Kaaaaaaahhhhhn!

I HATE CENTURYTEL!
Mood: stressed
Music: None

Sick, Interesting Picture

I'm feeling really sick today. Little voice, sneezing, shivers. Ick.

Anyway, I was reading through some NASA Mars footage, and found some interesting stuff - and surprisingly little commentary on it, so far. This picture is either a fake, a photograph of something shiny that looks remarkably like water, or a Mars Puddle. Any ideas? A few people have commented on the very different texture of the block in the foreground, also. To my eyes, it could be eroded volcanic rock - BUT, why do the two rocks have erosion patterns in different directions? A lot of conspiracy nuts say that it looks like wood. It does, but that wouldn't make much sense!
Mood: sick
Music: None

Updates

I updated C# Ninja with some basic C# tutorials this morning, and finished up a large portion of the site. It still needs work, but it's getting there.

This weekend was dominated by work. New Horizons managed to exceed the 2gb limit on their database, and replication went belly-up - so I had to hand-merge everything, bring the size under control (a few ntext fields had snuck in, changing them to text saved a LOT of space). That took up 7 hours of my Saturday! On Sunday, I went to fix a Jan/Allison's PC for them (again). Really simple fix, but it felt like working a 7 day week.

I'm hoping to get out to see the Geminids tonight, although I suspect that I'll freeze to death!
Mood: tired
Music: None

XBox Live

I finally put money onto my prepaid credit card (it's free for 12 months, but you need a balance to be approved/refunded by MS to prove the card works!) and activated XBox Live today. The signup process was kind of a pain - gamepads aren't made for entering serial numbers longer than your average Win2k3 Server CD-KEY! Still, it went by reasonably quickly - 9 minutes to get online, including the time it took me to tweak my FreeBSD firewall to prioritize XBox packets.

My first online experience was with Crimson Skies. I signed in, downloaded the update, admired the free content downloads (new planes, new maps, new game mods - very slick!), and then selected "optimatch" asking for a Dogfight (free-for-all deathmatch) without stats logging (I suck, and wanted to be forgiven for early blunders!). No matches. So, I created a game - 30 seconds later, I had a full server! Less than a minute later, my cablemodem was happily hosting a deathmatch in the skies. As host, I had no lag - and other players weren't complaining or flying particularly badly, so I think they were doing okay too. Voice chat takes a little getting used to, but it's actually quite nice to hear other players say things like "nice!", "that wasn't kind" and so on. The sound quality was very clear, and it was very friendly. I like friendly. The game itself was awesome fun; I came in 3rd (of 6), and really enjoyed the experience.

Anyway, if anyone who reads this is on XBox Live, my handle is MorphicFields, and I'm up to try any game I have.

Talking of which, I need to buy more games. :-)
Mood: happy
Music: Black Sabbath - Wicked World

House Judiciary Committee Strikes!

This is a good example of wheels in motion - the Leviathan has noticed that Ohio's election was quite corrupt, and now it is at least appearing to be hungry for answers. It's good to see the House doing its job!

A quick precis (lifted from blackboxvoting.com, original poster David):

1) Warren County lockdown - The admin building where votes were counted was locked down on election night and the public and the press excluded from the process. County officials claimed this was done in response to a terrorist warning that neither the FBI , nor Blackwell's office knew of,.

2) Perry County counting discrepencies - Poll books examined after the election show more votes cast than actual voters voting. Computer errors were blamed for other problems where votes were counted twice.

3) Perry County registration peculiarities- Very high percentage of registered voters in the county (91%) many registered in the same year and lacking signatures on file.

4) Unusual results in Butler County - A Supreme Court candidate for office received 5,000 votes more than did the Kerry ticket, whereas the Bush ticket got 40,000 more votes than the Republican judicials candidate.

5) Unusual results in Cuyahoga County - Unusually high votes for third party candidates (in one instance, 215 votes for one candidate versus 8 votes for all third-party candidates combined in 2000).

6) Spoiled Ballots - Undervotes for president in one county were as high as 25% (6,000 votes!), with a total of 93,000 for the state.

7) Franklin County overvote - 4,258 votes counted for a precinct with only 800 registerd voters.

8) Miami County vote discrepency - 19,000 votes were added to election totals that had been missed, all for Bush.

9) Mahoning County machine problems - Numerous voters reported problems with not being able to select Kerry on voting machines which defaulted to Bush.

10) Machine shortages - In Franklin County long lines were found in predominantly Democratic precincts despite the fact that 68 extra machines were available. Also, 77 machines malfunctioned in the course of the day.

The precis actually understates the allegations in the document itself, but I'm too tired to post more!
Mood: tired
Music: Fields of the Nephilim - Moonchild