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Week of 1 November 2004

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Monday, 1 November 2004

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13:33 - Let me be the first to announce it...

Bush Defeats Kerry!

I told Jerry Pournelle a couple of months ago that I thought Bush would win, if not a landslide, at least a very convincing victory. I see no reason to change that view. When it comes to predicting elections, no one has a very good crystal ball, but every indication I see, without exception, tells me that Kerry will be defeated ignominiously. Kerry is unlikely to win any of the states carried by Bush in 2000, and will do well not to lose half a dozen states carried by Gore in 2000.

Based on my own scientific analysis, I expect Bush to win at least 300 electoral votes, and 325 is not out of the question. In fact, if you're thinking about going out tomorrow to vote for Kerry, don't bother. It's a waste of time.

All of that said, I wish both would lose. I'm voting for Badnarik.


Barbara had a bit of a scare yesterday. Her parents were on a bus tour with her sister Frances and her brother-in-law Al, who was driving the tour bus. Barbara's mother had been ill for several days. They'd tried to convince her to fly home from Texas, which she refused to do. Barbara's sister called when they were in Nashville, on the way home. Her mother really wasn't doing well, and they tried to convince her to go to a Nashville hospital, which she refused to do.

Holiday Tours, the tour bus company, is based in Randleman, NC, a half hour or 45 minutes east of us. Rather than take Barbara's mother all the way to Randleman and then have to bring her back to Winston-Salem, Frances and Al decided to have Barbara meet the tour bus in Winston-Salem, pick up her mom and dad there, and take them directly to the hospital. They would call Barbara when they were an hour or so out of Winston-Salem and let her know where to meet the bus.

Barbara figured they'd arrive in Winston-Salem sometime between 5:00 and 6:00, so we had a very early dinner. Sure enough, Frances called about 4:15, just as we were sitting down to eat. We ate dinner quickly and Barbara took off to meet the bus. She delivered her mom and dad to Baptist Hospital around 5:00, and the waiting commenced. Barbara called me around 9:00 to say that her mom was being X-rayed, but at that point they didn't know what the problem was. They suspected pneumonia, which is very bad for an older person, and particularly for Barbara's mom, who's had lung problems for years. Barbara said she'd come home for the night, but not to expect her early.

As it turned out, her mom had severe gastritis, so they treated and released her. Barbara took her parents home and then came home, arriving here I think around 1:00. She'd already called her supervisor at work to tell her she'd be late or not coming in at all today. We finally got to sleep in the wee small hours and slept in this morning. Barbara went in late and plans to work just until her regular quitting time. But the important thing is that Sankie is going to be okay.



I sent off the Preface, which was the final element, for the Pocket Guide book yesterday evening while all that was going on. Now it's all over but the shouting, which is to say the final edits. I've posted the draft manuscript documents over on the Subscribers' Page. If you download them and read them, I'd appreciate any comments, corrections, etc. We're on a very short schedule. The final edits must be made by this Thursday, at which time it goes to O'Reilly's layout and production folks.



I just did something I almost never do. I signed an NDA. Generally, I refuse to do that because NDAs raise a whole host of issues. In this case, though, what I signed the NDA for isn't central to what I do. This one is for beta testing Xandros 3.0. I haven't seen it yet, but I assume the Xandros 3.0 "beta" must be very close to a finished product, because Xandros has said publicly that they plan to ship 3.0 next month.



If you've sent me email recently and haven't received a response, please forgive me. I've been focused entirely on getting this pocket guide book finished. My inbox looks like the Augean Stables. I just checked, and there are nearly 500 messages in there, many of them not yet read. These are "real" messages, mind you, not mailing list traffic and so on. I'm going to spend some time today wading through it all and trying to get caught up. I will read all of the messages, but my responses are likely to be very short. Thanks for understanding.



14:35 - This bites. As I was wading through my inbox, the first messages I read were those from subscribers, several of whom were renewing subscriptions. I fired up Mozilla and hit the PayPal site to accept the payments, but for some reason (presumably PayPal's site redesign), Mozilla had forgotten the saved password. I keep a master password list in a password-protected Excel spreadsheet. (And before anyone says anything about that, Excel's password protection is pretty secure as long as you use a good password; the Excel password crackers out there use brute force.)

So I double-clicked on the master password spreadsheet, which brought up StarOffice. That promptly told me there was a file error because the spreadsheet was password-protected. Shit. I thought StarOffice would open password-protected MS Office files. Apparently not. I didn't have a single machine in the house with MS Office installed, so there was nothing for it but to install MS Office 2000 on my main Xandros desktop box. After I did that, I was able to open the password-protected spreadsheet in Excel, copy the data from it, paste it into a StarOffice spreadsheet, and save that with password protection. Geez.


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Tuesday, 2 November 2004

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11:08 - Geez. I just drove over to vote and the line was outrageous. There were cars parked for three blocks on both sides of both streets of the corner where the polling place is located. I managed to find a parking place and walked up toward the polling place to find a line out the door, the full length of the building, along the full length of the parking lot, all the way to the street. A polling official happened to be walking out as I approached. I said, "Geez," and she remarked that there was a two-hour wait. That's simply outrageous. Once again, Kathy Chastain Cooper, who runs the Board of Elections, has screwed up.

I considered my options, and decided just to come home and try again this afternoon about 2:00 p.m. I thought about making an announcement: "Attention. All Kerry voters. Your polling place has changed. Please proceed immediately to ... All Bush voters. Your polling place has also changed. Please proceed immediately to ..."

Next time, I'm getting an absentee ballot for sure.



13:28 - From an article on CNN.

"At a Forsyth County precinct, the first voter in line said he got there before dawn and soon was joined by several hundred more people."

I think that must be my precinct they're talking about. I'm going to head over to the polling place again around 2:00 and see what the lines are like. Frankly, I'm not sure why I bother. Nationwide, for the last 20 years, ballots marked for LIbertarian candidates have routinely been "lost", "misplaced", or otherwise gone uncounted. As far as I know, no one has even lost his job for these activities, let alone been jailed.

I've never had any confidence that votes are counted accurately, but the widespread deployment of electronic voting machines with no provision for providing an audit trail takes us to an entirely different level. I can't believe the things are even legal, or that anyone would even consider using voting machines based on Microsoft Windows. Have they learned nothing from the plague of exploits over the last several years? If electronic voting machines cannot be trusted, how much less trustworthy is an electronic voting machine running Windows?

We need to return to the way things used to be done. Paper ballots. Actually, we should return to the method used before the so-called Australian Ballot became popular in the late 19th century. Prior to that, one didn't fill in a government-provided ballot at the polling place. One brought one's own ballot, previously filled out, and deposited it in the ballot box. Completed ballots were distributed by candidates, political parties, newspapers, and so on. Anyone who wanted to split his vote created his own ballot, listing the candidates for whom he wished to vote. We would be better off returning to that method. No hanging chads. No problem doing recounts. No overvoting. No problems at all.



14:50 - I just got back from voting. I arrived at 2:00 p.m. just as it began to sprinkle, stood in line for a few minutes in a light rain, voted, and left at 2:25 p.m. with it raining a bit more heavily. That's not too bad a time, but longer than it should have been. The problem wasn't the poll workers. They were doing an excellent job at moving people through. The problem was that, incredibly, there were only eight voting stations set up.

As it turned out, the long lines earlier today were deceptive. Turn-out wasn't heavy at all. I was voter number 607. In other words, voters were being processed at little more than one a minute. The bottleneck was the voting stations, eight of which was totally insufficient even during the slack period that I was there. Eyeballing it, I'd say they needed at least 20 voting stations, along with a few more poll workers to keep things flowing. Had they done that, there would have been at most a short wait even during the heaviest periods.

Of course, in one sense, I'm happy they made voting more painful than it needed to be. Anything possible should be done to discourage voting, because it's the easily discouraged voters who shouldn't be voting in the first place.



16:40 - Overheard earlier today: an aside from President Bush to the head of the Secret Service. "Listen, I don't mean to be a sore loser, but when it's done, if I'm dead, kill him."

Oh, wait. That was Butch Cassidy to the Sundance Kid. Or was it?

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Wednesday, 3 November 2004

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09:37 - Bush indeed won a convincing victory yesterday, receiving about 3.5 million more votes than Kerry. Although many of the left-wing so-called news sources are refusing to admit it, Bush won Ohio and its 20 electoral votes, which put him well over the top. By my count, Bush probably has at least 286 electoral votes right now, and he should also win Wisconsin, for a total of at least 296.

Now that the Republicans have control of the House and the Senate and the possibility of appointing two or three Supreme Court justices over the next four years, I think it should be a high priority for them to concentrate on disenfranchising the fringe voters that make up the base of the Democrats.

I would like to see them introduce means tests for voting, as well as literacy tests and a poll tax. Also, anyone who is a net tax consumer should be ineligible to vote. That includes government employees at any level as well as anyone who's on the public dole, which often amounts to the same thing. Allowing tax consumers to vote is a conflict of interest. It doesn't include retired people who are on Social Security or other government pensions. They paid for those.

Most of the problems this country faces result from the enfranchisement of fringe voters who vote themselves bread and circuses, in the process shifting the entire political spectrum far to the left. We no longer have the opportunity to vote for right or centrist candidates, just left or lefter, soft-core socialist like Bush or hard-core socialist like Kerry. This must be stopped, and the Republicans are now in a position to do so. Disenfranchising the poor and the stupid, who invariably support the Democrats, would benefit all of us, ultimately including the poor and the stupid.

That would leave the Democratic Party as an empty husk, and therein lies an opportunity. Rather than continuing to attempt to establish themselves as a viable third party, the Libertarians should move into that husk, redefine it, and begin challenging the Republican Party on an equal basis. We'd then have the refreshing prospect of Conservatives challenging Libertarians, which is what politics should be about. The Socialists and other left-wingers would be out in the cold, where they should be.

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Thursday, 4 November 2004

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08:45 - I'm writing and beta testing Xandros 3.0 on various systems. Not much to say about the former. Not much I'm allowed to say about the latter. It is public information, though, that Xandros intends to ship Xandros 3.0 in December, so clearly this isn't going to be a long beta test.

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Friday, 5 November 2004

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10:21 - Holy shit! An Air National Guard F-16 rolls in on a strafing run and cuts loose with its Vulcan rotary cannon against a school building. Unfortunately, this didn't happen in Fallujah. It happened in New Jersey. Fortunately, only a janitor was present and no one was hurt. I guess the school district should consider itself lucky that the pilot was practicing strafing runs with inert projectiles instead of launching missiles.

I'm sure this accident has doomed the career of the pilot in question, his commander, and probably his commander's commander. But it begs the question, why was the ANG expending live ordnance within just a few miles of a residential area? The intended target was about 3.5 miles from the school building that was actually hit. Although 3.5 miles sounds like a fair distance, in fact an F-16 covers that distance in literally seconds. And, in the dark and from the 7,000 foot elevation at which the strafing pass occurred, 3.5 miles isn't a great distance at all. Even a tiny navigation error or a moment's inattention by the pilot can result in ordnance striking something miles from its intended target.

So, although I'm sure the pilot will be blamed, the real question in my mind is why a range so close to a residential area is still being used.



11:40 - One of my correspondents suggests, in jest I think, that the recent initiation of the air war against New Jersey was the result of its choosing Kerry in the recent election. Hmmm. Heute Neues Jersey. Morgen die Welt. Nah, I don't think so. Although if Illinois, the New England states, the upper Midwest, and the Left Coast suffer similar attacks, I may be forced to reconsider.

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Saturday, 6 November 2004

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09:47 - Last night was clear, and moonrise wasn't until 0020 this morning, so Barbara and I headed up to Bullington to observe. We got the scope out and set it up, but as it turned out we barely used it all evening. Instead, we worked on our Deep Sky Binocular lists. Barbara logged 15 new objects on her list, and I logged 14 new for mine. I'd logged one more than Barbara when we started the evening, so we're back to even, with perhaps 20 or 25 remaining on the 60-object list. Most of the objects on this list are challenging, either difficult to locate or difficult to see, and often both.

Barbara is off to a Border Collie trial today, where she'll have a table for Carolina Border Collie Rescue. I'm working on incorporating final edits for the Pocket Guide book. Forsyth Astronomical Society is doing a "sky tour" event up at Bullington tonight. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I believe FAS contributed the event as a prize in a fundraising event at a local private school. People bid on the prize, and the winning bidder basically gets a couple hours of private instruction. Barbara and I may or may not go up tonight, depending on how tired she is when she gets back from the BC event.


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Sunday, 7 November 2004

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