Voder-Vocoder

I went to early vote this morning. This is the first of two Saturdays that the polls are open. It seems to me that they should be open Sundays as well.

There are five early voting locations in this county, so I had to drive a bit to get there, but the convenience of being able to vote on a Saturday morning made it worth it.

I had to wait in line less than half an hour; I should have timed it. The line went out the door of the county supervisor of elections branch office and into the next door, some kind of abandoned store.

Since there were voters from all precincts there (all in different congressional districts, state senate districts, state house districts, county commission districts, fire control districts, and sub-municipalities), they printed out ballots as needed. To get our identity, they swiped the magnetic strip on our state ID (driver license).

After filling out the bubbles on the ballots, we fed them into a machine that read them. There was no feedback on whether the machine read the ballots correctly. I have to hope that somebody performs spot-checks to verify that the optical scan machines are functioning properly.

"Just as you suspected, Barack Obama is wrong for you." --John McCain radio ad, heard in FLorida.

Think about this for a while. Why might someone be suspicious of Obama? Maybe they don't want to admit out lout that that are afraid of black men. And the "for you" bit: this ties into a segregationist viewpoint where it's okay if Obama wants to be president of black America, but not okay if he wants to be president of you, white America. In fact, it would be wrong for a black man to be president of you.

It's subtle, though.

I've got out of the need-to-install-a-new-OS-all-the-time mode. This is mostly because Linux Distributions these days are mostly good enough.

So I've got Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) installed. Since this is a "Long Term Support" release, I'll leave it installed until the next LTS release or until it end-of-lifes.

Q: How do I disable autostart of Totem after inserting a DVD in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)?

A: Open Nautilus (Places->Home Folder) then from the menu bar, Edit->Preferences->Media->Never prompt or start programs on media insertion.

This was our sail yesterday. The big blue arrow shows the predominate wind. The tide was initially against up as we went downriver. After motoring out of Port Sanibel behind Punta Rassa, we raised our sails when we hit the main Caloosahatchee channel. We sailed almost due south on a beam reach, using the motor for a while against the tide, until we got past the bridge. We use the motor most of the time we go under the bridge, because the wind is unpredictable there and the big boats have a habit of tossing us about.

We made good time all the way down to the Point Ybel Lighthouse on the tip of Sanibel Island. At that point we gybed around to a broad reach and headed for Estero Island. We gybed twice again, beating downwind. This annoyed the hell out of me, so I convinced the skipper to let me rig the jib wing-on-wing using an improvised spinnaker pole made out of the boathook. This let us sail east, directly toward our destination, at about the same speed. This is a lot easier to rig than the spinnaker.

After a while, we decided to head back, beating upwind and making good time, once we realized that the fairleads needed adjusting (again).

about 13 miles total.

Examples of appropriate places for partisan political posters:

• Party Headquarters,
• Campaign Rally.

Example of inappropriate places for partisan political posters:

• The local produce stand.

I'm not arguing against your first-amendment right to free speech. And I don't want to infringe on that right at all, but you did just lose a customer, if only because I find your politics distasteful.

Get up; get up; the sun is up!
The dew is on the buttercup!
Get up; get up; the sun is up!
Now get your ass out of bed!

Update: I've also seen

Get up; get up; the sun is up!
The dew is on the buttercup!
Get up; get up; the sun is up!
...Early in the morning.

Get up; get up; the sun is up!
The dew is on the buttercup!
Get up; get up; the sun is up!
Now get your ass out of bed!

More universe building:

(4) The Historocrats. Your basic time travel story. Five hundred years in the future, a group of people decide that human civilization messed up too badly and goes back in time to start over. They are accompanied by a group of historians who just want to find out how people lived before the invention of writing. So a large group travels back to 4001 BCE (6000 HE) and set up small nation on an island somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea.

I see that my computer seems to display U+2019 (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK ’) with a glyph identical to U+02bc (MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE ʼ). WordPress and most other software seem to convert U+0027 (APOSTROPHE ') to U+2019. That's odd, because nine out of ten times, it's an apostrophe, not a single quote.

Of course the crotchety of fASCIIst in me says stick to the 0x27. Straight apostrophes were good enough for every great novel ever make on a typewriter.

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# html_utf8_to_ascii.py
# Copyright 2008 Hal Canary
 (more...)