Random Musings and Nicknacks

Every time we have a federal election (which, let’s face it, is quite frequently) the controversy around the election blackout law comes up — there is a ban on publishing results for any riding until the last poll in the country closes.

Although I agree with the concept, I have always considered it a losing battle in the internet era. That was until today, when I started really thinking about it and suddenly considered — where are these results coming from?

This is the way I imagine it must work: You walk into a polling station, make your vote, and place it in a sealed box. Those boxes are taken to a back room with observers, the counts processed, and reported to Elections Canada. Elections Canada then releases results as they are being reported, right? So Elections Canada should be able to keep those results until the end of the blackout period.

Or is each individual station sending people out into the crowd to announce how the counting is going without any kind of oversight about who they are telling when?

Both Bob and I have had troubles with flat bike tires over the last couple of years, I think mostly due to the debris from construction. It got significant enough that at the beginning of this year, I did some research and we both got flat-resistant tires (kevlar belts through them) to try and slow down the incidence of flats.

Unfortunately for dad, this doesn’t seem to have stopped the flats! He has had several since then (at least for the most part they aren’t phantom flats anymore, there are definite punctures). I commented yesterday that it was very odd, because for me in almost 7,000 km of riding I’ve only had one flat, and on the same tires he has I’ve done more then 3,000 km without any.

Well you know what that means.

This morning, I was doing my pre-ride inspection on the Kona, topped up the air in the front tire, started topping up the rear tire, and all of a sudden heard from the front of my bike the sound of air escaping very rapidly…

Fortunately I was prepping the Kona because I didn’t want the effort of moving the lights to the Olmo, so I switched them and left.

Now tonight I get to find out what happened.

Continuing the politics that have somehow snuck onto this blog recently, I just ran across an article in the Washington Post, about how US voters that risk becoming disenfranchised due to a new computer system

Thousands Face Mix-Ups In Voter Registrations
In New Databases, Many Are Wrongly Flagged as Ineligible

Thousands of voters across the country must reestablish their eligibility in the next three weeks in order for their votes to count on Nov. 4, a result of new state registration systems that are incorrectly rejecting them.
…
The issue made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which yesterday blocked a challenge to 200,000 Ohio voters whose registration data conflicted with other state records.

It is impossible to know how many voters are affected nationwide. There are no reports of large-scale problems in Virginia, Maryland or the District, but the trouble is cropping up in many states.

The rest of the article is quite a terrifying read.

W. came out last Friday. The movie seems to get a quite buzz – some respected movie critics gave favorable reviews about the movie. So on Sunday, Chris and I decided to see the movie in the theatre. Tim, on the other hand, requested to stay at home. Now I have to admit that he made a smart choice – I am not saying that the movie is not worth watching; what i am saying is that the movie is not as good as I expected.

It may be not easy to cramp everything about a person into a 2 hours movie; however, I believe Oliver Stone can do much better than that. I can list at least 3 things that I am disappointed about the movie: (more…)

I have a secret to tell you. You aren’t where you think you are. Well, actually you are, after all you think you are at ourlog, and you are there, but ourlog isn’t where you think it is.

From its inception, ourlog has been running on a server called Everest. But a little over a week ago, just before Thanksgiving weekend, I quietly moved it to Neuromancer, and shut Everest down completely. I haven’t mentioned this before, as I figured the best way to test would be to see if anybody noticed. For 10 days now not one person has asked me what’s wrong, or what’s different, so I consider the acceptance test to be a pass.

What is Neuromancer you ask? Well aside from being an AI that takes over the world, it is also the name of our new Network Attached Storage, a low power system that provides a lot of disk space to our house, by sharing it over the network.

The primary advantage of using this system (aside from being quieter), is that we have the ability to build in redundancy, so that if a hard-drive fails we will still have all our data and hopefully never see a message like this ever again.

I hope.

I’ve been unfairly maligned. I need to tell what really happened.

Mommy and Daddy just don’t understand how hard it is, when you are lying there, your tummy is completely empty, and you can’t even remember the last time you were fed [ed note: Punky, it was 10 minutes earlier]. They had totally forgotten about me. I tried to be a good boy, I tried to remind them. I went to my food dish and knocked it around to remind them it was empty. I went to the food door and barked and whined there to remind them where it was.

But they are mean. They ignored me. They would rather let their poor puppy starve to death than take care of him.

So there I was, a completely empty tummy. It had been so long since my last meal that I couldn’t even remember it, and I had no idea when the next one was coming — it could be never!

So I had to take action to prevent a pup-icide. I was good, I didn’t touch the food on the table, that belongs to people. But food is on the counter because nobody has claimed it yet, right?

So I just took a bit, just enough to ensure I didn’t die of starvation.

They’re just so mean, they starve me half-to-death and never even think about it. They keep all the good stuff for themselves.

What else was I supposed to do?

He finally did it. When we caught him, at least 5 dumplings were gone from the plate.

I cooked some dumplings for dinner and put the rest on a plate to let it cool down so I could pack it up for Chris’s lunch tomorrow. While we were watching Obama and McCain’s debate, we heard a loud noise from Kitchen. Chris got up and saw Punky running out of the kitchen. I was told to check what was missing. So I went to check the food on the small dining table, everything there was intact. When I scanned the kitchen counter, I noticed a part of the plate was empty – I took a closer look, there were some fine black hairs left at the empty spot…

I think that for a company, the test of how successful you will be is not how you deal with happy customers, but how you deal with potentially unhappy ones.

Apple has a reputation for doing this well, and leads the industry with stellar customer satisfaction numbers. Based on the two experiences I have had I can see why.
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“Psssh.” -Dave, Soldier No.673, 11th Company

On the weekend, Tim showed us a hilarious parody of the song “American Boy”, called “American Vice President”, lampooning the Republican candidates.

Unfortunately I cannot currently link to this video, which is well worth listening to, because it was taken down on a Copyright Claim. I can link to the explanation of why the claim is bogus.

I do, however, have a few questions that I would like the music label to answer:

1. Why is a parody a copyright violation, yet the full original video and song being posted not?
2. How (as explained by the artist) it is a copyright violation when nothing was copied?
3. Why are none of the other parodies on youtube getting DMCA takedown notices?
4. If it wasn’t the music, and it wasn’t the fact that it was a parody that was the issue, what exactly caught your attention?[1]

I notice that the artist said yesterday that the claim had been rescinded and Youtube was going to put the video back up, yet somehow it still hasn’t appeared.

For a country that prides itself as the beacon of democracy and free speech in the world, the conduct of their primary political parties to stifle exactly those ideals if frankly disgusting.

[1] I hate to sound a bit paranoid, but this question is actually directed to the Republicans sitting behind the curtain, although I know I’ve been told to pay no attention to you