Red state?

Despite the Obama win, some parts of North Carolina are as I remember.

The Android's Dungeon Endorses...

 

Four years ago, I gave you my endorsements. I'm here to repeat that feat.

President

Barack Obama. Top Three Reasons:

• The Courts. I saw a story that said that when Bush entered office, half of the federal judges were Republican appointees. Now it's something like two-thirds. That's getting way out of balance -- see the recent Supreme Court ruling that said that a woman who had been discriminated against could not receive back pay because her employer successfully hid from her the fact that she was being illegally underpaid.
  
• Foreign Policy. I actually think Obama would disappoint a lot of people who expect a ton of multilateralism. I think he'll listen to what other countries want, and then do what he thinks is best for America. But we need a President who will actually listen -- if we want other countries to listen to us.
  
• Taxes. The Bush tax cuts did not help the economy -- look at how much better things were under the higher Clinton tax rates in the 1990s. They did, however, succesfully redistribute wealth towards the wealthy and away from the wage-earner. As someone who earns an income (albeit a nice one), I'd like to see the American worker treated better by the tax code. The American capital-gains-earner has had his day.
  

Plus they gave us a cool yard sign.

Representative

Steny Hoyer. He continues to disappoint in a number of ways (bankrupcy bill, FISA, bailout), but his opponents are even worse.

Judge of Circuit Court/Judge of the Court of Special Appeals at Large

"I tend to think judges should stay in office unless they embarrass themselves significantly. In fact, I'm not sure we should be voting on them." That's what I said four years ago. I could not Google anything embarassing about these folks, so back to office they go.

Board of Education

Running unopposed, so I see no need to vote.

Constitutional Amendments

Question 1 is the early voting question. While I'm generally in favor of early voting, I think far too little attention has been drawn to the problem with absentee ballots. Namely, they undermine one of the main principles of our democracy -- the secret ballot. It's too easy to buy or coerce votes with absentee voting. Since this encourages both absentee and early voting, I'm going to have to vote no.

Question 2 is the slots question. I figure if you're going to take money from poor people to spend on schools, why not do it directly, instead of only picking on the poor people with gambling problems, and giving half their money to gambling companies? Gambling is fine for a trip to Vegas, but it doesn't belong as a neighborhood phenomenon. No.

Ballot Questions

These are at the county level. In the past, I've had trouble getting details on these (and hence voted no), but this year, someone on our town mailing list pointed me towards a useful page on the League of Women Voters web site. So here we go.

• Question A: More money for libraries. I really like libraries. Yes.
  
• Question B: More money for public safety. If public safety officials need new kitchens (among other things), someone is going to have to make an attempt to convince me. No.
  
• Question C: More money for county buildings. Homeless Shelter, Courthouse, Health and Human services...they've put some pretty important buildings on there. Yes.
  
• Question D: More money for roads. We need better roads around here. Yes.
  
• Question E: More money for community colleges. I'm probably being a snob here, but I don't see the return on investment to the community. No.
  
• Question F: Raise the phone tax from 8% to 11%. The people who want me to vote no have called me 3 times. Yes.
  
• Question G: Expand public notice for County Council legislation from 5 days to 10. Anything that helps us keep better track of the County Council has to be good. Yes.
  

E-commerce

People are living more of their lives online these days, and my family is not immune.


For example Christina has been working on Alas: Joyeria de Epoca -- 20th Century Epoch Jewels, "Specializing in North American Vintage and Flights of Fancy. Rare Vintage and Antique Costume, Estate, and Silver Jewelry. Coins."

She had been buying costume jewelry for her own use and found that she enjoyed it enough to start offering some items for resale.

I particularly like the logo, which comes from a picture Christina took on our trip to Puerto Rico last fall.


As long as I'm promoting relatives' web sites, my cousin Sara and her husband Marty operate Saramar Studios, where they feature stained glass, paintings, mosaic tables, jewelry and their own art. Check it out; they're really quite talented.

The Case of the Purloined Photograph

About a month ago, I was in Laurel, and I decided to do a little waymarking. One of the sites I visited was Laurel Tavern Donuts, which falls into the category "Independent Doughnut Shops."

Here you can see me behind the store with my bounty of donut holes held aloft in triumph.

Last week, I read a Washington Post blog item about Laurel Tavern Donuts' inclusion in a "Zippy the Pinhead" comic strip. I thought about posting an image of the comic strip to the waymark page, but I decided that it would be a potential copyright violation to do so. I figured, however, that "fair use" would allow me to clip out part of the strip for illustrative purposes.


After posting the above clip, I looked at both the waymark page (linked above) and the Washington Post blog page (also linked above). If you look carefully, you notice something. The pictures of Laurel Tavern Donuts are...identical. Down to the reflection in the glass door. (I would post the image here, but the irony of doing so in a post about copyright violations would be overwhelming. I'll resume violating copyrights in a future post.) I e-mailed the creator of the photo to ask if the Post had gotten his permission. They hadn't.

He's been trying to get in touch with someone at the Post to check on this. He hasn't heard back.

I think in the loosey-goosey world of blogging, lifting the picture would probably be considered OK (if perhaps of questionable legality) if the Post had credited the picture. But taking the picture and reposting it without permission...the Post should do better than that.

Republicans and Authenticity

I've heard a lot of comment about Sarah Palin's $150,000 wardrobe. A lot of it has to do with how much money this is compared to what the average American makes. A lot of it is about how it's a waste of campaign money. I haven't heard any commentary that gets to what I think is the real point: authenticity.

The GOP has been selling Sarah Palin as an authentic, down-to-earth hockey mom. Of course, a lot of people wonder if that's what we're looking for in a vice president. But the $150,000 wardrobe story shows that the GOP isn't even looking for that in a vice president. If party leaders had really thought, "You know who we need, someone really down-to-earth," they would have, at most, bought her the kind of stuff she was wearing already -- which I guarantee you was not Saks Fifth Avenue. Instead, they treated her like Eliza Doolittle.

You see this authenticity problem with "Joe the Plumber". He's not named Joe, he's not a plumber, if he made $250,000 a year he wouldn't be a typical plumber, the business he's thinking about buying (or maybe he's not) doesn't even make that amount of money... Would it have killed them to have found an actual plumber to use as an example? Apparently.

In this election, Democrats don't have a major authenticity problem. (Unlike with John Kerry or Al Gore.) They're not running a guy who's pretending to be Barry Obama from Chicago. His whole life story -- growing up in Hawaii (which Americans aren't sure is a real state) and Indonesia -- screams "exotic." And yet the Republicans are resorting to distorting it to make it seem even more "foreign". Why? Because Americans don't really dislike foreigners (see the governors of California and Michigan). Like Holden Caulfield, it's phonies that we can't stand.

---

Another thought, as long as I'm discussing authenticity, Obama's background and things the media isn't quite getting right. The other day, I was watching the news. They were showing Obama ads that feature his mother and his grandparents. The commentators speculated that the ads were a way of making him seem whiter and "less threatening".



Really? Americans find a picture of a white woman and her black child less threatening? Maybe. If so, we've come a long way since this picture was taken. God bless America.

Happy Anniversary to Us

Nebula update

When I last posted about my Nebula novel reading two-and-a-half years ago, I had read 24 out of the 41 novels. As a reminder, the Nebula awards are awarded to science fiction authors annually by their fellow writers. I haven't been in the mood for much science fiction for the past couple of years, but lately I've gotten back into it. Since I read one book on my recent trip to France, I thought it was time to do an update.

---

1969: The Left Hand of Darkness

I probably read this in 2006. This book falls into an interesting class of science fiction books -- they take place in a setting where interstellar travel exists, but it rare. Therefore, the book takes on an almost fantasy-world character, as it explores a different "Earth" -- in this case, one where inhabitants have no gender. The protagonist is an offworlder, sent to invite the planet's inhabitants into a galactic federation. Le Guin used this setting to explore gender in an interesting way. I can't say I loved this book, but I found it to be interesting and very well-written.

---

1983: Startide Rising

Another 2006 read. This one is the second set in Brin's "Uplift" universe, where humans have "uplifted" chimps, dolphins and other creatures to sentience. It's an interesting concept, but I found the parts that were told from the dolphin's point of view to be a bit tiring to read.

---

2005: Camouflage

Part of this story is about shape-shifting, immortal aliens who have been living among us. It's kind of interesting, but it really wasn't my cup of tea. It's not what I think of when I think "science fiction".

---

2006: Seeker

Seeker is the book I read while in France. It's the third book in McDevitt's "Alex Benedict" series. The first book appeared in 1989 and was about Benedict unraveling a story about the galaxy's military history. He was doing it when he came across a puzzle his recently deceased uncle, an amateur archaeologist, was exploring. The next two books in the series have appeared in the past few years and are told from the point of view of Chase Kolpath, Benedict's assistant, and deal with his business as an antiquities dealer. The books shift from what I'd consider "military future history" to "mystery", as well as changing narrator. McDevitt's work remains very good, and the fact that the mysteries are about events of galactic importance (it's not as cheesy as my phrasing makes it sound) allows the exploration of interesting "big ideas" like immortality and the nature of man.

The fourth book comes out next month, and I'm looking forward to reading that, as well as other, non-Benedict books by McDevitt.

---

2007: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

This book gives me a weird sense of pride for a number of reasons. One, I read it before it was nominated for a Nebula, so I didn't need that to know it was going to be a good book. Two, a Pulitzer-prize-winning author like Chabon decided to dabble in science fiction. Three, my fellow science fiction aficionados recognized this as the year's best novel (it won both the Nebula and the Hugo) even though it was written by an "outsider".

This book was really, really good. It takes place in an alternate history version of Alaska, where Jewish refugees were settled after World War II, instead of in Israel. But they were only allowed to stay for 50 years, and now they have to leave. Oh, yeah, and it's a murder mystery. And incredibly weird combination of ingredients, but Chabon not only makes it work, but elevates it to literature, not just "pulp fiction". Not only did this deserve the Nebula, it makes it clear that some of the other works on the list don't belong in the same category.

---

So I go from having read 24 out of 41 to 29 out of 44. I actually picked up some of the other ones in this time period, but I didn't make it all the way through them. That's not a good sign, but I'll try again at some point. I am also going to take a look at the runners up for more ideas about good books to read.

To make it easier on myself to keep track, here is the complete list of Nebula novels I've read as of October 2008:

1. 1965: Dune, Frank Herbert
2. 1969: The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
3. 1970: Ringworld, Larry Niven
4. 1973: Rendevous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
5. 1974: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. 1975: The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
7. 1977: Gateway, Frederik Pohl
8. 1980: Timescape, Gregory Benford
9. 1983: Startide Rising, David Brin
10. 1984: Neuromancer, William Gibson
11. 1985: Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
12. 1986: Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card
13. 1988: Falling Free, Lois McMaster Bujold
14. 1992: Doomsday Book, Connie Willis
15. 1993: Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
16. 1994: Moving Mars, Greg Bear
17. 1995: The Terminal Experiment, Michael J. Sawyer
18. 1996: Slow River, Nicola Griffith
19. 1997: The Moon and the Sun, Vonda N. McIntyre
20. 1998: Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman
21. 1999: Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler
22. 2000: Darwin's Radio, Greg Bear
23. 2001: The Quantum Rose, Catherine Asaro
24. 2002: American Gods, Neil Gaiman
25. 2003: The Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon
26. 2004: Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold
27. 2005: Camouflage, Joe Haldeman
28. 2006: Seeker, Jack McDevitt
29. 2007: The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon

[Note: Since my last Nebula update, Blogger has introduced the "labels" feature; this has allowed me to gather all of the updates here.]

Fast Trains

 

That's 199 mph, if you can't read the GPS receiver.

European Countries

Well, I'm back in the States, so it's time to visit my countries visited map. I may have more interesting things to say about Holland later, but right now I'm jetlagged. So it's easier just to update the map. Rather than a medium-small hole where Holland is, my map of Europe now has a small hole for Luxembourg. I actually have no clear plans for visiting any more of these countries. The conference I go to in Europe in the spring is going to be in Germany and France the next two years. Hmm...in 2010, it'll be in Nice, which is a 23 minute car trip from Monaco. So there is that.

Redesign

This won't affect those of you who subscribe via e-mail, but I've redesigned my blog page. I was initially looking for a way to get my Twitter updates to post in the sidebar.

Unfortunately, one of the disadvantages of having such a long-lived blog is that at any given moment, I'm probably using an outdated template. So I grabbed a "modern" template, made a bunch of changes to it to conform to the Android's Dungeon style manual (e.g., changing the background to "pseudoprime blue") and set it loose. I'll probably fix a few more things in the next few weeks. Let me know if anything looks wrong to you.

Group Photo

As part of my continued search for pictures of myself on the internet, please see this picture from Canada in May.

Waymarking Santa Barbara

Last year, I spent my free afternoon at this conference in Santa Barbara geocaching. This year, it was time for some waymarking. I was particularly interested in increasing my category count. Yesterday, I told you I was at 73; now it's 95. Here is an assortment of pictures from an afternoon of waymarking. Some are interesting; some are mundane -- like the waymarking categories. Annoyingly, some require me to put my GPS receiver in the picture in order to get credit. Enjoy.
 
 
 
 

Tweet Tweet Tweet

I try to keep on top of various trends in the way people use the Internet and the web. I don't want to be the old guy wondering about this Wikipedia thing all the kids are using.

Partially for this reason, I set up a Twitter account. Twitter is similar to Blogger, but it limits you to 160 characters per post (or "tweet"). In fact, it was founded by one of the creators of Blogger. While it may seem strange to want to use a less-functional version of an existing tool, constraints can force users to be more creative.

I first became aware of Twitter through Slate's John Dickerson, who posts wry comments like, "The discovery of Big Foot's body has forced political insiders to reluctantly cross its name off the list of likely Vice Presidential picks." While I enjoy his work on Slate, some of his tweets are particularly funny.

I don't recommend my Twitter page to non-Twitter users, even if you find me interesting enough to read this blog...there's just not much there. But if you are using Twitter (or if this post intrigues you enough to start), go ahead and start "following" me -- maybe I'll return the favor.

(Technical note: if you use an RSS reader like Google Reader, you can also follow me here.)

LAX Blues

 

Yesterday, my flight got into LAX only 10 minutes late, which seemed to be a good omen. Sadly, when I went to collect my baggage, it did not arrive. After going through two broken baggage status machines, I found one which told me that my baggage was arriving on the next flight, an hour and a half later. This information did not make any sense -- I had checked in early for a direct flight -- why would my bags be on a later flight. I confirmed the location of my luggage with a baggage service agent, who could offer no explanation for what had happened.

With some time to kill before my luggage arrived, I decided to go for a walk. As I mentioned in my previous post, there is a Googie waymark at LAX that I was hoping to find. It was easy to cross the first set of traffic lanes, but for some reason traffic did not seem to want to stop for me on the second set of lanes. As I made it across, I saw that there was in fact a traffic signal and an associated "Don't Walk" sign that I was violated. Also seeing this fact was a cop, who came over and wrote me a jaywalking ticket. Sigh. I don't think I'll be able to pass that off on my expense report.

After returning to baggage claim and collecting my suitcase, I headed back across the easy set of traffic lanes to catch the Avis bus. As the bus was pulling away from the curb, it stopped. It seems the bus had hit a SmarteCarte and wedged it between the bus and curb. The bus driver would have to back up, and he asked me to dislodge the cart. I was happy to do so. Last week, at Dulles, Christina and I had been tricked by a SmarteCarte guy into giving up an unused carte. We saw it, and then he came up and pretended that it had been his. When we backed off, he immediately returned it. Christina stopped me from yelling at him, and a flight attendant stopped by to offer her sympathy.

After the Avis bus backed up, I hopped out, cell phone camera in hand, to dislodge the carte and record the damage for posterity. Unfortunately, the carte would not budge. I hopped back in, the bus driver backed up some more, and some good Samaritans deprived me of my photo op by removing the carte themselves.

After driving by the Googie waymark, I headed out on the 2-hour drive to Santa Barbara. I had missed the conference's opening reception, so I stopped off at El Pollo Loco. The one bright spot of the delay is that it allows me to claim the dinner per diem on my expense report. Since that's $29 and my dinner was $7, in the unlikely event that the jaywalking ticket is $22 or less, I really will be able to put it on my expense report. (In a sense.)

Waymarking Bingo

 

I've been doing more waymarking than geocaching lately. I have a couple of main motivations for this -- one, if I'm in an urban/suburban area, waymarking doesn't require me to dig around suspiciously. Two, if I have a choice of areas, I lean towards the area without ticks.

A secondary motivation, however, is waymarking bingo. For each category of waymarks (e.g., pyramids, sushi restaurants, "you are here" signs) that I log, I get an icon on my user page. Above, you can see rows 19-37 of my user page (the current page is here). As of this morning, I have 73 out of a possible 752 categories.

Some waymarkers have introduced the concept of "waymarking bingo", which they defined as 20 icons in a row, column or diagonal. Very few waymarkers have achieved this. I feel like I've been doing a lot of waymarking, and the best I have done is 4 in a row (row 33). It'll probably be a long time before I get a bingo. You might think row 33 is my most promising row, since I already have 4 in a row. But row 33 contains such tricky categories as Abandoned Air Force Radar Sites, Martello Towers and Holy Wells. There are 13 existing waymarks worldwide in the first category, 14 in the second, and 29 in the third. I don't expect to be in the neighborhood of them any time soon.

I can always wait for someone to create a more convenient waymark in one of these categories or even - gasp - do the research and create one myself. For categories like KFC and 7-11, that's easy...and then I get to put them on my "ignore" list, since I'm not really interested in seeing more than one. For the above categories, that could be a little trickier.

Truthfully, I'm more interested right now in filling out the grid as much as possible than in getting "bingo". It's interesting to hunt down the rarer icons. When I was at LAX last night, I noticed I was near an example of Googie architecture. Since there aren't any examples near home, I decided to find that one. It turned out to be the most expensive waymark find yet, but that's a tale for another post...

Round and Round

 

On my break from a conference in DC today, I walked to a virtual geocache that required me to walk a labyrinth carved into the ground and follow a very specific set of instructions.

Right as you enter the labyrinth, you'll notice the only place where the lines of the labyrinth cross. As you round the labyrinth, keep track of how many times you go past that point on the way to the center. (In other words, if there was a line drawn on the ground from that point to the southwest edge of the labyrinth, how many times would you cross that line on your journey to the center.)

I wasn't sure I followed the instructions correctly, so I took a picture, came home and re-traced my steps. (I had.)

Then I noticed that the cache "owner" -- who is the only one who could prevent me from logging the cache due to a wrong answer -- hasn't logged on in a year. So I didn't really need to do this. So it doesn't go to waste, I share it with you here.

Snorkeling La Jolla Cove

 

Yesterday, Christina, some co-workers and I went to La Jolla Cove to do some snorkeling. I took along the waterproof camera case Christina had gotten me for Christmas last year. It's really a neat device -- a complicated mechanical setup that gives you access to all of the camera's functions, while protecting the camera.

I assumed it would work, but I was a little nervous. I needn't have been -- it survived the snorkeling completely dry. I took a lot of bad pictures, and a couple that turned out well. When we got back, I figured out how to set the camera in "underwater" mode -- I'll have to remember that for next time.

Elfball

 

Since Christina is a very enthusiastic Elfquest fan, we went to the Elfquest panel, where the big news was the forthcoming Elfquest movie. They announced that it was going to be directed by the guy who did the Dodgeball movie. Sensing some potential skepticism from the fan base, they decided to meet it head on, with the above tounge-in-cheek graphic. The director's tales of reading the Elfquest stories as an 11-year-old did a better job of mollifying the crowd, however.

More from Comic-con (with video!)

As mentioned earlier, we got ice cream from the cast of Eureka. Christina talks about this, and more, on her blog.

Below, you can see her question the Eureka panel about what exactly was up with that ice cream...

Richard Hatch

 

I was going to post a longer Comic-con recap, but I don't really have the time or energy, so here's a picture of Richard Hatch, star of Battlestars Galactica past and present. More pictures to follow.

Comic-con

We're having a good time @ Comic-con. We went back to the car after lunch to drop stuff off and ran into the cast of Eureka shooting promo photos in front of an ice cream truck. They gave us ice cream.

Now we're at their panel.

2 California Virtuals

 

After I got off work today, we went down into La Jolla and visited two virtual geocaches. The first centered on this strange monument. The key to it is apparently here; it is a way of circumventing a ban on explicit memorials, I guess.

The second one involved reading an inscription off a bench. We beat a hasty retreat when the guy on the bench started talking to us of aliens and other such things.

In my goal of getting all virtuals (and similar) within 70 miles of home, I briefly got the number down to 121 with a visit to "Jug Bridge" in Frederick earlier this month, but someone posted a new earthcache in Calvert County, so I'm back up to 122.

Peace Pole

We're out here in California. I don't have anything exciting to report, so I thought I'd share pictures of us at a peace pole. Just another random thing I wouldn't have found had it not been for waymarking.

 

 

Obama T-shirt

 

Right before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, I got an appeal from the Obama campaign for money. Unlike previous appeals, this one promised a t-shirt if I donated $30. I waited and waited, and no t-shirt arrived. After the primaries were over, I e-mailed them about the shirt, but got no response. I really hit the roof on June 26th when I got another request for $30 with the promise of a t-shirt. I e-mailed them again. And waited.

After another couple of weeks without the shirt, I finally posted a blog entry on their site demanding my t-shirt. Of course, that was yesterday, and the t-shirt arrived today. As much as I like to believe they responded to my outcry, it's just a coincidence. Now I almost wish I had sent $30 for that other t-shirt...