First, taken from karenhealey:
On the theory that we could all use a hearty dose of positive energy and general warm fuzziness while we wait, none too patiently, for better times; that *no* one I know is getting told often enough what a good job they are doing just getting through this crazy, lovely world. Take a second, and mention something you like about me (if such a thing exists) in the comments. Then repost this to your own journal, and have some goodness for yourself.

I'm pretty sure that Ive been far more engaged in this election than any other. The presidential race has by far gotten the most newsplay (as usual), but what it's mostly done is bring to light the problems I have with the American political system.

I still dislike the primaries. I dislike the electoral college. I'd much prefer an instant run-off election without any primaries. I'd prefer a popular vote.

Moreso than that, I hate the voter registration and subsequent voter caging tactics that are engaged in. I hate that campaigns feel that they need to pressure votes to vote or not to vote.

Registration should be automatic: if you're a citizen and 18 years old, you're registered to vote. (One state does this.)

Voting should be automatically absentee and thus effectively compulsory. Lacking that, election day needs to be a national holiday. Stop the schools. Stop the working. Give people a chance to get out and vote.

And voting methods needs to be balanced across the states. The fact that they're not even always consist WITHIN a given state means that problems like what happened in Florida in 2k and are even happening now in North Carolina and could likely happen elsewhere over the next week.

It's a travesty that all votes are not created equal, at least on the presidential level. But all politics are local politics. So besides the big races, I've taken a lot of time to look at the city and state measures.

City-side, it reflects a liberal atmosphere and I think I'm for just about all of the measures.

State-wide, there's a couple bonds, a couple energy measures and a few regarding crime. While I don't want to say that anything there is unimportant, there's a sense of sameness to many of the twelve measures. And as cool as I think high speed rail is, I can't say that if 1A doesn't pass I'll be too broken up.

That said, there's two very important measures. Prop 8 is the one that's getting most of the airplay, and it's a reprehensible piece of legislation. On a personal level, I don't think that marriage should be legally defined at all, so in that sense I'm against it. But since it's really a measure about adding a separation of rights between people.

But Prop 8 is actually the lesser of two problems. It's bad, but it's not nearly as bad as Prop 4, which is a very real step in the march to take away rights from women. Every time I try to sit down and write out a concise argument against Prop 4, I find that I'm consumed by anger such that it becomes difficult to think.

If you're an American, go vote next week. Take some time off work (or school), and wait in the line if you need to, but go through with it, regardless of the weather or whatnot. It's a right and a choice that shouldn't be squandered. As much as you might think your vote doesn't matter, it does... especially on the local level.

Otherwise if you see a bunch of things that limit our rights and take away our freedoms pass... you can wonder what might have happened had you gone out to the booth

theonlymegumegu gets the blame.

( It's kinda long, okay )

I believe josienutter was the first I saw do this one today.

* take a picture of yourself right now.
* don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
* post that picture with NO editing.
* post these instructions with your picture.

karenhealey, theonlymegumegu, and ohsochewy also got to it before me.

( Photo! )

From karenhealey.
A meme:

Because we never really know each other as well as we think, in response to this post I'd like you to ask a question. Anything about which you are curious, anything you feel you ought to know about me. Silly, serious, personal, fannish. Ask away. Then, if you want, copy this to your own journal, and see what people don't know about you.

Not really a surprise.

88% Dennis Kucinich
87% Chris Dodd
86% Barack Obama
85% Mike Gravel
84% Bill Richardson
82% Hillary Clinton
81% John Edwards
77% Joe Biden
42% Rudy Giuliani
32% John McCain
27% Ron Paul
25% Mike Huckabee
24% Mitt Romney
17% Tom Tancredo
15% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Also, Rock Band kicks so much ass.

Comment and I will:

1) Tell you why I friended you.
2) Associate you with a song/film.
3) Tell a random fact about you.
4) Tell a first memory about you.
5) Associate you with a character/pairing.
6) Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
7) Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.
8) In return, you must* repost in your LJ.

*for extremely small values of "must"

Another soundtrack meme. I quite like that it's got different things to sync the music to.

( Jeff 2: The Sequel )

In other news, I've been working on an entry that's gotten rather large and complex. I'm pretty happy with it so far.

Also, today was like fucking Christmas. I was just about to fall asleep when the buzzer sounded. Package. One of my roommates was expecting something, so I assumed this was it. Nope. It was my iPod. YAY!

I unpacked it, hooked it up to the computer, and crashed pretty hard.

I got woken up by the buzzer AGAIN. This was the expected package. However, my DnD books were also in. Double YAY!

I figured the 5 or so hours of sleep I got was enough so I've been playing around with the iPod for a couple hours, now.

Since I made my post yesterday, my computer has crashed just once. And I was out of the room. If a computer crashes and no one is there to see it, did it really happen?

Actually, I think reinstalling the processor drivers (of all things) may have solved the problem. Not totally sure, but one can hope.

Unfortunately, my theory that because I have XP Home and not the slightly better XP Pro, the problems are due to XP Home's incredible suckitude have to be thrown out the window. I've got XP Pro... it's just not labelled as such when loading up. It doesn't say Home either. Now, the easy way to tell would have been to look at my computer properties. This didn't occur to me, though. r, Jesse (Roomie #2, for those keeping score at home) had some computer problems last night and asked to borrow my CD so he could check his hard drive. While he did that, we got to see the nice "Windows XP Professional Setup" on that all text blue screen. So that's how I found out.

In any case, there's a costume party meme going around.

( This is your daily dose of braincell death. )

There, that wasn't so bad, now was it?

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English

15% Yankee

10% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

Which is about expected. Yankee is going to be the closest Ameircan English to British English, where I lived for six years. The rest of the hodgepodge is because I also grew up military, so I had exposure to a wide variety of regional dialects.

The only problem I had was with questions 10 (the easy class one, since none of them seemed like familiar phrases to me. I'd probably opt with "cruising course") and the inevitable soda/pop question... since I'm pretty sure I use both rather indiscriminately.

Go to wikipedia and look up your birthday (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births, and one death in your journal, including the year.

So, March 12:

515 BC - Construction is completed on the Temple in Jerusalem.
1881 - Andrew Watson made his Scotland debut as the world's first black international football player and captain. (60+ years ahead of Jackie Robinson. Wow!)
1993 - North Korea nuclear weapons program: North Korea says that it plans to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and refuses to allow inspectors access to nuclear sites. (This last seems to be the most prescient and important event on my birthday during my life.)

Births:
1685 - George Berkeley, Irish theologian (d. 1753)
1922 - Jack Kerouac, American writer (d. 1969)
1953 - Ron Jeremy, American actor

Deaths:
1925 - Sun Yat-sen, Chinese revolutionary, politician (b. 1866)

First a meme.

( Not really a suprise )

As is typical, I've plunged headlong into the Olympics. As is typical, there are some sports I love to watch (figure skating, curling) and others which are mildly interesting, at best (short track, snowboard halfpipe). This is true for the summer games as well (love diving, track and field not so much). I'm not strongly against NBC's coverage. The prime-time show actually works out well for my schedule, and I like Bob Costas. A lot of the commentators annoy me, though. I much preferred to watch snowboard cross on CBC than on NBC, simply because the NBC snowboard commentators were grating.

Also, a lot of the interviews with athletes feel insipid and banal.

One of these years, I'll need to go to an Olympics proper. I'd love to go to Beijing.

I've realized that I'm not really a good national fan. While there are some Americans I cheer for, I actually find myself rooting for non-Americans moreso. Also, I have far less excitement for the possibility of an Olympics in a US city than one in another nation. Since I more or less started watching the Olympics in '94, the two I've been least excited about were Atlanta and Salt Lake. From an admittedly biased position, they were the least impressive, as well.

To give an example of how much the Olympics takes my attention. I got my new computer built and mostly set up last month. However, I'm not using it, yet. There are a few programs I need to get running, but haven't, because I'm spending all my time watching the Olympics. Rather pathetic, really.

I also need to get scholarships reviewed. Soon.

Time to go climbing.

http://kevan.org/johari?name=damienroc

Woo. Bandwagon.

Holee shit.

( And now, a meme )


New computer is together and working. Finally. It only took me about a week to get the OS installed. However, I'm pleased that I did manage to get it all running by myself, with only the occasional help from jrenken. In a lot of cases when I had a problem, he pointed me in the right direction and I managed to get through it.

Only thing I need to do now is to get it to have the proper screen resolution. I made a mistake at that point in the install process, and now it's stuck at 1024x768. However, I use a 1280x1024 LCD... going at a lower resolution is really, really bad.

I'll probably spend tomorrow setting up the onboard software. Already it feels significantly more useable than the last time I tried Linux (~5 years ago.) Some things will take getting used to, but I think the 4 screen layers could be very useful for organisation. Use one for work, one for writing, one for general stuffs, etc...

Stolen from karenhealey.

Ask me for my Top Five. Any category, any topic.