Author: Dave Shevett

A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

My Election Predictions

I predict next Tuesday will not in fact decide who will be the next president. What will happen is we will see the largest voter turnout as a percentage of registered voters ever recorded. The vote will be close enough that there will be an immediate challenge in the courts. The fight will simply get uglier and for 2 weeks the election will be undecided. During this time stories of gross voter fraud will surface, be reported in the media, commented on, and either discarded as false, or simply lost in the shadow of “Oh yeah? Well [other side] did [this unsubstantiated rumor!]”, thereby removing any weight to the story. Wash, rinse, repeat.

In the end, no matter who wins, the public will be disillusioned with the voting process even more so than usual. Unless there is a viciously polarized populace for the next election, I see a third party rising again in 2008.

And of course, The Onion has a perfect take on the whole schpiel. (Click on the image for the full banner). Make sure you also check out their election day guide, which includes helpful hints such as:

  • Tip for those on the go: Voting a straight ticket can save you up to 15 seconds.
  • If you are black and a resident of Florida, work out two or three alternate routes to your polling place to avoid police checkpoints.
  • If you are a Flintstone, make sure to put the granite slab arrows-first into the dinosaur’s mouth.
  • If you live in Florida, for Christ’s sake, look at the ballot very, very carefully this time.

Happy electoral college day, everyone!

In the groove.

Yesterday was one of the most productive days I’ve had in ages. I did some huge revisions to CONGO‘s appserver (the core application that holds all the business logic).

After being sick for a day, and having a tooth extracted earlier in the week, I was feeling edgy about the amount of stuff getting done, but yesterday’s 4-6 hour burst of code updates really helped.

For those into the geekier details, read on!

Continue reading “In the groove.” →

Baby teeth used for Stem Cells?

This afternoon I had the joyous experience of having a tooth extracted – nothing really dramatic honestly, it only took about 15 minutes, it was just unexpected. Went in to have the tooth looked at, and the x-ray showed the tooth almost totally gone. Out she comes!

After getting back, and nursing some gauze, we started chatting about the future of dental procedures, and the potential that sometime soon teeth may not need to be repaired anymore… they can be removed and simply re-grown.

Continue reading “Baby teeth used for Stem Cells?” →

“I’ll be taking the next year off dead. For tax purposes.”

This is becoming somewhat of a pattern. After going away on business trips (in this case the trips lasted about 4 weeks), I tend to get sick when settling back into the house. Oddly, it didn’t happen during the gap between Gnomedex and Ubercon as I expected.
It did however happen this week. So now I’m walking around the house, zombie like, feeling like my head is stuffed with a wet pillow.
So, things’ll be a little slow until I return from the dead.

Trivia tidbit du jour

Did you know that Canadian coins stick to magnets?
I was carrying around one of the spiffy Google pins I got at Gnomedex in my pocket this weekend, and noted that one of the coins I had stuck to it (quite strongly). Fishing it out, I noticed it was a Canadian quarter.
Having been brought up with the knowledge that “Coins do not stick to magnets” this was quite an interesting discovery.

A game recommendation

While down at Ubercon this weekend (which was a blast, btw – if you like gaming and webcomics, this is definately the place to be. Next Ubercon is in March, 2005!), I sat down in the LAN area during a break from registration, and played Evil Genius for a while.
This is one mighty warped game. You play your standard Evil Genius (straight out of Dr No and the like) building your underground fortress and trying to gain notoriety with your hordes of yellow jumpsuited minions and psychotic sidekicks.
This game was put together by the same folks who did Dungeon Keeper, a game that broke ground by placing you, the player, on the ‘evil’ side of the equation, trying to maintain your dungeon against those pesky heros and wizards who try to wipe out all your creatures. It’s been 5 years since that game came out, and Evil Genius has revamped the concept into a slick, beautifully laid out, modern version of the same concept.
It’s a LOAD of fun, and is making me ponder getting Transgaming Cedega tools in place to try and run the game under Linux.

Off to Ubercon!

I’m off to Ubercon in New Jersey. This is a great gaming convention that I’ve been working with for the last few years. LAN gaming, tabletop fun, and a great vendor area. If you’re in the area, cmon by!

Bicycling, weather, and traffic

I’m a bike rider. I have 2 wonderful bikes – my Haluzak recumbent, and a Giant mountain / trail bike. I’m not one of those rabid riders who feel they must have top of the line equipment, lycra everything, and be emblazoned with screaming corporate colors like a mobile billboard. I ride because I enjoy it.
Today I rode into Somerville, as I am wont to do, to do some work at the Diesel Cafe, a wireless enabled coffee shop in Davis Square. This was my longest ride this summer, and not only did I break my record for a single days ride, it was also my first time riding in the city proper. Read on for some interesting observations.

Continue reading “Bicycling, weather, and traffic” →

A new approach to menus… Fisheye

From another mailing list, someone brought up this little applet (requires Java) that demonstrates a way to make very long pulldon menus navigable, by ‘zooming’ portions of the menus based on mouse position.
Apple used a similar concept with the OSX Dock, which can expand the portion of the menu you’re interested in.
It’s great to see folks thinking about new ways to approach old problems rather than falling back on “this is the way it’s always been done”. How many people really think about pulldown menus in this depth and spend the time to go “Hm. I wonder how this could be improved?”

A good addiction. Wikipedia.

I just introduced my mom to Wikipedia, and spent the next 1/2 hour updating and creating pages relating to fiber arts (her specialty).
If there’s any project that truly represents the spirit of the Internet – global sharing of information for anyone and everyone who wants it – it’s this project.
I encourage everyone who believes that Information Should Be Free, and wants to participate in the group-think that we all dreamed a connected world should be to hi thee to Wikipedia and contribute. Everyone has some information that’s not there already. What do you know that someone else hasn’t documented and shared already?

Bloggers are taking over the media!

Reuters has published a quicky bit about how blogs have become a real force in politics, opinion, and commentary:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. presidential campaign between George W. Bush and John Kerry (news – web sites) has prompted a frenzy of gossip and conspiracy theories among Internet bloggers, hybrid online sites that blend news, gossip and opinion.

In particular, I like how the debunking of the CBS memo is attributed to bloggers who aggressively attacked the authenticity of them. Initially, I was very skeptical of the criticism being levelled at the article, but in this case, the skepticism was valid, the memo was indeed a fake.
The current bruhaha is about George Bush’s ‘bulge’ that showed up in one of the debate pictures. It looks as if GW is wearing something under his jacket, and people are speculating wildly that this was a ‘wire’, and he was being prompted off-stage by Karl Rove. Personally, I think this is pushing it, but who knows how this will pan out.

Palm Browser

On my cell phone (a Kyocera 7135 I’m sure ya’ll are tired of hearing about), I had a wide range of browsers to choose from when doing webstuff. The Kyocera built in something or other was the one I chose first, and it was ‘eh’. Palm phones aren’t known for their screaming horsepower, and trying to render 150k jpegs down to something legible just brought the poor machine to its knees.
I rummaged around and found the Eudoraweb browser. It’s a HECK of a lot faster than the browser I was using, perhaps because it never loads images unless you ask for it. It shows byte progress as pages are downloading, and it’s bookmark system is nice and simple. I’ve switched to using it full time now, browsing Slashdot, my blog, a few other blogs, and various Livejournals seems to work perfectly, as long as you keep in mind this is a 33mghz CPU with 16meg of RAM trying to render pages that were designed for osmething with a lot more horsepower. Useable, but not quite the same as the desktop experience.