What Country Am I Living In?

http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2008/10/30/citizen.html

Counties can’t certify their election results until the challenges are resolved. If the voters can prove citizenship, Handel said, their ballots will be counted.

Any voter can challenge another’s qualifications to cast a ballot by notifying a precinct poll manager, Handel said. That voter then would be given a challenge ballot and would have to go before the election board.

So, we're going to allow anyone voting on Election Day to point fingers at other voters and say they're not a legal citizen, and the state will then put tell them to vote on a paper ballot which won't be counted until the citizenship dispute is resolved on Friday? Where am I? How does anyone think this is a good idea? The possibility of abusing this system to, if nothing other than cause mayhem, is incredible. What if I just sit at the polls all day and say I want every single voter to prove their citizenship before we count their vote? Would they remove me from the polls? What if I got a group of people together and we rotated in and out of polls all day long causing problems? What an incredible mess they've opened themselves up to.

Mysterious Apple

MMMmmmmm... Mysteriously delivered candy-chocolate-caramel apple..... sooo tasty... wait a minute... isn't there a Disney movie about mysteriously obtained apples? Uh-oh.

A Very Horrible Halloween

Now the nightmare’s real
Now Dr. Horrible is here to make you quake with fear
To make the whole world kneel




Happy Halloween!

Me

:-D

That's all I have to say on the subject.

Five Love Languages

I feel loved when...

The Five Love Languages

My Primary Love Language is Physical Touch

My Detailed Results:
Physical Touch:	10
Quality Time:	8
Acts of Service:	5
Words of Affirmation:	5
Receiving Gifts:	2

About this quiz

Unhappiness in relationships is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. It can be helpful to know what language you speak and what language those around you speak.

Tag 3 people so they can find out what their love language is.

Take the Quiz!
Check out the Book

Just Wow

Police say teen [girl] driver hit 107 mph in a construction zone.

OSP Trooper Ryan Hockema tried to stop a red 1995 Ford Mustang he spotted going 87 mph near a construction site. According to the trooper, the vehicle then accelerated to speeds as high as 107 mph in the work zone while failing to maintain the travel lane, following other vehicles too closely and making unsafe lane changes.

The driver, Messer, allegedly told the trooper she had trouble seeing while talking on her cell phone before stopping for the officer, according to OSP.

Kimberly Messer of Springfield Oregon, you should have your license taken away for a very long time because of this. You are a hazard to everyone on the road. I hope your parents leave you in jail for a day or two before taking you home and grounding you for the rest of your life. How stupid do you have to be to drive like that and then mention anything about talking on your cell phone. She's incredibly lucky that she's 18, because Oregon has a ban on cell phone use for drivers under 18.

Bracelet FAIL

If you're a company in the business of manufacturing bracelets a good way to make sure your customers never come back is to stamp the F-word on a handful of the bracelets for an order:
Obscene word stamped on some school bracelets

Apparently, Weber School District ordered 30,000 bracelets that were supposed to read "Color Me Drug Free", but some instead had F*** written on them. Whoops.

Methinks the bracelet company will not be getting a second order.

More Cool Google

I just discovered an added feature to Google Maps that I find rather nifty. We all know and love that you can use Google Maps to look at current traffic conditions for highways in many major population areas. Apparently Google has been storing this data and now allows you to get a predicted traffic conditions for any time of day of any day of the week. So now you can find out what the roads will be like whenever you need to be traveling. For instance; it is a very, very good idea to avoid I-15 Southbound between Orem and Springville on Fridays around 3:30, otherwise it is predicted that you will be sitting in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic for a good chunk of that distance.

[sigh]
I love Google.

No, The voters are not the problem

The Charleston Gazette is running an article about early voters having their votes switch from Obama to McCain.

Two of the voters describe the problem like this:

"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain." - Virginia Matheney

"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again. The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the Republican" - Calvin Thomas

That sounds like a pretty big problem. It sounds like the machine knew they were touching the screen to indicate a vote for Obama and after registering that information by marking the box it then changed the vote to McCain. That is not acceptable. Here was the response from the county election officials:

"[Jackson County Clerk Jeff] Waybright blamed the problem on voters."
"People make mistakes more than the machines," he [Waybright] said, "but I went in yesterday and recalibrated the machines. We are doing everything we can not to disenfranchise anybody."

No, wrong. This is not a voter problem. The software on the voting machines should absolutely prevent this from happening. I can think of two possible situation as to what the software may do to cause this behavior and either option is unacceptable in a voting machine and the software should be fixed. This is typical government type reaction to using a crappy product, rather than demand a product that is well designed they believe that training everyone to use a non-intuitive and crappily designed product is the solution.

Here's scenario 1: The boxes used to select a candidate are too close together and the software has a hard time determining which box the user actually touched. Solution. Vote for one office at a time, candidate choices are buttons that are 3 inch squares with 3 inches between them. Lots of room to do this.

Scenario 2: The software registers any touch that doesn't land in a box as a touch for the first box or last box on the screen. No, bad. Wrong. The software should be designed to ignore any click that doesn't clearly land inside a candidate box.

And, to add to that it should be really easy to allow the voter to verify their ballot. Once you made your selections you should get a Confirmation Page, like everything in the world gives you. It should say something like "For President you have selected:" and then in VERY BIG BOLD LETTERS the name of the candidate. "Is this correct?" Yes, No.

Software that randomly switches votes is absolutely unacceptable. I've been through this tirade before, so I won't go all the way into it. I will suffice it to say that the current crop of electronic voting machines could be the worst thing to happen to democracy in a long time. The ability to commit election fraud on a county and state level is incredibly simplified with insecure, poorly designed machines that provide no paper backup of what is happening.

Written on Student's Exam

Here are two things written verbatim on student's exams that I graded last week:

"The Hell for more than 1 'B' -> NO ESCAPE!"

"If I see it I should be able to pop it, otherwise FREAK OUT"

Things the CS Dept. Wants to Know

to: grads@cs.byu.edu, faculty@cs.byu.edu
subject: Is someone cooking fish in the building?

My Illness of Tuesday

I said I'd discuss my illness and then never did. So, here's your update on that.

My family spent most of the weekend at my sister's house, watching Conference, eating meals, etc. Her ward apparently had some stomach bug going around, but her house had been symptom free for a week before. On Monday night we met there again and had dinner of 5 Buck Pizza. Now, whether it was the pizza or the stomach bug we'll never know, but regardless I'll probably avoid 5 Buck Pizza at this point; probably not their fault, but those are the breaks.

Anyways, that was the setup. Tuesday morning I got up, was still tired, turned off my alarm and went to sleep for another hour. I crawled out of bed around 10 and started my morning internet routine, check the news, email, weather, etc. After sitting there for about 10 minutes I started feeling not so great in the digestive area. Curious as to if I were an isolated case I called my mom to see if anyone else was not feeling well after the pizza. She was also ill.

I haven't had digestive illness for a long while now. I thought I'd try a small sip of water as I was thirsty. Mistake. Within 30 seconds of that cap full of water hitting my stomach I was in the bathroom undoing the process, unpleasant. I've managed to not vomit in several years. I don't enjoy the process. Since I had just woken up there wasn't really anything to throw up, so it was mostly dry heaving and stomach acid... gross. On top of that my nose was running. On top of _that_ tears were dripping onto my glasses, and then drying leaving salt spot so I couldn't even see. I was a very miserable mess.

That was not all of my problems though. The vomiting continued sporadically for ~6-8 hours. This was accompanied with other... unpleasant... digestive issues. I think that from Tuesday at 10am to 10pm I spent 6 hours in the bathroom being sick or feeling like I was about to be sick, and the other six hours sleeping. I was able to sleep through the night only waking up a few times until about 9 Wednesday morning. So when I got up Wednesday morning I hadn't eaten anything for 36 hours. Tuesday afternoon after the vomiting had died down I was able to keep down small amounts of 7-up coupled with Tums, and a little water. So I was able to avoid complete dehydration.

All in all it was an incredibly unpleasant 24 hours to endure through. I really, really hope I did not pass the problem on to any roommates or friends (assuming it wasn't the pizza). So far no one I know has gotten ill so I think we're safe.

"I Can Still Fix This"

With the world around him disintegrating and the hordes of angry, misled citizens banging on the doors and windows President Bush was heard saying to a close aid, "I am the Commander in Chief! I can fix this, I can fix all of this." Also heard was "I do not need to explain why I say things. — That's the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

He then went on to explain that he built this economy on lies, bad business practices, and poor politics, so we should just continue with those 3 pillars of strength. There is no need for fiscal responsibility or accountability "This is an anxious time, but the American people can be confident in our economic future," he said. If we all just dream of rainbows and sunshine it will come true, because "I am the Commander in Chief" and that's what I want.

Please ignore the fact that I promised the economy would be okay after doling out the "economic stimulus checks". Turns out I was simply trying to stave off disaster until _after_ I left office so we could all blame someone else. Also ignore that I said everything would be OK after shelling out money to all sorts of corporations that I have friends in and things got worse. But, please, please, please, in 3 months, forget the fact that I said this: "the U.S. government's financial rescue plan was aggressive and big enough to work"

Also, from that same source:
"Bush says anxiety feeds market frenzy but U.S. rescue plan will work." He then went on to discuss how blood drives sharks crazy. Those loony creatures, just can't get enough after they smell the first drop.

Thanks Bush. As the world crumbles around you I'm sure standing there saying "Don't Panic! We can fix it!" will make a big difference.

Also, it looks like the DOW will drop below 8000 today. Note that this is ~2500 points below where the DOW was before the $700 Billion bailout that Bush "ordered" Congress to approve was passed.

Havoc

Issued by The National Weather Service
Salt Lake City, UT
8:08 am MDT, Wed., Oct. 8, 2008

... WINTER-LIKE STORM TO HIT REGION THIS WEEKEND...

AN UNSEASONABLY COLD STORM SYSTEM IS TARGETED FOR UTAH THIS WEEKEND. ALTHOUGH THIS STORM SYSTEM WILL FILTER IN ACROSS THE REGION DURING THE NEXT FEW DAYS THE BRUNT OF THE SYSTEM WILL AFFECT THE STATE SATURDAY INTO SUNDAY. SNOW LEVELS ARE EXPECTED TO COME DOWN TO THE VALLEY FLOORS FOR ALL OF UTAH EXCEPT DIXIE AND LAKE POWELL REGIONS BY SATURDAY NIGHT. ALTHOUGH SNOW AMOUNTS IN GENERAL MAY NOT BE SIGNIFICANT... EVEN MINOR AMOUNTS COULD CAUSE HAVOC WHEN YOU CONSIDER THAT MOST TREES HAVE NOT LOST THEIR FOLIAGE. IN ADDITION... MAXIMUM TEMPERATURES ON SATURDAY AND SUNDAY WILL BE ABOUT 25 DEGREES BELOW NORMAL.

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So apparently we're in for a cold weekend with a possibility of Havoc! I just found it amusing to find that word in an official statement issued by the government.

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In other news I was deathly ill all day yesterday. I'll give an account of that later.

The Life of Pi

I just finished reading The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I found it really interesting and can't wait to discuss it in depth with someone. Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the back of the book contains some "Discussion Questions". Although they are supposed to be thought provoking I found the presented questions incredibly bland for such a richly filled story. So I hope to actually discuss the depths of the novel. I don't think I can even write any kind of summary here without spoiling the book, so I will simply state that it was interesting and I will thoroughly enjoy analyzing it. If you're into contemporary philosophical type reads I'd recommend it. Anyone that enjoys either Life of Pi or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will likely enjoy the other as well (Zen isn't nearly as brutal, fyi).

So, if you've read it, let's talk. If you haven't read it, read it, and then let's talk. We can start with: What would you do for survival? --Discuss on multiple levels: physical, mental, moral, meta-physical, etc...

National Debt: A Graph

Here's a graph of the National debt from December 30, 1994 through October 1, 2008. Guess when Bush entered the white house.

(All numbers from TreasuryDirect.gov: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/NPGateway)

Things that Annoy me

If I'm waiting in the turn lane to cross 3 lanes of traffic then don't come up behind me and start honking. I know why I'm there. I'm not confused about being in the turning lane with my turn signal on. I'm waiting for a safe chance to turn, which I realize must be a foreign concept to you. If you'd like to cut in front of 3 lanes of vehicles traveling 45-50mph be my guest, but I'm going to sit and wait until it's safe. Jerk.