Done!

It took some re-learning of rarely used skills, but my closing night goodie for the cast members is done. Now I can sleep.

Time out for Hosing

One of the test cases was written incorrectly, it said to put together four sets of video channels, each with 48 programs on it. So I did. This is about 2/3 more bandwidth than the machine can handle, so it is responding painfully slowly to my attempts at recovery. The test was supposed to say make four sets for a total of 48 programs.

Which means I have time to blog while I wait for it to recognize the HACF command (Halt And Catch Fire, for those of you who don't remember the first Intel processors. Or maybe it was Zilog. Zylog? I forget).

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<soapbox>
My friends seem to lose track of the fact that the Democratic nomination process is not an election in the sense that the Presidential vote will be. The process does not have popular elections in all 50 states and however many territories there are, and the rules for the process are set by the party, not by any objective government body. The rules can be changed by the delegates to the convention, and by the party officers (such as that silly ruling seating all the FL delegates but only giving them half a vote each). The candidates can work to change the rules in their favor, they can even sue the party if they think the rules shafted them (or just want to gain a political advantage). It's not over till it's over.

In the tradition of Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Mussolini, Mao, Franco and Marcos, the Republicans have decided to keep their nomination process simple with only one name on the ballot. This is not the way democracy is supposed to work, and definitely not a process the Democrats should emulate.

I've been a delegate to a state Presidential nomination convention where one candidate had a substantial lead, and I was pledged to another candidate. Despite the foregone conclusion, the convention officials allowed all of us to have a voice, and when the vote came we felt we had been given a fair shake, even though we lost. I'd like to know that all the delegates to the Demo convention get the same fair deal, because if they don't, the process is broken, and it sucks to be them.
</soapbox>

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BASFA was fun last night. For only the second time ever, I needed to put more than $1 in the pun jar. There was a lot of that going around. As a test, I put a CD into the auction for a new singer which has a track that's getting almost constant airplay on the commercial rock stations. No one recognized it, I think it sold for 25 cents. I bought an item in the name of the Computer History Museum which I'll give to johnnyeponymous next time I see him. It's like a hand held Babbage engine.

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I voted this morning. As a non-partisan, all that was on the ballot were the two state "eminent domain" issues, a Whisman School District bond measure (which just continues one in place which expires every 8 years), a superior court judge (I voted for the only candidate who is not a prosecutor) an unopposed candidate for water district commissioner (I didn't vote) and Liz Kniss, running unopposed for county supe. I wrote my own name in.

Mountain View had primaries for city council, but they are all partisan, sadly. IMHO, city-level politics should be non-partisan.

It was a heavyweight paper ballot. Take a pen and connect the two parts of an arrow to indicate your vote. Weird.

===    ===>
needs to become
========>
for a completed vote.

I much prefer touch screen.

Lo-Fi

Well, it seems that the AT&T wi-fi service at Starbucks is only available to folks who have AT&T internet (DSL) at home. dave_gallaher was right, there's no connection between the MediaNet service which lets me use my cell phone as a 420kbs modem and the hot spot service which would let me use my laptop's wifi card as a normal ~54Mbps connection. Boo hiss.

After 45 minutes on the phone with AT&T customer support & wifi support, it's obvious none of their southern belles have a clue about wifi hotspots. Very nice young women, they tried to be helpful, they even asked others around them, but the clue-by-4 needed to answer the question of "what service do I need to buy from AT&T to be able to use an AT&T wifi hot spot" has not been used on any of their phone staff.

It also has not been used on the Starbucks staff, or on either att.com or starbucks.com webmasters.

When you connect to the ATTWIFI SSID at Starbucks, it says you should have the opportunity to create an account, either a day pass or a monthly, but when I hit that button, I get the T-mobile page which says call AT&T. Obviously for expediency, AT&T has piggybacked onto the existing T-mobile service and stupidly trusts their arch rival to do right by them.

So, I will keep the T-mobile account, and use my phone modem for away-from-hotspot locations. No way am I getting slow DSL at home just to access wifi elsewhere, especially when Comcast gives me 16Mbps at home for a few pennies more.

Grrrr

eBay has serious problems with making what ought to be routine things very difficult to find. There was a glitch which put someone else's item on my seller's page. It took dozens of clicks before I could get email to them about it, and then they said contact a live help session, which took 10 minutes for them to respond to, and the person on the other side was very slow reading a simple "kill this auction" request. They now do not let you kill an auction which has bids on it, or is less than 12 hours from ending. After she got her head out of wherever it was, it only took a minute to get the auction killed and my account credited.

So of course I changed my password - but they reset it, and now eBay is not recognizing the newly changed password. When I try to go to the "change password" link which they emailed to me, after I enter all the security question answers, it asks for my password!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

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Went to Walmart, mostly for kitty litter, but also got some small glow lights to make backstage safer. And I picked up both parchment and card stock paper for my cast closing night gift project. Parchment looked off-color so I used the card stock. Everything printed nicely, envelopes are stuffed and labeled, and now that's done. Whee!

Reviews for the show have poured into Artsopolis, they are short but 5-star. The Campbell paper wedged in a short review, it did not mention me by name and was hidden next to the public notices page. But it was also 5-star. I expect that's all we'll get, what with it being the final weekend.

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Meanwhile, my trip to Seattle got shorn of the day trip to Victoria, since it is too much of a time sink for such a short visit, and too big a hassle for my not very mobile parents. don't know what we'll do instead, but I'm sure my brother-in-law will think of something. They've been to most of the usual tourist sites, and after all, my sister grew up there and her hubby worked for Boeing.

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Which reminds me, Saturday the 21st I will be on my own, so if any of my Seattle friends want to get together, drop me a line.