Archive for December, 2008

Get a closer look at Minnesota’s senatorial recount

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
Minnesota Senate Recount Take The Franken-Coleman Ballot Challenge | Startribune.Com

The recount continues in the Minnesota senatorial race, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune has put up scans of every contested ballot. Site visitors who login are able to peruse these ballots, attempt to determine voter intent, and tell the site whether they think the voter meant to vote for Al Franken or Norm Coleman. At the moment, they have 6700 contested ballots available for perusal.

Want to know why vote totals change during a recount? Go to the site and see for yourself. The fourth estate is alive and well in Minneapolis, bringing needed transparency to a mystifying political process. This is just too cool.

Posted in Geeky, Media, Politics | 1 Comment »

Why I will need no car in a few years

Monday, December 8th, 2008
I ran my third half-marathon a week ago, the Las Vegas Half-Marathon, and bested my previous finishing by nearly six minutes. In order to better visualize my progress over the past 3 such runs, I tortured Excel into producing a graph of my finishing times. It looks like a nice and linear progression. If my finishing times continue to drop at the same rate I’ll be setting world records within two years, and a year or two after that I’ll be running faster than traffic and will be able to ditch my car and commute around LA on foot. Extrapolating the trend any further starts to get more complicated, I don’t understand the theory of general relativity well enough to detail the implications of negative finishing times .

But in any case, I’m happy to be improving at this whole long-distance running thing. Next up: my first full marathon, at Disney World in January.

graph of my half-marathon finishing times over the past few months

Posted in Geeky, Media, Politics | 1 Comment »

Announcement: Cyber Monday shall continue until the Economy rebounds

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
I’d barely gotten used to the idea that there’s this fabricated new consumer holiday the day after Thanksgiving called ‘Black Friday’, when all of a sudden another holiday pops up a few days later, “Cyber Monday“.

I received a flurry of emails over the weekend advertising upcoming Cyber Monday deals, and I’d have thought the number of these emails would decrease over time, but today I received yet another mass email from yet another internet retailer announcing the extension of Cyber Monday. It’s now “Cyber Week”. I suppose we’re all supposed to spend spend spend in order to help the economy. If the economy continues its free-fall, we’ll soon be hearing of “Cyber Month”, and maybe 2009 will be dubbed “Cyber Year”. Hopefully we won’t have to suffer through a “Cyber Decade”. Buy buy buy!

If only there were a pre-established consumer holiday coming up in a few weeks, maybe the retailers wouldn’t have to try so hard to stoke a few sales…

Posted in Entitled Ranting | 1 Comment »