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I’m not sure either party should be counting on the youth vote to push the election their way. I was 18 not that long ago and I remember the first time I got to vote in a presidential election (Bush-Clinton, 1992) and I had a lot of buddies that were “definitely going to vote” only to get distracted by a intense game of Nintendo NFL Hockey and one of whom missed his graduation ceremony (which his family attended) after a night of celebration. I’ll wait till after the election to see if the youth vote swung the election.

So, if it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and looks like a duck, it’s NOT a duck? Bush, apparently, is now for same sex civil unions (if the state allows it), but want’s marriage to be between a man and a woman. So what is the difference between a civil union and a marriage? Aside from the name, not much.

A lot of Kerry supporters are pushing the “Incumbent Rule“, in which the undecided voters will break for the challenger in an election with an Incumbent. The logic is that the undecided voters already know the incumbent and if they are still undecided, it must be because they are less then happy with them. For this election, the incumbent is Bush and the challenger is Kerry (ignoring Nader, et al). It seems like a sound theory and one that may play out for this election.

But for subsequent elections (possibly 2008, 2012, etc.) I wonder if there won’t be some sort of Heisenberg effect on those elections (yes it’s an over simplification of the theory, but most people understand the concept). In other words, by observing this phenomenon and postulating it’s effects on elections, are we changing the results? Will people, under observation and with their knowledge of the ‘Incumbent Rule’ going to vote differently? It may happen in this election, or it may be that the Rule is wrong.

8 more days.

Okay, so I bought a radioSHARK recently(and reviewed it). Of course, as is the case with it all, soon after I bought it, I found a program called ReplayRadio, which recorded Internet radio streams in real time. Fortunately, I didn’t like the it that much, so I returned it and continued to play with my radioSHARK.

So today, I’m in downtown for breakfast at a local cafe. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a wait to get in, so we wandered into the junk-shop next door. Most of it consisted of junk (hence the name), but as we were getting ready to leave, I spotted an ICOM PCR100, a computer controlled radio tuner, sitting on a shelf. It was $20. Of course I had to buy it. I knew I was taking a chance it might not working, being in a junk shop and all.

After a very filling breakfast, we got home and I sat down at my desk. Unwrapping my new toy, I plugged it in and download TalkPCR. To my amazement, the thing worked. And it worked well. Given that it can tune 0.01mhz to 1.3mhz, it’s reception capabilities are better then the radioSHARK. A quick search of the Internet show a starting price of $125. $20 is a good deal.

I find it most amusing that in the two weeks since I got the radioSHARK (un-returnable to the Apple Store), that I find two products (one good, one bad), that offered radioSHARK-like capabilities. God is laughing at me.

I got published!

Why is it so difficult to find a digital music player with bookmarking capability?  The iPod’s and Dell’s of the world just seemed to have missed the boat on this capability.  It’s not that difficult to add the code to a player.  I know, I added the bookmarking capability to the wonderful open-source project Rockbox and use it on my stalwart little Archos Recorder 20.  Unfortunately, my Archos is showing signs of wear and I’m afraid it may die on me.  In anticipation of its demise, I started looking for a replacement.  I really want to move beyond MP3 and into the later generation compression techniques.  But each player I look at fails to provide anything beyond a rudimentary resume feature.  The iPod comes the closest with a semi-permanent resume functionality on a special type of audio file (Audible.com files).  Nothing truly useful, nothing a student would be able to use to mark a teachers recorded lectures.  In the end, I understand the logic, these are MUSIC players, not audio book players, and therefore the files don’t need to be bookmarked, but this the logic is a cop out, forcing users into a working model conceived by a group of engineers.  Bookmarking is a value add feature and once in, gives the user a better experience.  Ah well, I’ll see if I can each out a bit more life out of my Archos.  Where’s my soldering iron?

I’ve read a number of articles on the inaccuracies (lies?) in the recent debates and it hit me, why not have a realtime fact check in place? It’s a bit naive, I know, but image the debate is time shifted 15 minutes, during which time, the figures that are spoken by the candidates would be checked against the facts and displayed on the screen. Imagine Kerry saying that “the president has presided over an economy where we’ve lost 1.6 million jobs” and up pops a block saying “the economy is still down by 1.6 million private sector jobs since Bush took office, but the drop in total payroll employment — including teachers, firemen, policemen and other federal, state and local government employees — is down by much less than that — 821,000″; or when Bush says “these drug discount cards, and they’re working” and up pops “But in fact they’re not working nearly as well as originally advertised”. Of course there would be bias in what was reported and it would probably work better in an interactive setting (i.e. on a PC) instead of on TV, but it would be a good way of keeping the politicians in check. One can only dream.

I was listening to Lars Larson today as I drove into work. It was actually a sound bite the KXL does at fixed point in the day that Lars states his opinion about something. For the most part he’s relatively logical in his statements, but today he said that because Saddam was acting like he had WMDs by buying banned materials, that gave us the right to go in and take him out. To an extent, I agree with him, though I’m sure we differ on how quickly we should have gone it. The part of the clips statement that really got me annoyed was Lars’ analogy for the masses, which I’m horrible paraphrasing: In the United States, if a person pretends to have a gun, the police will kill them, therefore because . Um, wow, that’s a strong statement. Using the same logic, if a felon buys some bullets, that apparently gives the police the right to shoot him, regardless to if they showed a gun. Of course, if you wanted to really take this analogy to it’s logical end, the police could justify killing someone because they knew he had a weapon. How did they know? Well, because they sold it to him. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with Lars, I get upset when people use poor logic.