Patrick’s Rants

You might find that the machines are less than perfect.
The Columbus Dispatch : County’s voting machines examined

Where my wife works management has decided that they want a single type face for all of their documents, Arial 12 pt. bold. She told me that she recently began bucking the “corporate line” and started mixing in Helvetica. I expect her to be called out it any moment now.

The State of New Jersey was going to send some voting machines to Ed Felten to check out. The voting machine company, Sequoia Voting System sent him an email threatening to “protect their intellectual property rights” which you can read on Felten’s blog Freedom To Tinker.

The Brad Blog goes into more detail, even encouraging the readers to contact the New Jersey Attorney General to impress upon her the importance of elections that are open, error free and not subject to being subverted. Here’s my email:

I understand that your office has declined to order testing of electronic voting machines manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems. Based upon reports available across the internet, Sequoia machines have errors that may affect election outcomes. These machines need to be verified to ensure that democracy is not subverted. Your state, as most states, has open records laws. We should expect no less from our voting machines; that our vote is counted by observing the proper operation of the voting machines.

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit digging around an Access database since starting my new job. I’ve gone in and made changes to table structure, queries, reports, etc. Access is a great program. (heh- sure) I’ve learned that you can’t read Microsoft’s instructions and learn anything - that takes external web sites. I once wanted to be able to duplicate certain records in the database and Microsoft’s help excruciatingly detailed how to write a macro. A day later I found there is a built in function that requires as many as three lines of code instead of the 40+ that Microsoft’s web site was forcing me to write.
(more…)

I have a couple of posts that I have forgotten what it was I was going to write. This one is about the weird Scientologists. It’s mostly a collection of links, but man are there some weird stories at the end of this fishing line.
Church Calls Protesters ‘Cyber Terrorists’ (As opposed the the Xenu “real life terrorists”)
‘What Drives Me’: Tom Cruise’s True Mission This is no top gun mission - we’re talking real life.
Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack Something I would never condone. Exposure to the light is far worse for Scientology.
Check out the Operation Clambake site for a complete debunking of the bunkful “religion”. Don’t overlook Wikipedia’s Operation Clambake entry or the Slashdot story about the “emeter” being pulled from Ebay.

#2 is at it again.

She received an email and then began telling me that the system was going to be down for maintenance. Before I took a look at the email, I understood that the “system” was going to be down for maintenance at 6 PM, which I thought was inconsiderate since I’m there until 7 PM and use the network fairly heavily (everything is in client-server architecture). She even made a big show of shutting her computer completely off at 5 PM so as to not mess up the maintenance being done.

The email sent out the users advised that the District Exchange server, hosted by NAU, was going to be offline for maintenance from 6 PM through midnight last night. We have been “forced” off of the Outlook clients for all of our users throughout the District and have to connect using WBA - the web interface. So, since I don’t generally connect to District email (I refused an email account) and even if I did the machines undergoing maintenance are not even contained within the District I left my computer running. I really hope I didn’t mess up the upgrade or whatever.

Ask Slashdot:

How to Convince Non-IT Friends that Privacy Matters?

The answer is you can’t:

Identity Theft Is Real

But I keep tilting at windmills none-the-less.

I just stumbled across a couple of sites that I hope will be able to get things really moving for me on my Sansa e250. I bought a MicroSD card and haven’t figured out how to put music on it yet, but it looks like the Rockbox project has a nice replacement for the firmware and there’s a nice “fluffy” article on linux.wordpress.com describing how to use the e200 on Linux. I say “fluffy” only because he didn’t point to the firmware zip files (which I would love to see. I bricked the last one I tried to update.)

I have been searching around for a free solution to a minor problem. The problem is snow days or snow delays. The school district posts snow day schedules online but there are lots of people who don’t bother to check the web site, or listen to the radio or watch TV including some of our own employees. A “simple” solution would be a system that first would alert our drivers that the schedule has been changed through text messaging. That way up to 80 phone calls could be averted in favor of 80 text messages. Advancing such a system to begin alerting parents would save hundreds if not thousands of phone calls answered,

“Transportation, school’s canceled”

whereby there is usually one of two responses. The first,

“Is it a two hour delay?”

“No. School’s canceled.”

“School’s canceled?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. OK.”

<click>
Or, just <click>
I envision a system that allows people to register their phone number with multiple levels, Transportation employees who tend to be up earlier and might need different kinds of alerts, other district employees and parents. I’ve found some programs that would allow some of this and others might be able to be bent to work, but nothing “out of the box” so to speak especially when you consider that I’m also thinking that a web based system would be best - and our web server is a Mandriva box so it has to be a *nix based solution… that kills the $29.95 solution from Notepage which looks like it covers most everything except, of course, the the fact that it runs on Windows . And digging a little more I notice that at least one solution has a per-pager licensing structure.
I suppose a package that will send a text to the phone through an email interface could work, but the mailing list solutions that I’m familiar with (Mailman) require some sort of two way authentication that may or may not work so well when we’re talking about phones and text messages.

If anyone has experience with a Linux based solution that isn’t too cumbersome, I’m interested in hearing about it.

I’m kidding of course, it’s not Microsoft that did this, they just made the “speculated tools” in the (so far) biggest bank meltdown in Europe.
How to lose $7.2bn with just a few Basic skills | The Register