Keeping In Touch

There’s a Remembrance Day ceremony (sponsored by Digital Moose, a Canadian ex-pat group) up in San Francisco tomorrow that we’re going to try and get to. For as militaristic a society as the US seems to be sometimes, you’d think they’d honour Veterans’ Day/Memorial Day better. I think Canada does a much better job of it.

So I got back in time to vote, and I did. I now see the humour in Scott Adams’ ending every story about something stupid or weird that he did with “And then I voted!” I thought I’d just be voting for the Senate and Congressional reps, but this vote was for a lot of stuff. There was the State Governor and Lieutenant Governor, a schwack* of judicial types, a bunch of other state-level positions, some schoolboard representatives, the Mayor of San Jose, some miscellaneous legal propositions, and several bond propositions that, to my mind, deserved a more thorough and careful examination than voters are likely to give them.**

I’m glad I listen to NPR during my commute and therefore had at least an idea of the candidates and the issues. This helped too.

I have to admit that a big incentive to vote was to see what kind of interface my district was using for its touchscreen voting system. I thought the screens were pretty well designed, actually, though I’ve heard reports of crashes because of the sensitivity of the screens (if you weren’t very careful to only touch it in one place, i.e. if you had mobility/stability problems and let your hand brush the screen as you were tapping your choice, it would freeze). I think one especially has to watch for problems like that, since they just don’t show up as often in controlled tests where everyone’s being careful and maybe isn’t from a broad enough demographic group.

War brides renew vows - this made me get a little misty-eyed.

Very, very short stories – I was talking about this with someone last weekend. Good stuff. Personal favourite, because it doesn’t rely on excessive punctuation or sentence fragments: “He read his obituary with confusion.”

Hot Library Smut – one for my sister. Um, this isn’t really smut, Mom, don’t worry.

Chow Magazine – Mmmm, I’m hungry

Shoes - Why do I like these so much? Can I justify spending the money?

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* What’s the correct collective noun for judges? A gavel? A wig?

** I didn’t pay as much attention to Canadian politics as I should have, but I don’t think bonds were as popular a thing to do in Saskatchewan, at least. Or maybe they just weren’t voted on? But these all involved incurring a really massive amount of debt.