Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"It's not much of a conversation if it is only in English." -- Hywel Williams

I woke up way too early, to a liquid sound. After months of making "going to hack up a hairball now" sounds every week or so but never producing anything, Perrine threw up in the hall this morning. Fortunately in an easy-to-clean-up spot.

I must get more sleep before this evening, but for the moment I'm _a^w_a^k_e so I went back to the process of recovering my deleted email. Right now I'm focussing on this month. Some 1400-1500 messages (note that this does not include mailing lists, or stuff already filtered as spam). But 500+ of those are notifications of LiveJournal comments, and another 700 were spam that got through my wimpy filter, so I'm left with a few hundred to go through and see which still need to be filed or responded to or acted upon, and which I'd already taken care of.

I missed the late night news and the local evening news, so the last weather forecast I'd heard was Thursday, and I thought we were due a "light dusting" of snow "fluffy enough to push off the sidewalk with a broom" on this pass and three to ten centimeters tonight or tomorrow. Well it didn't get deep and it looks fluffy from here (I haven't gone outside yet), but it's more than a dusting. It's actually enough to look kind of impressive until I spot a section edge-on and can see that it's only a couple of centimeters. Pretty. It's still fluttering down in a desultory "no you can't take my plate away I'm still nibbling" manner; most of fell by the time I finally fell asleep, I think. (I tossed and turned a while before nodding off.)

Oh, as soon as I typed that "still nibbling" crack, it started coming down faster. Sorry; didn't know it was listening. (Still not coming down heavy, but it's no longer "oh, there's a flake [pause] and another [pause] and three over there". It's now light but continuous.) Anyhow, it's pretty. It doesn't look deep enough to scrozzle traffic or cancel the gig tonight; I hope I'm right about both of those.

I got more mail addressed to 1723 W. Hollins. I wonder whether that's where the missing Christmas card from a friend in Texas, with a photo of her child in it, went. (She asked me on the phone whether I'd gotten it, which is why I know it's missing.) When I get misdelivered mail, I circle the street name, write "misdelivered" on it, and drop it back in the mail stream, figuring it'll probably get redelivered to the right street the next day, but I never get anything similarly scribbled on; so I wonder: are the folks over on Hollins and whoever lives on East Lombard (that's a sorting error rather than a carrier error -- different zip code) not bothering to try to get my misplaced mail to me, do nearly all the mistakes happen in one direction, or does the carrier for this route quietly trash all evidence of mistakes instead of correcting them? The first answer sounds most likely... Among the misdelivered mail I've gotten have been bills (of course), letters from medical facilities which may or may not have been bills (and I even had someone from the "make sure babies of poverty-level new mothers get adequate care" department of one of the local hospitals ring my doorbell once because of a similar address mixup), and various ominous-looking documents with the carbon inside so they can be printed on a computer already sealed, from the court system. On the one hand, the USPS has a pretty damned good track record nationwide, so I can see why the courts would feel trusting about ordinary first-class delivery. On the other hand, a few individual post offices and sorting facilities are real screwups, and I wonder how understanding the courts are to people in SouthWest Baltimore who don't get their time-sensitive documents in the mail.

Back to sorting through the last few weeks of email. Then a nap. Oh, and I'm getting reminded that I have to feed the cat.

vvalkyri just posted a New York Times editorial about the danger of electronic voting machines. This shouldn't be news to anyone on LiveJournal at this point -- URLs and text of blogs and online media discussing the problem have been floating around for months -- but I'd wondered why I wasn't hearing about it on the evening news. When a columnist in the NYT writes about it, does that mean folks will start paying attention? I dunno. I hope so.

This isn't just hypothetical "the security and testing aren't good enough" hand-wringing. Anomolous vote counts have happened in real -- not test or demo -- real elections in 2002.

Somebody on my friends list (I meant to keep track, but I also meant to post this the day they did (hey, at least you know it made an impression on me and I'm spreading the meme, right?)) mentioned a link (probably via BoingBoing?) to a page suggesting:

"Avoid the questionable Diebold machines. Register as an absentee voter so that you can have a receipt of your vote. In many states, this takes quite a while so DO IT NOW. [I'll still love you even if you vote for someone i don't like, but i'll be very angry with you for not voting.]"

MyAbsenteeBallot.com provides a more thorough set of information about casting absentee ballots in various jurisdictions.

I'm not sure which type of voting machine they'll be using in Baltimore. I'd commented that if they use the electronic ones, I'll have to arrange (now) to be out of the state on election day so as to qualify to use an absentee ballot, but that was before I read the comments about whether/how absentee ballots will be counted. (The instructions for Baltimore say an absentee ballot "will be counted" provided that it is recieved on time; nothing about the normal ballotting having to be close... There's still the matter of how they're counted. That they can be verified is good, but only if they will be verified.)

Get people talking about the problem of improper voting machines. I don't think the problem is going to get fixed until enough people make a big enough fuss.

Oh, so that's what that smell is...

I smelled a faint "very hot electronics" smell for the past few hours but couldn't figure out where it was coming from.

Then I happened to turn to my right and notice that the CPU fan on the 100 MHz Pentium in boygeorge (the Windows NT machine) wasn't turning.

No performance flakiness out of the ordinary, and once I jiggled a wire the fan started again, so maybe, if I'm lucky, no harm done [knocks wood].