first in the nation, for the first time.

Finding the polling place in our new home town was easy...all I had to do was to follow the increasingly thick path of yard signs until I reached the parking lot in the middle of the Great Yard Sign Forest.

The habit of plastering yard signs all over the roads is still somewhat amusing to me.  Are there really people who have no clue who they're going to vote for right until they drive to the polling place, and who make a decision based on the signs along the way?

"Okay, I'll just vote for whoever has the most signs up.  That's thirty-three for Paul, thirteen for Romney....guess it's Ron Paul today."

Or maybe it's like one of those commercials where they just repeat the name of the place as often as possible so it'll get burned into your memory?

"Huckabee....Huckabee...Huckabee...must vote for Huckabee."

Anyway, voting was (dare I say it?) fun.  Very small-towney, with the polling place set up in the top floor of the local library on Main Street.  I made my little mark next to Ron Paul's name, for what it's worth.  Unless Dr. Paul decides to go independent if he doesn't get the Republican nomination (and let's get realistic--he won't), that'll be the only time I'll get to vote for my candidate this year.  Come November, it'll be nose-holding time once more.

we vote tomorrow.

We registered to vote a few days after we moved in, so we'll be able to vote in the primary tomorrow.  Robin and I are both registered as "Undeclared", which means that we can decide on the day of the primary whether we want to vote in the (R) or (D) primary.

The field on both sides leaves me mostly cold.  On the Democrat side of the ballot, we have a power-hungry shrew whose main bribe is the promise of "free" health care for everyone, a Rorschach candidate who has so little substance that his main thing is the voicing of vague generalities so everyone may project what they want onto him. a blow-dried trial lawyer-turned-Marxist, and a handful of nuts.

On the Republican side, we have a RINO from NY who was for gun control before he was against it, an actor who's a lot like the current President except with a  deeper voice, a former Mass. governor who apparently believes in the wrong Jesus (or believes in him the wrong way), an authoritarian war hero with a temper problem, and yet another former governor of Arkansas who "doesn't believe in evolution", and who apparently believes in the right Jesus (or believes in him the right way), and a handful of nuts.

I think it's not much of a secret that we'll be voting on the (R) ballot tomorrow, and that our two votes are going to go to the only guy in the race who does more than give lip service to the Constitution, even if that means the majority of the population sorts him in with the handful of nuts.  (That would be the Congressman from Texas, Dr. Paul.)

On a side note: something about Mike Huckabee is deeply unsettling to me.  Every time I see him, or listen to one of his speeches, he reminds me of Greg Stillson from Stephen King's The Dead Zone--the "aw, shucks" populist who is a raving nutcase underneath the rolled-up sleeves and the winning smile.  Maybe it's the "I don't believe in evolution" thing, or the fact that he once told his fellow Baptists that "we need to take this country back for Christ", or the fact that he's supported by the Evangelicals (how'd the last candidate you backed work out for you and the country, folks?), but something about Huckabee definitely rubs me the wrong way.

On yet another side note: does anyone else find it amusing that the conservatives openly wonder whether Romney could be loyal to the U.S. and the Constitution before the Mormon church, or whether Giuliani could be loyal to the U.S. before the Catholic church, or whether Obama isn't really a sleeper Muslim who wants to impose Sharia on all of us...but they don't even think about asking that question when an ordained Baptist minister enters the race--one who's already publically stated he wants to "take the country back for Christ"?

Anyway, I have no illusions about Dr. Paul's chances to become the next President--the message of limited government (and by extension, limited government loot) is highly unpopular, and the country isn't buying what he's selling.  But at least we won't have wasted our votes by voting for the lesser of two evils yet again.

idealism meets reality.

Apparently, the "One Laptop Per Child" project is faltering, because Intel just pulled its support.

The article linked has a picture of two little Nigerian kids looking at the OLPC computer, which is being trialled in Nigeria at the moment.

Call me a cynic, but my first thought at seeing the picture was the mental picture of a little eight-year-old Nigerian boy, hunched over that hand-cranked laptop at the kitchen table, and typing furiously:

"Dear Sir,

I am Chief Accountant with the National Oil Nigeria
PLC (N/Oil) and member of 5 MAN Contract Executive
Review Panel (comprising 2 Snr.Staff of CBN and 3
Snr,Staff Of (N/Oil) set up by present Civilian Regime
of President Obasanjo. So far we have come across a
surplus of the sum of US$27M.(Twenty-seven Million
Dollars)which was as a result of deliberate
over-invoicing of certain contracts awarded by
Contract Award Committee of the cooperation..."

overheard on the radio this morning.

Driving the sprogs to their new vet, I listened to the radio, and apparently there were a bunch of college football games played just a few days ago.  Seems they all go by some variation of "Bowl"--Rose Bowl, Cheetos Bowl, you probably know what I'm talking about.

One of the local radio folks had the idea for an addition to the college football bowls--have one played annually at the football field up here at Dartmouth, and call it the "Hypothermia Bowl".

i have made snow my bitch.

We got more snow yesterday and the day before that. It seems that this past December was the snowiest on record in NH since 1880-something.

The good news is that keeping the ice and snow off the trouble spot (and a few tubes of silicone on the backed-out roofing screws) seems to have stopped the leakage. If we're still drippage-free by the weekend, Quinn can move back into his room.

After paying the snow plow guy a nice chunk of beer money for his repeated services, we went out to Sears in West Lebanon today. We got a 28" two-stage self-propelled snow blower, and I've been trying it out for the last hour or so. That puppy throws the hell out of some snow, that's for sure. It only slows down when you try to clear more than a foot of packed snow, but on new snow, it roars through a foot of the stuff like it's not even there.

Another nine hundred dollars...but I'm thinking it'll pay for itself after the thirtieth time I clear my own driveway, instead of paying Mr. Plow $30 to do it each time.

bread and circuses.

Where the frak does it say anywhere in the Constitution that the government has the authority to take money out of my pocket and give it to to other folks to make sure their Teevees don't stop working?

I think as inept as folks working in government usually are, some of them know exactly where to spend the cash to keep the masses quiet and docile.  If you shut off the flow of the electronic opium to the lower-income households, the peasants are likely to a.) riot and do other nefarious things outside of the house due to sheer boredom, or b.) actually go to the library, pick up a book, and start forming an opinion that has a more solid foundation than a ten-second newsbite.  Neither of those scenarios are terribly comforting to The Authorities.

on primitive computing.

A few days ago, I started a little experiment.

Before we moved to New Hampshire, I sold or gave away most of my small collection of vintage Macintosh systems. The only ones I retained were a Powerbook 3400c (because it's still useful with its built-in CD-ROM and network connection, because I have an entire spare 3400c for parts in case something breaks, and because it'll make a dandy first computer for Quinn), and a Color Classic (because it's cute as a button.)

Now, the Color Classic is an obsolete computer by any standard of the definition. While the Powerbook can run Office 2001, Internet Explorer, and other modern software, the little Color Classic doesn't have the wheaties to cruise the web or serve up YouTube videos. It's an all-in-one akin to the original Macintosh, a small beige box with a floppy drive and a very sharp and crisp 10" Sony color monitor built into the case. The main processor runs at 16 MHz (even cell phones have more powerful CPUs these days), and the system has 10MB RAM and an 80MB hard drive. It runs Mac OS 7.1, and very little else.

When I purchased my Alphasmart Neo, I discovered the benefits of minimalist computing. The Neo only does text--no web browsing, no email, no WiFi, nothing but you and whatever it is you want to commit to paper. In the six months since I bought it, my word count has increased dramatically, because the Neo's One-Trick Pony nature allowed me to concentrate just on my work, without distracting me with Instant Messages or tempting me with games or a Wikipedia safari.

Well, I took another look at the Color Classic, which had been stored in my closet since I got it for free from one of fellow Robin's Ph.D. candidates at UT a few years back. Then I realized that the little Mac might have the same decluttering effect on the creative process, since it couldn't run serve up any modern distractions, either.

So, I dusted it off, replaced a dead PRAM battery that prevented it from booting up (the original half-AA cell had finally run dry after 14 years), and fired the little thing up.

And you know what? There's something liberating about that old technology. You don't get Google or streaming video, but that little Color Classic boots from a cold start to the OS 7 desktop in ten or twelve seconds, and shuts down instantly. I spent a few hours on the Internet looking for a suitable word processor that would let me save my stuff in a format the Windows box would understand (I do my final formatting and printing from Office 2007 on the modern machine), and found one called Nisus Writer that actually fits on a single floppy.

I wasn't expecting too much from Nisus Writer. I mean, how sophisticated can a program be that fits on a floppy disk and takes only 1MB of system memory to run?

Pretty sophisticated, it turns out. Nisus Writer, last updated in the early 1990s, lets me do everything I usually do in MS Word. It has a thesaurus, a spell checker, word count, and all the formatting features I routinely use. It even opens previously edited documents to the precise location where you left off, which is something that Word still hasn't learned even in the 2007 version. In addition, Nisus Writer saves its files in plain text format, which can be copied to a floppy and then opened by Word (or any other word processor) on the XP box without any loss in formatting.

Well, if you use a piece of hardware for a specific purpose only, and it does that job as well as any modern hardware, can you really brand it as "obsolete"?

Now the Color Classic is sitting on my desk as the in-house writing machine. I still use the Neo whenever I go out, or feel the need to move around in the house, but the Color Classic now serves as the screen-and-keyboard version of the Neo. It doesn't take up much space, it looks good on the desk, it's just as useful as any other computer for the limited task of word processing, and it's fun to use.  Electronics recycling at its best, no?