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… ...

A few years ago, K was taking some GIS (geographic information systems) classes. That was a lot of fun for me since GIS is something I’ve poked at on and off for quite some time. Back when I was first playing with GIS, GRASS was probably the best (and may still be) open-source GIS system out there, but it wasn’t too user friendly. So it was a lot of fun playing with ESRI’s ArcGIS. ...

As I mentioned earlier, we were having problems with the water softener and when your well water is as hard as ours is (“how hard is it?” “that’s a rather personal question sir” “no you git, how hard is the water?”) the water softener is pretty important. So the venturi gasket looked okay, but I ordered a new one since it’s a bit sensitive. I also ordered some new internal gaskets that go in the valve. The parts arrived on Saturday. Replacing the venturi gasket didn’t help, so I opened up the valve and found that I had the wrong sized internal gasket :-( . Turns out that all of the brand name softeners (GE, Sears, Kenmore, Home Depot, etc.) all use the same valve, but in two differrent sizes, a common smaller size and then the rarer large size. I’ll give you one guess as to which we own. Of course, if I had paid attention, I would have noticed that the gasket had two sizes, but oh no… Anyway, so I figure I’ve got to return the gasket, but then I google around a bit and find that in addition to the gaskets (which ironically allow the softener to suck), sometimes the symptoms we were seeing are caused by a blocked drain plug or blocked rotor. I pull out the drain plug and sure enough - it’s blocked. But even after I clear the blockage it still doesn’t suck - but in an entirely different failure mode. I clean the rotor - now it works. I still had some issues with leaks, but reseating the rotor and the whole valve has fixed those. I think we’re back in business. ...

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.

It’s okay to look, I promise that there are no shots of me doing naked cage construction. *shudder* A couple of months ago, K got a call about a squirrel. When the folks brought it over, it turned out to be rather small, but pretty far along in its development. Well, that’s because it was a flying squirrel. They tend to be a lot smaller, a lot sweeter and just darn cute. Because they live in colonies, K found someone with another flying squirrel and has been raising them together. They just recently went outside, so hopefully they’ll be releasable before winter. Here are some of the pictures from when they were still inside. ...

It’s been a while since we’ve had plumbing issues. Okay, sure, we replaced the RO faucet in the kitchen six months ago, but other than that… So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that yet another water oriented appliance has broken down. This time it’s the water softener, again. When we first moved into the house, five years ago, the water softener didn’t seem to work. The first problem was a salt bridge that kept it from operating correctly. Once we figured that one out, it was easy enough to fix. Then a year or so later, the tank filled up and wouldn’t drain. That one turned out to be the venturi gasket - part of a clever device that uses pressure differentials to move water around. That one was a bit more annoying since you can’t just order the 1.5" gasket, you have to replace both the nozzle and gasket which costs about $20 + shipping. ...

Like a lot of other people, I’ve been pretty stressed out recently. Nothing too terrible is going on for me personally, but I’m concerned about the U.S. financial situation, I’m concerned about how that will affect me and my company (if at all) and I’m concerned about the current political happenings in part since I think that they will have the biggest affect on the first two issues. I’ve been obsessing over politics and polls for the past few months when I would probably be better off “drink[ing] herb tea and play[ing] with [my] screensavers.” At this point, I’m fairly confident that Obama will win (yay!), but watching the McCain campaign’s negative attacks is annoying - in particular since the negative ads are aimed at Obama personally and not his policies (as opposed to Obama’s negative ads which appear to be aimed at McCain’s policies). ...

A while back, Luis Villa asked about a script to add creative commons licensing information to an image. I just wrapped up a first cut at a GreaseMonkey script to do exactly that. Hopefully someone will find it useful.