brad's life

-- returned my broken computer in Vancouver

-- because it was close, I turbo-hiked up Multnomah Falls instead of doing my normal daily run

-- watched "A New Hope" from the newly digitally-dust-cleaned scanned-from-original-prints Star Wars DVD box set release. xb95, jproulx, and iseebi came over to join dina and me.

All this Diebold crap depresses me so much.

Why don't the People In Charge understand that an open, peer-reviewed, understood voting system is the only safe bet? Even if Diebold isn't intentionally evil (a big if), they're definitely not smart. Do you want a corporation rushing out shoddy voting software to make a buck, or would you rather a group of smart people made it for free, motivated only by making the best system that's fair and tamper-proof?

The People in general don't much know or care ("but it's DIGITAL!"), which is a depression I've long since come to accept, but I'd expect better of our government.

Good reading: http://www.blackboxvoting.com/ (which would be better with RSS)

I have 440 emails in my inbox ("to-do list") right now. I haven't done a cleaning day in a while.

If you're waiting for a reply from me, I apologize.

The combination of gnome-volume-manager + udev + hal + dbus makes Linux actually sane for mere mortals. And fuck, sane for me too. I never liked having to mount USB memory sticks.

So I'm telling whitaker all about this (because it's all working in Debian now) when he asked me if anything exciting's happening.

Now, this guy hasn't been gone for a week yet but we've already forgotten his perpetual your-mom jokes. And I totally walked into it:

whitaker: "Your mom automatically mounts when I stick it in. Oooooooo..........."

Damnit.