Polls just closed on the West coast. With that, everyone calls Washington, Oregon and California for Obama - Obama wins! And I’m heading to bed. I would still like to see who wins NC. It looks like it’ll be close, but we should know in the morning. If I’m doing really good, I might stay up for a McCain concession. We’ll see.
I headed over to the polling place to vote this morning. As of 8:30am or so, there were no lines at our precinct. But then, that’s not too surprising for a small precinct in a non-populous county. Chronological observations: There were a fair number of cars parked at the polling place. I took one of only about 4 or 5 free spots The Obama people were prepared for the rain - they had decent sized open sided tents set up to stand under while handing out literature and talking to voters There were about 10-15 people voting when I arrived The elections officials were prepared for crowds. Instead of the usual split of the alphabet into 3 or 4 lines, I think there were 6. They also seemed to have extra help on hand, including some high school students. The folks handing out the ballots mentioned that polling had been steady so far. When I left around 8:45/8:50, I was only the 161st voter :-) I suspect that across NC, things will be similar. We had such a huge number of people cast ballots early (some 35-40% of all registered voters) that I would imagine we won’t have too many problems with lines, etc. ...
I haven’t been in much of a writing mood recently. I blame it on a high state of anxiety: the economy, the stock market (and therefore my retirement accounts), the health of the small business I work for, and of course the election. As a good Democrat (actually, an independent with Democratic leanings), I’m constantly concerned that in spite of all the polling and all available evidence, Obama will lose. Not certain how, but… ...
So Hunter is planning on being at GB tonight too. But as of last week, we thought this was his last GB and so of course, everyone brought cameras. Sample pictures: 151815471553156215651580 More in the gallery Requests to remove pictures will be honored.
Both K’s and I are from Louisiana, Baton Rouge to be specific, so we kept a close eye on Hurricane Gustav over Labor Day weekend. Fortunately, it looks like the storm weakened and the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There were a couple of levees in New Orleans that were topped (a good thing the storm surge wasn’t any higher or there would have been major flooding). ...
Things making this weekend more enjoyable: Seeing a “Republicans for Obama bumper sticker on the car in front of me Finding that 5th Season is starting to carry beer and wine making supplies Gardening (more or less) Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks Receiving ~1.5″ of rain Sunday night… after taking the dogs on a walk Getting TurboGears to work through fastcgi Knowing that it’s only a four day work week coming up Presumably there were other things, but these are the ones that come immediately to mind 🙂
It’s things like this that embarrass me when I tell someone I’m from Louisiana. The Louisiana House has voted overwhelmingly to pass the Louisiana Science Education Act which allows science teachers to use supplemental materials when teaching controversial subjects. For those who haven’t been there, in Louisiana, controversial subjects include: evolution, global warming, Keplerian astronomy and the round earth theory. Okay, I made the last one up – at least 85% of Louisiana households do believe that the earth is round. ...
A few years ago, I participated in a six month program to train leaders in information technology. I learned a fair amount, perhaps enough to be disillusioned, and ever since the program, I can’t help but look at organizations in terms of their leadership. Case in point, the grapevine of ex-employees from my former workplace says that three employee resignations were announced last week. One person only gave one week notice. By my rough count, that’s about 20 people leaving since January – or approximately 8-10% of the work force. Ouch! ...
Over vacation, I managed to convince K that we should get a new computer. Our old one was bought just after I started my last new job, so… February 2001? For most things, it worked pretty well: email, word processing and spreadsheets, etc were fine. It didn’t hurt that we were running Linux, so there was minimal pain for upgrading the OS (it originally came with Windows 98… can you imagine trying to run XP or god forbid Vista?). But given that it was reasonable for desktop use, it still had a few problems for some of the purposes I had. It was using USB 1.1, so a max of 12 Mb/s off to an external disk (instead of 480 Mb/s for USB 2). The hard drive was small and not mirrored, so if it died, we were in trouble. No DVD burner, only a 4x CDROM writer. Finally, you couldn’t do much photo editing because of the small amount of RAM and the slow speeds. ...
Testing, testing, is this thing on? “My fellow Americans. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes. Er, wait, sorry – wrong decade. Sorry for the lack of posting for the past few weeks. K and I were out in Yellowstone and just got back last night (or was it this morning?). The advantage of Yellowstone is no news. No television, no computer, no phone. I suppose there was a newspaper, but we didn’t read it. So what’s been going on while we’ve been away? Has Clinton conceded yet? Have gas prices dropped yet? Is it still fashionable to conserve water in North Carolina? I guess I already know the answer about Clinton and gasoline. Since we’re on a well, I think water conservation is going to be a way of life for now on, so that doesn’t matter either. ...