enough to document any of this stuff? Time to play the Ominous Conspiracy Music again ...

the In Place, downtown

A couple of us gathered today at the Urban Market and Cafe (downtown Dallas) to chat about ways to End World Hunger. I was feeling sang-froid, as usual.

The Urban Market is on the ground floor of the refurbished Interurban Building, and is like a small version of a Whole Foods market, with fresh meat & fish and mostly healthy stuff on the shelves. They have a large number of tables and chairs and can accomodate quite a few people who want a casual brunch.

While there, I decided to sip on a Bolthouse Farms "Perfectly Protein" (vanilla chai tea with soy protein) which was most delicious. Yummm.

They face the challenges of any inner-city grocery: parking is limited (yet nearby) and the shopping carts are about half (one-third?) the size of those in the `Burbs. The patrons probably shop there several times each week since they're typically space-limited in the downtown lofts.

Although Urban Market's been open several months, the banner on the parking structure (as you enter from Jackson Street) still says "URBAN MARKET - COMING SOON!". Oops .. gotta remember to change that Real Soon Now.

how much grief for "10% off" ?

yes, it's true .. I love a good deal. So when I spotted Trish-Bob's mention of buy.com I moseyed over there. I don't own an iPod (yet) but am a big fan of iTunes, so the Bluetooth headphones can wait awhile (I listen to podcasts on my Palm Tungsten T5).

Somehow I found buy.com's "10% off Amazon" promo; I have a long list of "Wish List" books, and decided to put them to the test. They had most of the stuff I wanted, but their website needs serious work if they hope to compete with Bezos and family.

1- their search engine reeks. Often I'd input a book title, and was told the book didn't exist. On a hunch, I input the author's name instead and voila! - there was my book. Hmmm.

2- Several times, I'd click [Buy] and nothing happened; I would then click [Buy] again. Not surprisingly, it incremented the counter, thinking I wanted multiple copies. I learned to wait for the "final screen" and changed all the quantity 2 and 3 back to 1, rather than fight it each time their server stalled.

3- The Cookie Issue: buy.com suggested I enable all cookies for all websites. Uh, no .. that ain't gonna happen (I spend enough time fighting spyware as it is). I allowed cookies for buy.com itself, and all worked okay until checkout time, when it folded its arms and refused to budge. Argh! I fired up a different browser, fed it the URL and crossed my fingers, hoping it would remember the contents of my shopping cart. It worked!

4- After I ordered the books, I noticed a caveat: "There is an order limit of 5 books per order, per customer." It allowed me to go all the way through my Wish List, and never said anything about this limit during the ordering process. I guess they want to enforce as much grief as possible, by making me artificially split my order into 5-book chunks.

Bottom line: buy.com was frustrating, but I did save 10% over Amazon.com .. so it wasn't a wasted effort. In theory, most will be shipped in 1-2 business days (others are backordered). I didn't have to leave the confines of my domicile, wandering the aisles of Half-Price Books. Woo hoo.

must .. can't .. oogie ..

"If that thing was shiny, we might've lost him for weeks."

- Jon Stewart commenting on The Puppet's fixation of a dangling camera in the White House Press Room, earlier today

subset of women voters: MEN!

Tuesday, I attended "Can We Trust Electronic Voting?", hosted by the Dallas League of Women Voters [LWV] chapter. I was invited by a friend who's in charge of publicity for the group, and was assured that I wouldn't be the only man there! She was right; out of a crowd of ~50, there were 3 men in the audience (not including all 3 of the e-voting experts on the panel*)

* Rafael Anchia; Bruce Sherbet; Doug Jackson

I jokingly asked if the members traded recipes at the end of the meeting, and received a quasi-piercing scowl in return! She did say that the 85-year old organization (formed soon after the 19th Amendment to the US Constition was ratified) has considered adding a tagline "Not for Women Only!"

Surprise, surprise .. this organization is political in nature, and follows a semi-rigid heirarchy. The Dallas Chapter is a member of the Texas Chapter of the LWV, which is a member of the national LWV group (all of which are nonprofit organizations).

At any rate, the forum itself was informative; I learned a lot about the state of electronic voting, and what's keeping it from becoming widely deployed. Here, it's been used for Early Voting (30% of the voters) for several years, but not on Election Day itself when the other 70% come to the polls (then, it's a paper ballot read by Optical Scanners). One of the panelists said they try to chose a technology which will give them 8 or so years of life; e-voting machines are purchased - not leased - from one of the (only) five vendors.

There's a great debate about preferring Open Source software, since there's a perception that a hacker could compromise an e-voting device and change the outcome of an election; there's fear that a Trojan could be inserted by an employee or poll worker (on the end of a bribe chain) and no one would be the wiser. Currently, none of the vendors use Open Source. Given the finite set of companies involved, there's no annual e-voting tradeshow for either hardware or software (they could all fit into a single room at Motel 6).

---

Naturally (for me!) I was amused by all the spiffy new acronyms I learned:

DRE [Direct Recording Electronic] - electronic voting ("e-voting") machines

EAC [Election Assistance Commission] - established by HAVA to oversee its implementation

ES&S [Election Systems & Software] - name of the company that supplies Texas with electronic voting systems (hardware & software)

HAVA [Help America Vote Act] - federal legislation passed in 2002 mandating States to establish uniform voting systems and standards

NIST [National Institute of Standards & Technology] - EAC is collaborating with NIST to develop standards and guidelines related to voting technology

PEB [Personal Electronic Ballot] - device used by ES&S to personalize a touchscreen

SARA [Secure, Accurate, Recountable, and Accessible] - the National League's criteria for voting systems and procedures

SOS [Secretary of State] - agency responsible for conducting elections

VRA [Voting Rights Act] - federal legislation initially passed in 1965 to achieve the promise of political equality and fair representation for all citizens

VVPT [Voter Verified Paper Trail] - independent paper ballot for voter to confirm the vote they cast

The American Taliban

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse, comes a collection of Real Words, Out of their Real Mouths (okay, this has been online for months):

Quotes from the The American Taliban.