Dear People of Earth:

Please stop forwarding me that damned email about the Queen revoking our independence. It was only marginally funny the first time.

Yours,

Fedward

link (15 nov)

Unrelated to that last entry, and on a more serious note, tonight's Astrogirl reminded me that I'd just had a similar thought to hers.

Don't vote the lesser of two evils. Don't not vote. Go vote, and vote your heart and mind. If you believe in Woody or Shrub, by all means go vote for them, but don't vote for one of them because you think he'll do the least harm.

The system isn't going to get changed until it's shown not to work. It's most likely that whichever one of them "wins" the election will do so without a majority of the popular vote (Clinton didn't have a majority in either '92 or '96). The Electoral College is built so that there's always a clear "winner" in a contest such as this. The problem here is that neither one of the two major party candidates has the support of half the people (who bother to vote) in the country. We have to choose from this?

The reaction in recent elections has been that an ever smaller percentage of the electorate actually vote. So the "winner" will receive the support of less than half of half of the people who have a say (that's less than a quarter of eligible voters, in other words). The rest can't be bothered to vote either way. This is why it's important to realize that voting for a candidate you believe in isn't throwing your vote away at all.

If enough of the disaffected vote their hearts, the Electoral College as we know it will cease to exist as of that election. If the Electoral College fails to nominate a President (if no candidate accumulates a simple majority of Electors), the vote devolves to the House of Representatives, which is sure to vote on party lines -- quite possibly not representing the will of the people at all. Scandal will ensue. If a third party candidate carries a crucial state and the Electors bolt as a result, scandal will ensue.

I'm waiting for the day when neither major party candidate garners more votes than the third party candiates combined. That's a truer representation of the will of the people. Scandal will ensue then too.

link (2 nov)

Look! Something shiny!

I pulled out the laptop and figured I'd see if I could fix some compatibility problems so I'd be able to use it on the plane when I fly to Holland in a couple weeks. First step was to check for Windows 2000 compatibility for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (good golly, is it a time suck, but I haven't played it since I upgraded the laptop from 98 to 2K). I downloaded an update from M$ that's supposed to make it work. I haven't yet tried to install the game, so we'll see.

The second step was to check on what was wrong with the DVD player. When we'd gone to Raleigh/Durham for Amber's wedding, I'd brought along the DVD of Fargo that I'd borrowed from Amanda (just so I could give it back), and popped it into the drive to see if the DVD software actually worked under 2K. The video looked fine, but there was this constant clicking noise coming over the speakers, so I figured DVDs would be a loss that weekend and didn't pursue the problem. Tonight I figured I'd pursue it (the in-flight movies are Gladiator on the way out (which I might actually watch), and The Patriot and Frequency on the way back (feh)), since I can presumably download drivers and software easily over the DSL, and not so easily over the Atlantic. So I popped in the nearest DVD, Run Lola Run, in order to test it.

It worked fine.

I got sucked in. Again.

I'm glad I bought it, but I can't press Play without ending up watching the whole movie. It's that compelling.

So here I am approx. 80 minutes later, having done nothing to fix the DVD software. And this time it just works, possibly as a side effect of my near-fatal error earlier today.

I was trying to get the Visor software installed so I could actually sync up at work again (lost that capability with the W2K upgrade), and couldn't get the system to install the driver as a USB device. So I was looking around in the Device Manager, and I deleted an "Unknown Device."

The system promptly went to hell. It lost the display driver, (luckily, the external monitor worked), then it farted and said that dependent devices had prevented that operation from happening, then it set about discovering all my devices all over again.

Then it said I needed to reboot. Then it did the device discovery all over again. Then it said I needed to reboot again. Then it discovered a couple more devices. Then it worked, strangely. And after that I got the Visor driver to install. I only lost about an hour doing all this.

Now as long as I don't look at the Hardware Wizard (it thinks I have three of most devices, and six of a few of them), I can go on believing that Windows 2000 works.

Now to try Alpha Centauri ...

link (1 nov)