Saturday, November 25, 2006
Thanks to Patricia a wee bit of solstice (remember solstice?) news has come my way. Tims' new band, "The Smokin Fez Monkeys", have been playing at Poor Richard's Tavern in North Ridgeville. The proprietors there have agreed to host a solstice gathering and provide a buffet dinner. Food and Fez Monkeys, what could be better? Ok ok, hitting the lottery would be better. Don't nitpick.
Date: Friday, December 22nd
Time: to be determined (probably 6ish or so)
Cost: also to be determined (probably 10ish or so)
Location: Poor Richard's Tavern (used to be the Century Tavern), 33312 Center Ridge, North Ridgeville, OH
Posted 9:52 AM by whatley (4) comments
Comments:
- Fookin' Mizz Funkies? Liver boats? The presidential erection? Chew Chew Flog Bug Jand? What's it all about, ralphie? I keep getting my murds wixed.
- I will go to the beach and toss bread to the water in honor of Solstice. Wait, no, that's Yom Kippur. Oh, how the hell do I celebrate the shortest day of the year in 80 degree weather?
Post a Comment- Go to the shore and sacrifice a small bottle of libation to entice the sun back North again. The libation should be poured into the ocean, but you can filter it through your kidneys first. The solstice gods don't mind.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
I'm moving out of my cave into a new place. With windows. Porch. Space. Two bedrooms. Any of you who still use the USPS, my new address as of 11/21/06 is 403 Oxford Avenue (Elyria, Ohio, 44035) and the phone's the same. Drop a line. I'll wash the mailbox.
Posted 8:01 PM by ralph (7) comments
Comments:
- Mr ralph! Mr. ralph! Do you need turkeys to help you relocate? I can volunteer if you like. Strong back, weak mind, will travel.
- I've been moving over a trip or two each day. Tomorrow (21st) 2 men and a Truck are taking the big things They're due between 8-9 a.m. and I'll spend the rest of the day moving more small stuff, maybe cleaning a bit, see how it goes. If you're looking for excitement, sure stop on by, though exactly what time I'll be where is hard to say. Thanks for the offer anyway.
- I can report that Ralph's new place is windowed and cheerful with porch space and possibilities for plants. Avast improvement over the "cave of darkness".
- Ralph - You mentioned the phone company was giving you lots of grief. How is that going? Did you get to keep your same number?
Post a Comment- He told me that the new company, "Windbrain" or "Windsock" that bought Alltel didn't know their central office from a hole in the ground. The customer disservice people in Idaho were breaking wind, and a new number was required. It's been almost 30 years since I worked for the telco, but the two locations are still wired to two different exchanges. My father worked for them one summer when he was in high school 65 years ago, and the same was true then. The company doesn't care if you have service or not as long as they collect your money every month.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Hello from sunny, warm downtown Hudson, Florida. Here on the Gulf coast, we see all kinds of flora outside our front door. Like these, and like these. There is also wildlife. View these ferocious specimens and be thankful you are safe and warm in your homes. Alex and Tommy say hi.
Posted 10:19 AM by Andy (3) comments
Comments:
- I was in Orlando at a conference watching the weather on the local news and they were all a dither about the cold front coming down across the Panhandle. Interesting perspective since my home in South Florida doesn't give much coverage to weather across the state. Did you get any of that in Hudson? Was it really a cold front or just native Floridian shivers?
- Got down to (shudder) 55 degrees last night. Betsy and I left the sliding door open to the outdoors and slept like polar bears hibernating.
Just like the storms on Wednesday night that were predicted to "rock you out of your beds" consisted of some flashes and distant rumbles and occasional torrents of rain. A pleasant Cleveland spring evening, if the truth were known.
Tonight it may bust 49 degrees. I still have not put on a jacket. We are leaving tomorrow AM for Cleveburg and "normal" nose-bleeding, joint-twisting, snot-wrenching weather. God bless us every one.
Post a Comment- Back again. Let me check - yup. The weather is here. Wishing you were fine. I kept waiting for it to get light this morning as we motored up I71 after 20 hours of driving. What it was at 7AM it was all day. And the sky drooled on us incessantly. Ah! So good to be home.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Here in Li'l Rhody we use optical scanners. You get a great big card with all the candidates and issues listed. Each item has an arrow at the right hand side with the middle section of the arrow missing. Voting for an item involves connecting the two halves of the arrow with a marker pen. The completed ballot is then fed into a machine for tabulation and then deposited in a locked bin if the need for a recount should arise. Its pretty straight forward and solves most of the problems that need to be solved - Ability to inspect the ballot before it is cast - instant electronic tabulation to feed the media frenzy - a physically marked, retrievable ballot for recounting and archiving.
When I walked in the old fellow at the check in table said "Hi, Tony where's Duffy?" before I got to the table and yelled my name over to the recorders at a separate table. I stopped long enough to sign my ballot receipt, was handed my ballot as I walked by, entered the marking station and marked my ballot being careful to stay inside the lines, went to the scanner and inserted the ballot. The poll worker at the scanner said you could put it in either side up and I asked if that was beause the votes had already been counted. He laughed. I collected up my dog outside, had a heated discussion about the Sentate candidates, said a brief hello to Senator Jack Reed who was having coffee at the corner deli before going to vote and went to work.
I don't if know America's all that great, but Jamestown, RI is OK by me.
Posted 10:53 AM by A. O. (1) comments
Comments:
Post a Comment- Until May 2006, we used the little punch tickets with all the potential for hanging chads, and butterflies and other insect species. I never had a problem turning the card over the making sure that the holes were punched through, and that the chads had shed. In fact, I rather liked the tactile, solid feel of the paper giving way as I viciously pierced through its heart with a metal pin. FORCEFUL voting at its best. No more complicated than coloring between the lines, and elegant in its simplicity. No tabulation at the polling places though. All the punch cards were counted at the Board of Elections HQ later. Change is life.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
I vote at a Baptist church in Vermilion. There are five precincts voting there, so the first thing is to find your own table around the edge of the room. Each table has its own line, and the line for the voting machines snakes its way through everything else. There were not enough voter access cards for people in line, so the poll workers for each precinct had slips of paper with our precinct voting order (I was the 200th). The Secretary of State had ruled that the ID with address requirement was not in force for this election, and theoretically all the Ohio Boards of Election had been told this twice on Monday, and again at noon on election day, but people were turned away nonetheless. One worker at my precinct table noted that they turned away a local policeman in full uniform who had just finished his night shift and who was on his way home to sleep. Since he did not have his home address on an ID, she would not let him vote. I felt more secure already. When it was my turn, I showed them my US Federal Government-issued legal passport. The lady looked at the little blue book with my picture in it and said "What's that?" I could get into the country, but I couldn't get in to vote. So I hauled out my driver's license and then they told me the story of the policeman. What good is power unless you exercise it, after all? So I got my #200 ticket and shuffled into the conga line. Before I got to the machines, my #200 ticket was exchanged for a voter access card and then the fun began.
Card into machine. Touch screen to show ballot. Looking good. The X's light up in the correct places. The candidates and issues filled 12 screen pages. Next - confirm choices. Looks good. Then print the chosen ballot. Now there is a growth at the right side of the machine with a little door that reads "Open to view ballot." I opened it, and through a plastic window saw only three lines of printed bar code on a paper tape near the top of the visible area. Screen says "Print this page" so I touch the button. A computer progress bar appears and fills and vanishes. Next screen appears, with a "Print this page" button. I touch it. Same result. Nothing is happening in the little "Open to view ballot" window. Third screen, "Print this page". And finally, a button that says "Cast ballot." "Ah," I think. "The printer will spring into action once I cast the ballot. The previous screens were the printer buffer being filled." So I "Cast ballot" and the screen shows "remove validation card." Still nothing in the "Open to view ballot" printer window.
I signal for assistance. A polling place judge, a Republican and a Democrat, all go into a voting machine. A new joke, right? Nope. We had them all, and a couple of others beside trying to tell me that after you vote, the printer window always looks like this. They do not hear me when I tell them that it never moved, printed or showed anything else. Eventually, someone comes over with a key and opens the printer housing cover. About 324,234 feet of folded, bunched and wadded paper tape springs free and makes a break for the floor. There is printing on it. The results of each person's ballot who voted on that particular machine. The man shows me the last printed group and says "Here is your ballot. I can't look at it, but you can" and hands me the mobius strip where it exits the printer head. I scan this section until I get to a candidate that I did not vote for. "That's not the way I voted," I explained, and then the fun began some more.
By the time I left three hours later, I had talked to the Board of Elections three times (the precinct workers gave me the number, but there was no phone at the polling place - use your own cell minutes), was told to wait until someone from the IT trouble team arrived, was told that I was not allowed to stay after I had cast my vote, got them to put the machine out of service (they closed one of the privacy shutters over the screen, but left the machine live), had (politely and respectfully) told three voters who went to that machine that it was not working properly, and tried to sit invisibly hoping that the nice policeman didn't come back and arrest me for littering. And creating a public nuisance.
Well, the IT guy came with two replacement voting machines (the machine next to "mine" had some conniptions about an hour later) and I got to talk to a higher-up who told me that, while there had clearly been a mechanical printer malfunction, once the ballot was "cast", it was securely removed from the realm of access or modification. As he put it "Its in the box."
It turns out that he has an IT and Six-sigma engineering background so we discussed statistics and probability and the pursuit of a perfect numerical accounting system. As a result, I may get to assist with the machine testing when the cycle begins again in 2007. I promise to share what I learn about security and the fun world of voting by numbers.
Suffice to say, although no system with people in it will behave all the time, I am intrigued that the mutual suspicions and distrusts between the Democrats and the Republicans keep them watching each other like hawks at the Board of Elections. With dual-access protocols for the systems, one from each camp needs to work with his opposite to get into the data. I just knew that realpolitik had an application in the technical world. Vive la difference.
The ballot error? Since the printer was jammed beyond digestion, there was no assurance that it was my ballot that had printed, or if it belonged to another voter. So since I confirmed my selections on screen before the ballot was "cast", I need to have faith that my grain of sand found its way onto the correct pile. Either that or secede from the precinct and form my own island of insanity. Or maybe that has happened already.
Posted 12:38 AM by Andy (0) comments
Comments:
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
My precinct is Elyria-City 7-A. The voting location is in a community school (a building that used to be an Elyria City grade school - now more or less a daycare center) just down the block. I guess all of precinct 7 votes there, be you A or B, because upon entering the room (something that looks like an old grade school auditorium) you get verified at either the A or B table. A (me) is the table on the right. So over I go to find four older women seated there who are obviously in a dither. Never mind that they each have assigned individual responsibilities, that's all gone by the wayside, the immediate topic, and focus of all the dither, is that some of the validation cards each voter has to have before accessing the machines are, well, missing. They can't find any to save their dear old lives. They know they must have at least 4 of those cards because 4 people are currently using the 4 available machines to cast votes. What happened to the other 6 they were supposed to have to give in advance to people in line? 'Tis a puzzlement and the cause of much confusion, so much that the woman who's responsibility it is to find my name and have me sign in next to it tells me that I've already signed. Uh, no. Better check again. "Oh yeah", she says, "guess you didn't, sign here". I sign, then I get a glimmer of where the missing cards may have wandered off to. An older gentleman has finished voting and, while walking away from the machine, has absent mindedly put the validation card in his his shirt pocket and is now walking out the door. "Uh, excuse me," I say to the cluster of dithering poll workers, "but I think one of your 4 existing cards is in the process of walking out the door". One of them actually stopped the dither fest long enough to listen and recovere (barely) the card. Ye gods.
Posted 11:18 AM by whatley (0) comments
Comments:
Sunday, November 05, 2006
A YouTube thingee. Perfect for watching just before you go out to vote.
Freedom!
Posted 10:18 AM by whatley (0) comments
Comments:
Saturday, November 04, 2006
The Periodic Table of Science Fiction.
For example - under Cm (curium):
96
Cm
Curium
(247)
Holy Mother Church
CURIUM: Noun, singular of the collective plural Curia. The Roman Curia is the ensemble of departments and ministries which assist the sovereign pontiff in her government of the Universal Church. The most famous Curium is the "Sacra Congregatio Romanae et universalis Inquisitionis seu sancti officii," popularly known as the Inquisition, which was founded in 1227 by Pope Joan VI.
The Office of the Inquisition was in sad repute when the Reverend Mother Maria Sklodowska took control of it at the beginning of the twentieth century—split by schismatic in-fighting and rife with doctrinal error. Worse, accounts of suspects being tortured, while certainly exaggerated, were not entirely untrue.
All this Mother Maria changed. She put the Inquisition on a firm scientific footing. Heresy was no longer prosecuted but rather investigated. That which was not understood was laid open to examination. All questioning was persistent but gentle. It was her position that an admission of error made under fear of punishment was worthless.
Critics objected that many suspected heretics lived long and fulfilling lives and ultimately died of old age while their cases were under consideration. Her supporters, however, say that the results speak for themselves. Many consider her example to be one of the wellsprings responsible for the flowering and growth of the Catholic Church in the last century and thus, ultimately, for the entente between Christianity and its traditional rivals, Judaism and Islam.
Among the Holy Mother's most famous sayings are these three:
A theologian in her laboratory is not a mere technician: she is also a child confronting heresies that impress her as though they were fairy tales.
Nothing in heresy is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
One never notices the sinner; only the woman within, praying for salvation.
But she herself would rather that whatever honor we bestow upon her be addressed elsewhere. As she herself put it, "What little my sisters and I have achieved, was all done for the greater honor and glory of our Lady and Savior, Jessica Christ."
Posted 3:41 AM by Andy (1) comments
Comments:
Friday, November 03, 2006
The recent movie 'OH in Ohio' can be viewed as an allegory for the modern voting process. Recast the actors as the Boards of Election, the voting machine sellers, and the political parties and the farce be with you.
Posted 11:36 AM by Andy (0) comments
Comments:
Thursday, November 02, 2006
The requirements for voter identification are not uniform across the country. State requirements for votor identification are listed by the National Conference of State Legislatures web site. Be sure you don't get turned away when you try to deposit your grain of sand on the electoral beach.
Since laws generally creep in by bits and pieces, and build to unintended consequences, barriers to voting may increase until it becomes difficult for many to prove who they are without compromising personal information or privacy. Will a Social Security Number be mandated at a polling place? Would a fingerprint be required for voter identification? Could a DNA sample be demanded? How about an implanted electronic chip or a facial recognition system? If the laws governing our voting security begin to require such measures, abuse of the information becomes that much easier. Since our governments are populated with such as you and I, frail and faulty humans that we are, errors and omissions will continue to be the rule rather than the exceptions. Or maybe I just suffer from normal paranoia.
Posted 1:29 PM by Andy (0) comments
Comments:
"Hacking Democracy," an HBO documentary that questions the integrity of Diebold voting machines, is scheduled to air tonight. Diebold's response? They insist that it be canceled. Nothing like a little censorship I always say. Moot point to me though. I can't afford cable anyway. If you're in my boat (welcome aboard matey!) you can get the bird's eye lowdown by reading a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machines, by the Center for Information at Princeton University and "Will The Next Election Be Hacked?" by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Happy voting mookies.
Posted 10:23 AM by whatley (4) comments
Comments:
- Oops, almost forgot. Here's a little local Cuyahoga County flavor: "how million-dollar equipment and security safeguards can quickly be undone by poor product design, improper election procedures and inadequate training". Pesky humans.
- I am disturbed by the fact that the state of my birth (I don't mean naked and wet) and the state of my current existence (I don't mean altered and confused) are notable players in the voting manipulation strategy. I remain discouraged and disheartened. Do I have any company?
- Absentee ballot regulations have been recently broadened so that pretty much anyone, for any or no reason, can request to vote that way. Indications are that the response has been huge. Probably due to peoples' dislike of electronic voting, especially in Northern Ohio after the primary debacle. We're being told that results won't be official, and in some close races not even be guessed at, until 10 days after voting ends.
Post a Comment- Diebolt maintains that the information in the HBO documentary is erroneous and based on information several years old, that their system is "hackproof", and that they were named as being responsible for software errors (counting 40% of the vote incorrectly) in 2000 by a company that they did not purchase until 2002. Diebold says that they were never consulted about the movie, and that HBO made changes to their web site information after Diebolt sent letters of complaint. The film producers claim that they never made thos claims in the first place.
The fact remains that when I voted in May, the poll workers were disorganized and confused about the electronic cards with the gold contact pads that enabled me to vote. The cards are programmed with a code via a hand-held keypad (a manual process) after the voter's elegibility is established (a manual process using books and papers and picture ID). Then the machines accept my input (a manual process) and a paper tape is made inside the machine (to be counted manually) to back up the electronic data cards that are (manually) carried to the Board of Elections, where they are (manually) inserted into computers (manually programmed and re-programmed) to give the final tally, which is (manually) reported to the world.
So of course it is hackproof. It is not as if people are involved or anything, right?
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