Rand Wacker

I had Tivo pick up this Discovery Channel on Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne project: Black Sky: The Race for Space. Fantastic documentary on an amazing project. HIghly recommended if you can find it broadcast again (which I’m sure they will), or it looks like they’re releasing on DVD so check for it on Netflix pretty soon perhaps.

…and some local ones. I received my absentee ballot the other day and was a little intimidated to see that it’s 5 separate slips, front and back. Besides the obvious national debate, there are a host of local offices up for grabs (we live in Richmond, Contra Costa County), as well as a slew of state-wide initiatives: 16 state-wide, 4 county-ish, and 2 city. “Democracy is hard, let’s go shopping!”

I spent a few hours today (mostly during the Presidential debates) going through the voter information documents, reading opinions of sources I trust, and discussing with a few friends a number of these. I’ve filled out my sample ballot and think I’ve got votes I’m happy with for the measures that really will have an effect on us (and that we can have and effect on the en-action of). I’m not going to get in to discussion of individual office candidates (people) here, there’s too much of that already (and there’s not a lot of information about the local races to make it really interesting). I’m posting my intentions here because I’m very interested in what other people may have to say. Any questions/comments/insights, please post a note below or trackback to your own entry. There’s a lot on the ballot to critically look at.

State Measures

1A - Yes - I think we should keep property and sales taxes local. Living in Richmond, I see a lot of impact due to lack of local revenue (as well as many other issues, but that would require even broader change…), but I don’t like the idea of the state having mandate over both my payroll taxes and my local taxes.

59 - Yes - Government sunshine initiative, always a good thing to have transparency in the local process.

60 - Yes - Counter to Prop 62, which could lock out third parties from state-wide elections.

60A - No - Ties the states hands to use one source of income (from the state-wide yard sales) to pay off one source of debt (from the state-wide bond restructuring).

61 - Yes - Bonds for children hospitals.

62 - No - Restructures the election system in a way that could lock out third party candidates and regulate a two-party-only system. No, no, no.

63 - No - Good cause, but this feels like a bad case of class tax warfare. I don’t like the idea of specialized taxes on only certain groups of people.

64 - No - I’m worried that the big backers of this bill are major corporations which have suffered some major anti-trust losses recently (and for good reason, IMHO). I don’t want to limit the people’s right to seek grievances, and leave it solely in the hands of a politically motivated Attorneys General office.

65 - No - No-one wants this bill at all anymore, they want you to vote on 1A instead (which I’m thinking “yes” for).

66 - Yes - I’ve long thought that “Three Strikes” was much too harsh.

67 - No(?) - I’m torn on this one. While I don’t like the idea of a regressive tax on a specific utility (the phone system), I live in an area where our Emergency Rooms are under constant threat of closure.

68 - No - I can’t find anyone whose actually for this who doesn’t run a racetrack…

69 - (???) - I’m really torn on this one. Building a DNA database for criminal detection does sound like a very good thing, but I’m worried that this bill doesn’t have enough privacy protections…thoughts???

70 - No - Severely limits what we could get from the tribal casinos for almost a century, and is only supported by one of them, so this one isn’t very popular. Lets see how the Govinator’s negotiations come out.

71 - No - As promising as it sounds like stem cell research is, I don’t want this state in the business of funding it. (Federal government, that would be a different case…I think).

72 - No(?) - I’m skeptical of a state-mandated health system, but I’m in a pretty good position WRT health care, so I could be looking at this through rose-colored glasses. Anyone have a solid argument for a “yes” vote?

County Measures

AA - Yes - BART is heavily over-subsidized anyways, and I would much rather see this come out of road or gas taxes, but my wife rides the Transbay tube every day, so I want it as safe as possible.

BB - Yes - Even though AC Transit drivers keep trying to kill me on my bike, they’ve made some excellent local improvements to the buses and stops recently with well-placed funding. Since no-one seems to be against this one, and even though its a (minor) tax on me as a home-owner, I think it would be a good investment.

CC - No(?) - I can’t get a good read on what this tax is supposed to actually fund in the parks, but I use them quite a bit so I could be easily swayed…

J - No(?) - Torn again. At first I didn’t like what I read out of this bill because it seemed extremely broad and focused too much on roads (which I really don’t want a whole lot more of). Reading the arguments against this measure I see that more than half of it is actually dedicated to non-automotive enhancements, so I’m not sure…Again, though, I would like to see this as a fuel tax (which it somewhat is coming out of sales taxes).

City Measures

Q & R - Yes - Very little description or discussion of these measures, but they seem sane and there’s no-one arguing against them…even the sales tax increase.

TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X

Looks pretty good…not necissarly good enough to give up Emacs though.

Found this today: TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

Its got a very interesting way of presenting information in a linear way, so that as you explore through hyperlinks you build a new flow to the page. Play around with it in your browser and see what you think. From the web page:

TiddlyWiki is an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by JeremyRuston. It’s written in HTML and JavaScript to run on any browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to any web server, or sent by email.

An updated-daily map of the presendential race across the country:

Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004

They also have an RSS feed.

Christine point me at this very useful Beast Blog (Because East Bay is Pig Latin for Beast). Its a multi-author blog with a lot of useful notes on things happening around where I live, and they’ve got an RSS feed! (Beat that, Tribe.net).

In particular they keep extensive archives on things like Free Wifi spots and Activism around the area.

If you live in the old nickle-dime be sure to check it out!

Guide to hacking your series 2 DirecTiVo | PVRblog

Last week we bit the bullet and bought Alexis a new Toyota Prius. We had looked at the previous generation a couple of years ago and really liked what we saw, but were really most intrigued by the newest 2004 body style and mid-size room. A couple of weeks ago after Sunday brunch we went down to the local Berkeley Toyota dealer and had a test drive. Very impressed with the car (drives well, very roomy, cockpit is a little strange but hey…this is “the car of the future”). Not so impressed with the dealership though. This place sells more hybrids than any other dealership in the country, and they know it. Probably explains why they put such an incompetent sales person in the car with us for the test drive (I could see him reading the sticker on the window about different features when we would ask him questions). Of course after we got out they started the hard sell, “would you like to put a deposit down to get on the list…would ya?!?” We couldn’t wait to get out of there.

With the Governator’s signing of the new bill that will allow hybrids getting 45MPG or more to drive solo in the carpool lane, we figured that demand would only be going up. Long story short, we were somewhat eager but didn’t want to pay the $8000 extortion money that Berkeley Toyota was demanding to drive one directly off the lot (suggestion to everyone that is interested, get on a wait list when you can). We looked at a number of used models but ended up finding a brand new 2004 that had been used for demos (all 12 miles of demo driving) on a lot up in Sacramento. Routes were planned, financing was approved, and we drove up for a long Friday night of new car price negotiation.

We love the car. It truly is the car of the future, and all of the oddities we noticed about the interior pretty much just give way to the fact that the thing works really damn well. Toyota did a fantastic job of engineering and the car is roomy, comfortable, drives great, and gets a reliable 50+MPG in our daily driving. The silence at low speeds is eery, the smoothness and power at high speeds is surprising, and all around its a well-built package.

There are a lot of other hybrid models coming out over the next couple of years. I highly recommend that you start looking at them if you are thinking of replacing your regular old gas-guzzler pretty soon. The technology has matured nicely (been running for 8+ years in Japan I guess), and the more we can do to reduce the amount of gas that each person uses the better for all.

When I go through these long travel periods for work, I like to be able to take some brainless entertainment with me on the road. Not having Tivo to go, and not willing to pay $8-$12 blood money for a pay-per-view movie. My friend aaron had the good idea of taking ripped DivX-encoded movies on his laptop when he was out of town for a long time. I figured that this would be a perfect way to work through a lot of the Netflix queue (I’m not in to the whole .torrent piracy aspect).

So I downloaded mplayer and mencoder for my PowerBook and started ripping. At about 600 megs per movie I’m able to fit 6 or so full-length features in the normal amount of extra space that I have (I carry around a lot of music as well). The biggest problem I had those was with the playback, that mplayer very often couldn’t keep up with the video and the sound/motion would always get out of sync. So badly sometimes that if I was using my laptop at the same time I was watching a movie I’d just give up on watching anything and listen to the audio only.

Along comes VLC (Versiontracker page), a fantastic playback device that so far has been rock-solid for my on whatever I watch. So now I’m totally happy with this setup and thought it would be a worthwhile suggestion to make.

Just over two weeks have gone by now that I’ve been following a new eating plan and its gone surprisingly well. The first week was actually quite hard (as the book said it would be), but after satiating myself with some sugar-free Jello (which has always tasted weird) and a couple of diet Cokes (which I never drink), I finally broke free of the low-level sugar addition that is so easy to form on a US diet.

Eating mostly salads with chicken or lean beef or some fish (I did get a little over-fished), eggs for breakfast (really, too many eggs), and having nuts and cheese for snacks became actually a welcome change from the usual fatty/sweet foods that had snuck in to my diet. Drinking only club soda has become really refreshing actually. In all honesty, I feel better. My blood sugar has been very regular (no major dips or peaks), and I don’t have any annoying urges anymore.

We weren’t completely faithful for the entire two weeks, in fact right in the middle we spent a weekend up in Healdsburg visiting a friend and cheated with beer and burgers and cake…and it was all just sickly sweet. Even my beloved Sierra Nevada tasted syrupy (the maltose that makes beer even worse than a straight spoonful of sugar). At this point I’m finding it hard to eat off of the diet!

Things I learned to appreciate:

• Taking our lunch - When making dinner the night before (grilling up some chicken or flank steak), make a double batch and then just pack the extra in with some greens for a nice lunch salad. Saved a lot of money this way.
• Pack snacks for work - Instead of relying on the sugary/fat-packed vending machines at the office, buy nuts in bulk and box them up in some tupperware to leave at the office. Roasted almonds, pistachios, cashews, yum (avoid the salted kind).
• Be creative with what you can eat - The diet book is very limited in its recipe/menu selection, but any decent chef will be able to look at the list of things you can have and come up with some more creative dishes. For example, legumes are just fine, so we took advantage of the cool fall weather to make some very tasty lentil soup. Made big fritatas to slice up and take to work for breakfast. Japanese dinners of miso, edamame, and sashimi are a fantastic treat out.

So now we’re on “phase two”, which is much more liberal in what you can eat. Pretty much the only things that are limited are pure sugar items, but even dark chocolate (in moderation), red wine (good heart benefits), and plenty of fruit is back on the menu. I actually need to go grocery shopping this morning to start laying in a lot of things we’ve been missing such as milk and yogurt.

Oh, and for those of you who are curious, I lost between 8-10 pounds, and Lex lost 5, even though we weren’t really trying/needing to lose weight. So we consider that pretty much bonus.