(Actually, this will be posted well after I fly out.) If you are one of those people who can easily shake the feeling that you’ve forgotten something when going to travel overseas, then you’re lucky. I always have some nagging feeling that I’ve forgotten something. Last trip home, it was whether or not I locked the front door on the way out; I worried the whole way and then had to call the landlord in Japan to go and check for me. This time, it’s a general feeling borne of having left in too much of a hurry.

Usually I’m much better about time when I leave on trips, often giving myself hours of extra buffer time. This time I cut it close on leaving the apartment, and rushed around in a slow-motion adrenaline half-panic while trying to throw everything I needed into my backpack and figure out what did I forget this time? Strangely, I think this time I didn’t forget anything, unlike my usual experience of have left behind something considerable though not major. On one trip to Wisconsin a few years back, I forgot to pack my shirts, and remembered while on the airplane. And it was a business trip, so I couldn’t rely on home support. I had to stop off at a shopping mall on the rental car ride to the hotel and buy a few new shirts on the fly.

But on this trip I think it’s all going smoothly. Got to the train station just in time to catch the train (though the taxi driver played hide-and-seek with me at first), got the express OK, got into the airport and just beat out a very long and tedious line at check-in, then went straight to this nice computer lounge. Heck, I even got seats way up from, row 20 on the way home (and row 19 on the way back).

And I even remembered to lock the door this time.

So, one nice perk about airports nowadays is that they tend to have nice lounges for anyone to use where you can whip out your laptop and plug it in at a desk. So instead of wasting away for an hour or so in a seat near the boarding counter, I can hop downstairs, plug in my computer (don’t have to worry about draining the batteries), and sit down in a nice cushioned rolling chair. Then I can work or play away until the flight is called up. Today, it’s blogging for a while, then maybe watch the latest Simpsons episode downloaded from BitTorrent. Cool.

Can we stop hearing about this guy now?

There’s come to be a certain phenomenon whereupon relatively average cases with no celebrities or political figures come into the national spotlight because of initially isolated media coverage, and the Scott Peterson case is one of them. One nexus where these cases begins is the Larry King show, which, when not commemorating Republican presidents, 60’s crooners, psychics or other assorted guests, can, at the drop of a hat, become almost solely dedicated to a single criminal case. Although centered around a politician, the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy case was similar in nature; until 9/11 hit, the Larry King Live Show was practically the Condit/Levy Show, nonstop. When Peterson’s case came up, despite the fact that it was a relatively average homicide case, King’s intense coverage made it a media circus.

What real need is there for us to focus on this stuff? I really believe in curtailing the freedom of the press in cases like these, where it can be pretty certainly determined that the vital interest of the public is pretty much nil, and the destructive influence on fair trials is maximized. We should have laws that shroud criminal proceedings unless some actual public interest is being endangered; whoever said that the free press right in the Bill of Rights should outweigh all other rights, like that to a fair trial? The public’s rubbernecking peep-show interest in cases like this is surely not as important as making sure that justice is done.

The news agencies are making it sound like it’s all about a nanny affair, almost a throwback to the early 90’s when that kind of thing was more predominant, and people don’t really care so much anymore. People probably have the impression that the Kerik nomination is being tanked just because of a technicality. But the truth is much more than that, much more than many of the news organizations are making a thing about. This CNN article is a good example of that, makes it look like a nanny problem and nothing else.

But the truth goes much deeper than that. Kerik had ties with a company that had mob ties, and received many unreported cash gifts from them, ran a corrupt ship at Riker’s Island and at a hospital he ran in Saudi Arabia, and was involved in unsavory civil court cases that involved his being wanted under police warrant. Josh Marshall gives a good accounting, with sources, here. However you look at it, it is more than just a nanny problem, though the “liberal media” is walking on eggshells to avoid even hinting of anything that cannot be documented four ways from next Sunday.

The problem should be obvious: Bush is stacking his cabinet and other vital posts not with people who are necessarily qualified, but with people who will toe the party line–and making sure that these people are qualified and vetted is secondary, at best. I mean, seriously–with all that in this guy’s past, and all they can say to excuse themselves is that he didn’t fess up that he hired an illegal alien as a nanny? If their vetting process is so lame that they depend entirely on the word of the candidate, they should be ashamed of themselves.

As you may or may not be aware, I post my entries to this blog using Ecto (Shareware, $17.95, or ¥2,030). I started using it back when it was Kung-Log, and bought it when it (deservedly) went commercial. It is a great blogging tool, and version 2 for the Mac is now out. (For PC users, version 1.5 has been released, but I won’t be commenting on it.)

There is a fairly radical interface change, and I’m not sure that I like it, although my distaste might come more from having to re-learn the interface rather than from real problems with it. In the new interface, the blogging window becomes secondary (it had been primary), and the entries list becomes the new central window. There is an advantage here in that you can now have more than one blogging window open at the same time. Maybe it makes sense, but it takes getting used to.

Another change is the addition of a “Rich Text” view for the blogging window; you can switch between the classic HTML interface and the “Rich Text” interface, which I guess, as it states, shows the page as if it were read as an RTF file. However, the rich text view is not WYSIWYG to the web page like the preview window is, and when you create special HTML in the HTML view and then switch back to rich text, if Ecto doesn’t recognize the HTML, it will erase it. I lost about 2 minute’s of hand-typed table code that way. Solution: never go into rich text view, which makes it more or less useless. Ecto would be much better if there were a “Preview”-like view, which shows exactly how the page would render on a browser, but you could type directly into it–more like Composer in Mozilla has.

Other than that, there’s little to grouse about. Oh, it would be nice if all the HTML shortcut keys worked in rich text mode, or if you could use shortcut keys to switch blogs while looking at the Entries & Drafts window, but those are minor. The new version does have some good improvements. First off, the Preview window works a bit better–it used to have lots of trouble displaying changes while you were typing in the blogging window, but now it works a bit more smoothly–not perfectly, but better. There is also a preview pane below the entries list now, allowing you to quickly see the post from the past you are about to open.

And there’s the addition of the Amazon.com link creation engine. Let’s say you’re typing a blog entry and you mention a book or a video. You’re an Amazon Associate, which means that if you link to an Amazon product and someone buys that product through your link, you get a share. But to make the link, you have to go to the Amazon site, find the product, get the ASIN or ISBN code, go to the Associates’ pages, go through a multi-step process and then copy and paste the link back into your blog entry. Not exactly a snap. With the new Ecto, you just select the title of the product you typed and execute the keyboard shortcut COMMAND-SHIFT-A. A search window appears for the item on Amazon.com; select the product type and search. When you see the product you want, just double-click on it and Ecto makes the link for you (after you entered your associate ID in the options, of course). This takes a really cumbersome process and makes it easy–a great feature. (See my last post for an example of this; it would’ve taken a lot longer to do this under the old system.)

But there’s another new feature I also like: the ability to simultaneously post to more than one blog at a time. I often post the same entry in this blog and over at the Expat (if it’s political), and before, Ecto made me wait until it was finished uploading to one blog before I could even see the other blog. That seems to have been fixed, a welcome addition.

There are a few other minor touches–more menus and buttons, some more options than before. But before this upgrade, Ecto was already the best blogging tool out there, now it’s just that much better.

Okay, it’s time for me not only to brag about the DVDs I’m purchasing, but to see if I can ramp up the hits and possibly purchases on my Amazon Associates account! See, I’m being up-front about it. They’re not needed to run this site, I’m gonna do this blog anyway; it’d just be a nice 4% gift for me, is all. If you’re going to purchase any of the following DVDs from Amazon anyway, why not give me a cut and buy them through a link on this page? You don’t have to buy the item immediately, by the way; if you put it on your wish list it’ll still count, but only if you buy it within 24 hours after following the link(s) from this page. Or you could put it in your shopping cart immediately and let it sit as long as your cookies last (usually 90 days), doing the actual purchase later.

I do these DVD buys every Christmas, by the way, when I go back home to visit. It saves shipping costs to Japan, and I can watch the Region 1 DVDs on any one of my DVD players (the one I brought from the U.S., and the region-free player I bought at Costco later, as well as the DVD drive on my computer). The Japanese versions of these DVDs not only cost a whole lot more, but they often lack the special features like commentaries and such.

First off, the boxed sets. I’m getting the three Harry Potter films, more of a bundle than a real boxed set, so the reviews say. But it’s at a good price (average of $15 per 2-disc set), so why the heck not. I’d rather not wait another six to ten years for the rest of the DVDs to come out and buy it in one grand set. Then there are the guy-film action adventure sets, the Die Hard films 1-3, and the four Lethal Weapon films. Yeah, I know. But they’re fun. Though the Lethal Weapon series was turning into a Warner Brothers cartoon at the end there. If there’s a #5, it’ll probably be animated. Those last two sets are also under $40, for a three- and four-DVD set respectively. I’m also continuing to get the M*A*S*H series, season number seven for me (I probably will skip seasons eight and nine, though, and get the final season only after this).

More on the PBS side is Jim Henson’s Storyteller series, the original and the Greek Myths. This was a short-lived series I enjoyed a while back, narrated by William Hurt. The episodes are very well presented, and I was pleased to find them out on DVD. Now if they’d just release the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (and at a reasonable price, I’d hope).

Some old comedies which came down in price enough for me to get: All of Me, the Martin/Tomlin vehicle which was one of Martin’s best. The beautiful Harold and Maude, which I first saw in high school, hilarious black comedy. Foul Play, a film with ‘made-for-TV’ written all over it, but still a really good comedy flick. The martial arts battle between Burgess Meredith and Rachel Roberts, as well as the elderly Japanese couple in the limo make the film watchable all by themselves. Then there’s Silver Streak, the first and best film with the Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor duo, and the best.

I’m also getting The Life of Brian, for reasons that should be obvious (shame on you if you don’t know); and Sabrina, the original Billy Wilder Bogart-Hepburn-Holden classic (not the remake); the special edition of This Is Spinal Tap (with the actors doing commentary on the film in character as the Spinal Tap band, acting again as if it were a real doc). And ones that I’m less than proud of advertising but am getting because they’re at least acceptable, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Martin’s The Man With Two Brains, and Short’s Innerspace.

Though I hate him as governor, Schwarzenegger was in some good films. Total Recall was not one of them, but it’s a fun piece of bloody fluff along the lines of Robocop, and I’m interested in what the Verhoeven-Schwarzenegger commentary will be like, and it’s just ten bucks. I’m also getting Terminator and Terminator 2 (number three was just Schwarzenegger, not Cameron, and wasn’t worth it).

And finally, the new films out: Shrek 2 (the extras are pretty good), and the final Lord of the Rings special extended edition, The Return of the King. The extended editions are still only $24, and this’ll complete the set for me. The extended RotK runs 250 minutes! Add that to the 208 for the first film, and 223 for the second, and the entire extended edition would run a total of 11 hours and 21 minutes! That’s what you call a long film. Sako, you still up for that marathon we talked about?

Yamantaka at The Expat pointed out this story coming out about how Rumsfeld could have ordered the extra armor for the Humvees all along. However, not only did he not order it, he has still not ordered it–the supplier of the armor says they have not received an order from the army yet.

Remember, Rumsfeld said that money was not an issue. The companies that make the armor and the vehicles themselves said that they could ramp up production no problem. About half the soldiers injured and killed in Iraq were hit by homemade bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, the kind of attack from which the armor would help protect the soldiers.

In short, Rumsfeld is simply letting the troops get maimed and killed, for no good reason. And then he lied to that soldier about it being an issue of being able to do it. Swell. I would join Yamantaka’s call to fire Rumsfeld; the only problem is, I know that Bush would simply put someone even worse in his place. So the better idea is to shame and humiliate Rumsfeld into doing his job.

This always happens to me. Back when the yen was down to the 80’s per dollar, I had no money to exchange. I always miss the sweet rate. Just a few days ago, it was at 102.1, and had taken forever to get there. Less than a week passes, and now the damn thing’s back up to 105.8–more than a yen higher than yesterday, a big jump, like the other big jumps over the past several days. I mean, for crying out loud. Today I wanted to change but had no time, so it’ll have to be Monday. And the way the rate works, if it goes favorable for buying dollars, the banks don’t change the official rate until the next day; if the rate goes more favorable for them to sell dollars–worse for buyers like me–they change the rate almost immediately. I checked on that once, a bit of a scam there. But it means that even if the rate breaks my way Monday before I buy dollars, I still won’t see anything from it–but the rate could get worse and I could get socked by it.

Good thing I don’t play the stock market. With my luck in these things, I’d be broke by now.

On the tail of the story that Bush and Rumsfeld care so little about the troops that they won’t even sign the letters to the families of the fallen, comes this bit of news from Kuwait, where Rumsfeld was answering soldiers’ questions in a ‘town hall’ style meeting. Apparently he figured he’d just get praise and adulation, but one soldier asked a very pointed question from an airplane mechanic from the 278th Regimental Combat Team of the Tennessee Army National Guard:

Why do us soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-arm our vehicles? And why don’t we have those resources available to us? … A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon. Our vehicles are not armoured. We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass … picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.

Now that’s a good question. It’s not as if this problem hasn’t been known about, much less been in the spotlight, for more than a year now. We’ve heard stories about soldiers draping bullet-proof vests along the side of their humvees in order to compensate for this. So what was Rumsfeld’s flinty response?

It isn’t a matter of money, it isn’t a matter on part of the Army of desire. It’s a matter of production and capability of doing it. As you know, you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have.

That’s his response. “You go to war with the army you have.” Okay, let’s say that’s true. The war started 21 months ago. The deficit of vehicle armor was brought up by many in the initial months of the war. So, as Rumsfeld suggests, does it take more than a year an a half to produce and send armor parts to the battlefield? Of course not. Just the same as with body armor–the government could have provided the troops with enough, they just didn’t fucking care. There was always enough money for that. There was enough money to give their cronies multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts of which we now see huge portions were stolen or pissed away. They got the $87 billion money which they touted as being “for the troops,” which Bush lashed out at Kerry for because he voted for an alternate $87 billion bill and therefore “denied” money “for the troops.” It was always “for the troops” when they wanted to win a political fight.

But now those same troops still don’t have the equipment they need, equipment that the Bush administration could’ve gotten them long ago. And those troops are still dying (1,276 as of today, most recently Private 1st Class Andrew M. Ward, KIA in Ramadi) and they still don’t have what they need, they’re digging through garbage to find “hillbilly armor” and Rumsfeld just stares back at this kid and tells him to suck it up. Worse than that, he actually tried to tell the soldier that he was being stupid about it: “I’ve talked a great deal about this with a team of people who have been working hard at the Pentagon… if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up.” I’m sure that made the soldiers feel better about it. Of course, Rumsfeld was talking out of his ass at that particular moment; most vehicles aren’t blown up with such excessive amounts of explosives, and the armor would save many lives.

These are the people who got voted back into office. Rumsfeld is almost the only cabinet secretary who will stay on. I can only imagine that the primary reason soldiers vote predominantly Republican is due to the induction process in which the soldiers’ self-image is deliberately stripped down so it can be rebuilt, a process which, indirectly, has a political flavor. Here’s an interesting study someone should do: find the political leanings of people about to go into the military, then find those same people after one year in the military and ask the same questions. Because I have trouble understanding why people who are so abused and mistreated by Republicans vote for them so enthusiastically.

As General Wesley Clark said, “The Republicans do like weapons systems and Democrats like people.” He was being charitable, of course. The truth is, the Republicans in power don’t give a shit about the troops.

Boy is this guy stupid:

“…it’s a heavier download. That’s why we’re pushing to get HD-DVD in place,” added Parsons. The new technology…has far greater storage capacity than DVDs currently on the market.

“Right now, you can probably download a DVD in two, three hours,” said Parsons. “This HD-DVD product is a day’s download. And that’ll be a big step [for the industry], to make downloading just super, super, super inconvenient.”

First of all, this guy must have terrific bandwidth. If he’s talking about downloading a whole 4.7- or 8.5 GB DVD in “two, three hours,” he must have blazing DSL or maybe a fiber-optic connection, and constant private access to someone with significant upstream broadband. To download a 25- to 27 GB HD-DVD in a day would require similar feats of downloading magic. Most people don’t get that kind of speed, meaning that even much smaller downloads can take days or even weeks, and that doesn’t faze most downloaders. They just leave their computer on all day and let things download in the background. Doesn’t matter much to them.

Right now, downloading a whole DVD is inconvenient for many, unless they have significant broadband. Which is why ripped DVD movies are typically not downloaded whole at original size. Instead they are compressed into much smaller files for easier downloading. An 8-GB DVD is stripped of its extras and the core movie file compressed into a 700 MB file, which can fit on a single CD-R for storage and is still of fairly good quality. That’s what might take 2-3 hours–the compressed movie, not the whole DVD–and even then, only if you’ve got blazing bandwidth and are using the right service, like BitTorrent. Introducing HD-DVD would be no different–it just means a slightly different encoding job for the pirate who originally rips the movie. The time difference won’t be so great unless the whole DVD, uncompressed, is made available for downloading, or if the movie file is not compressed as much–but it’s the choice of the pirate, not the format of the DVD that determines things.

Not to mention that broadband is increasing. On clients like BitTorrent or Shareaza, with tracker sites like Suprnova or Youceff many complete DVDs are indeed made available whole, because many downloaders do now have the sufficient bandwidth–or extreme patience–to download such a large file. Now, HD-DVDs will not become a popular standard for many years–by which time, broadband will have increased to the point where downloading larger files is even easier.

So in short, the HD-DVD files will be downloadable just like today’s DVDs are, with or without compression. Changing the format will do little or nothing to stop piracy. What stops piracy most is making the media itself cheap–which many DVDs are, certainly in contrast with music CDs. How many people are gonna sit and wait three weeks for a download to complete, then have to go through burning the DVD or CD (not always simple) just so they don’t have to pay ten bucks to get the original product, which has better quality and features? Not enough to matter, that’s for certain. As with downloaded music CDs, downloaded DVDs are not really any threat to the media conglomerates. They just love to act like they’re the victims of something.

Apparently President Bush, even on his many and lengthy vacations, cannot be bothered to even personally sign the letters he sends to bereaved families of soldiers killed in Iraq, instead having his signature stamped on them. Personally, I think a phone call is warranted. You might think that would take too long, seeing as how more than 1,260 soldiers have been killed in the line of duty. But the war has been going on for a year and nine months now, or exactly 628 days. Say Bush magnanimously grants five minutes of his time for each fallen soldier, that would average out to almost exactly ten minutes a day. Even for a president, that is eminently possible. But it seems that Bush can’t even be bothered to spend ten seconds per day even signing the form letter that someone else likely typed for him.

Even worse, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld can’t even find the time to sign his letters to the grieving families, either, as his letters are also machine-stamped.

We already know how much they disrespect the soldiers from how viciously they have tried to gut the soldier’s pay and benefits; we know they would rather save their own political asses by blocking any press about returning caskets and refusing to attend any of the funerals for the fallen, even one or two symbolically. But this latest information, though seemingly trivial, sends home the message that the ultimate and final sacrifice of the men who they call “heroes” when it serves their own political ends are not worth even ten seconds of their day. That’s how much they really just don’t care.

As I type, my students are taking their final exam in our Computer class. I design the final exam so that the question portion is on a web page with a form (fill-in-the-blanks are text boxes, multiple choice is done with pull-down menus), which generates an email with the student’s answers. My email client (Eudora, by the way) is set to automatically check the email account every minute, though when I notice a student just finished (dancing hamsters appear on their monitor), I manually check the email, which arrives instantly.

The thing that just struck me is the fact that the server for the email is somewhere in the U.S. A student finishes the test here in Tokyo, Japan, sends the results to the U.S., and then I retrieve them from there, seconds later; the answers have traveled halfway across the world and back. It just strikes me as funny, one of those minor epiphanies concerning commonplace but things strange in usually-uncontemplated ways, like what happens every so often when I’m walking down the street somewhere and suddenly it dawns on me that I’m in Japan.

Photo from Japan Guide.

Japanese people typically do not take showers in the morning; they take a bath in the evening. The “bathroom” in Japan is exactly that; the toilet is always in a separate room, except in small apartments where there is a “unit bath.” The bathroom (again, aside from unit baths) consists of a large tub and a shower area. Most Japanese sit down on a stool for the “shower,” but don’t always use the shower head. One soaps up outside the tub, and either showers to rinse off or uses a small plastic bowl filled with water, poured over the head or shoulders, to rinse. Then one luxuriates in the tub, which has a water intake and outlet to circulate the tub water through a heating system to keep the water warm. In many Japanese families, the same water is kept for everyone (usually father first, smallest child last).

A few myths about Japanese bathing to be dispelled: first, Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor (his last even semi-readable book, before he descended into mediocrity) aside, Japanese typically do not go to bath houses, especially with work colleagues. Sometimes people might enjoy the luxury of a special bath house, but otherwise bath houses (“sento“) tend to be for people with no bath at home. Second, Japanese rarely bathe in mixed-sex baths. It may be true still in a few small countryside villages and a few scattered hot springs (“onsen“), but not in most places in Japan. There is probably more mixed bathing in California, to be honest.

I am fighting off a bad throat cold (it seems I get no other kind) and working up to final exams, so not much today. But there are a few things:

Lycos Europe has the right idea. They’ve got a screensaver that, while the computer is idle and connected to the Internet, junk data is transmitted to web servers known as dedicated spam servers. The idea is to choke them right back, just as they choke our email, blogs, and whatever else they can get their slimy little paws into. Unfortunately, I can’t find the screensaver on Lycos Europe at present, though I haven’t spent too much time. If I find it, I’ll install it.

The yen is at 102.1 to the dollar. This will be a great shopping deal for me when I go to the U.S. You can check up-to-date exchange rates here.

It was great weather out today. Pity I couldn’t enjoy it more. Brought in by the unseasonable typhoon, we had 25-degree C temps and crystal clear skies.

This won’t be the big headline in Japan tomorrow morning. Not even a little one, I’d wager.

These people need to get a sense of reality. Apparently, a lot of people are irked that the iTunes music store charges differently depending on the country. Well, duh. When is that not the case? For example, music CDs cost under $20 in the U.S., but almost $30 in Japan. Everything costs differently everywhere. You expect the Internet to make things different? Get real.

By the way, Fahrenheit 9/11 finished at the box office with $220,000 worldwide. I’ll have to see if anyone lists DVD sales numbers to get the grand total.

One last bit. On the IMDB Studio Briefing, they tell the story of how, when the Wizard of Oz first played on TV in color in 1956, CBS was flooded with complaints by people with expensive new color TV sets. The problem: they complained that the opening sequence of the film was broadcast in black and white.

In a saner reality, perhaps.

Back when I was a student at SFSU, even though I lived relatively close to campus and there was a major bus line that would take me right there, it was all too often a crap shoot as to whether I would be able to actually ride the bus. Sometimes it would never show up. Other times it would be so full the driver wouldn’t stop. Sometimes it would be 20 minutes late then three buses would come crowded together. Living relatively close to school didn’t change things much; you would make the decision to walk to school, and then the bus would show up and you would not be able to get to a stop in time to catch it. Not altogether a pleasant service in terms of reliability.

In Japan such things rarely happen. Just as trains are punctual and stop on a dime, so are buses. If the bus is two minutes late, it’s a surprising thing. Yes, it costs about $2 and they don’t give transfers, but that’s just Japan for you.

Buses in Japan have different flavors, but the most common is the pay-as-you-leave type. When you get on a bus, you get on at the back (as passengers leave via the front). You see two machines(see photo at below left); one hands out small paper-slip tickets (see at right), and the other takes prepaid bus pass cards (available in 1000, 3000, and 5000-yen denominations; you can’t usually buy a weekly/monthly pass for unlimited rides). The pass cards handle everything automatically. The paper slip tickets have a number printed on them. There is no one price for the bus trip; you pay more if you ride longer. There is an electronic display board at the front which shows the current fare for whatever number your paper ticket shows. The number, naturally, increases as you go on.

When you decide to get off, you push the button, as is normal (I’ve never seen pull-strings on Japanese buses), and at the stop, you go up to the front to pay your fare and get off the bus. The machine at front is able to make change (a nice alternative to American buses!) and sometimes even sell bus passes. Otherwise, it either accepts your bus pass and shows how much you have left on it, or there is a money drop-slot over a conveyor belt to take your paper ticket and the money for the trip.

My only problem with the bus is that the schedule often makes no sense. Where I live, there is only one line, going to the train station, and buses come every twenty minutes. Express trains also come every twenty minutes. So you figure that it’d be natural for the two to be coordinated. But of course not! The buses drop you off at the station about two minutes after the express leaves–wasting 15 minutes of your time. Nice if you want to have a cup of coffee, visit the ATM machine, and study the train lines before departing, but usually people don’t need to do that.

With California being the largest electoral state, and because it always goes to Democrats these days, Republicans are seeking out new ways to grab as much of the state as possible away from Democrats. First is a proposal by Republican lawmakers to divide the state’s electoral votes: whomever wins in any one congressional district gets one electoral vote, up to the total of 53; the remaining two senatorial votes are given to the candidate winning the most votes statewide. Note that Republicans are not suggesting this be done in states like Texas.

Add to this the fact that Governor Schwarzenegger plans on “redrawing legislative and congressional district boundaries”–in short, non-census gerrymandering, just like in Texas, so as to stack the legislature with as many Republicans as possible and take the state into Red territory.

But add the two together: Schwarzenegger gerrymandering to turn districts Republican, and Republicans awarding electoral votes on a per-district basis. Begin to see a pattern forming? Republicans nationwide are doing everything they can, no holds barred, to solidify their power and make this a one-party country…

In addition to the 4000-or-so extra votes one machine magically conjured up for Bush in Franklin County (only 638 people voted in that precinct), there are other problems that investigators are now finding in Ohio. One of them is the always-mysterious people-who-don’t-vote-for-president, an unnaturally high 93,000 in Ohio. These ballots would have to be examined by hand, and most that can be read that way would likely go to Kerry, as most are in poorer areas with more minority voters, who were more often given punch-card machines which register such “non-votes” when the chad are not punched just right–sure you remember that mess.

There were also strong correspondences between minority areas and other voting machine problems. Almost all problems reported just happened to be in Kerry strongholds, primarily in areas with a high concentration of African-American voters; in the chart below, red areas indicate black population levels, blue dots are reported problems in Kerry districts, green for Bush districts:

Not hard to see the disparity. The same applies to vote spoilage:

Republicans will likely roll out the old “Democratic voters are stupid” riff like they did in Florida in 2000, but with numbers so disproportionately skewed, that chestnut will be nothing more than a lame insult to minority voters. But they’ll make the charge anyway, most likely. But this absolutely harmonizes with the stated Republican goal of suppressing the minority vote.

I saw the CBS 60 Minutes report on voting machines recently, and in the report, it showed an rather easy way to misvote: if you have three buttons lined up vertically, and you push the top and bottom one at the same time, the middle button is selected on the computer screen. The representative for the voting machine company (or perhaps she represented the district) insisted that a voter would never press buttons like that. However, it is easy to see how she is wrong. Try this: point your index finger as though you would press a button. Now look at your hand: most likely, your other three fingers are curled up into your palm, with you thumb resting over your middle finger (some people actually have the thumb extended, more likely to hit a surface). Now look at the position of your thumb knuckle. When you press the button, the thumb knuckle will be protruding downward, and could come in contact with the surface at the same time your forefinger does. We usually don’t hit anything with it as a usual button may be raised (or touching the surface below the button may be unimportant), but you should be able to see how the thumb knuckle could hit the flat surface of the touch-screen on the voting machine. That would generate a misvote, and explain why many people tried to vote for one candidate and kept seeing another’s name coming up on the screen.

Harder to explain is the Pat Buchanan effect in Ohio. In many districts heavily weighted for Kerry, third-party candidates did far too well. In precinct 4F of Cleveland’s East Side, the ultraconservative third-party candidate, Michael Peroutka, got 40% of the vote. In precinct 4N, the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik captured 32.5% of the vote. It is highly unlikely that these candidates won such large percentages of the vote in precincts almost totally devoted to Kerry, meaning that there was obviously something wrong with the voting machines in those precincts.

In Florida in 2000, if one were to have given Gore all of the votes he lost due to vote fraud, vote spoilage, and machine ‘malfunctions,’ he would have won Florida and the election easily by tens of thousands of votes. Ohio may not be such a easy ‘real’ win for Kerry, but it could easily turn out that without all the ‘errors’ coincidentally all working against him, Kerry might very well have won the state, and again, the election. All of this making George W. Bush truly worth of the Thief of the White House.

I just woke up to a few hundred blog comment spam, and though a few had common attributes–IP Addresses and URLs–most were simple, meaningless text strings with varied, faked IP Addresses and not even a URL, name, or anything in common. Completely useless to any spammer whatsoever. And I almost had no common element to erase them all in one swipe with MT-Blacklist, meaning I would have to resort to deleting them one by one–a process which could take more than an hour. Not exactly an enticing proposition. But fate rescued me: the unspeakable moron who mega-spammed me used one common element–which I reported earlier, but Paul reminded me that I should probably not announced it–and it was in every spam. So I did have one common element to shovel the freshly-laid manure out, after all. But it was close–had the slimeball not used that one little thing, I’d have been in for a hellish hour of staring at spam.

And it’s not just this morning. I have been getting an increasing amount of this kind of spam, probably from the same lowlifes, almost every day now, with many emails bearing no URLs, mention of a company or web site name, or anything else of value to a spammer. It’s as if they simply want to wear me down, make me so sick of deleting spam that I give up and let everything stay, including their links. These people are unspeakable pieces of human garbage. Imagine someone coming to your home, every morning before dawn, and stapling ads to the front of your house until its covered with them, and it’s legal and there’s little you can do to stop them aside from just taking down the ads.

I’ve been putting it off, but that comment registration system is going up as soon as I get the time. I just pray to God they haven’t found a way to hack that, too.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these bits-and-pieces entries, so…

Universities and colleges have the right to deny military recruiters access to their campuses without suffering the consequence of the government yanking their government funding. The 1995 Solomon Amendment tied the two together, essentially extorting the schools to allow recruiters full, free access to university grounds so they can sell a military career to students on campus.

A federal appeals court, using a rather odd precedent, decided for the educational institutions–but the government is not backing down. The government is still acting as if the amendment is in force pending their decision to appeal further. And schools know that no matter what the courts say, the government will use its muscle anyway. No one is daring to defy the government for fear of “coincidentally” losing funding (or losing funding should a higher court reverse the decision). Even the plaintiffs remain anonymous.

Music corporations are challenging KaZaA in court. For those of you who are uninitiated, KaZaA is one (and the most popular) of several companies that make software and/or run web sites that facilitate illegal music downloads. The industry is still claiming that their loss of sales is due to online piracy, and not because of the economic downturn that just coincidentally began at just the time their sales dropped.

Already, the industry fights back by using fake song files–that is, files that are the same size and have the same titles as pirated songs, but are fakes–they play the song promised in the titled for a short time, then cut to an annoying high-pitched beep or other alternate sound. Because of the similar name and size, they infiltrate downloads of the real thing.

In both of those respects–suing KaZaA and faking song files–the industry is a bit behind the curve. KaZaA may be the “new Napster” in a way, but there are now a plethora of web sites and software one can use to download music. And just as KaZaA replaced Napster after Napster got sued out of existence, something else is bound to take KaZaA’s place if and when it falls.

The U.S. Congress, salivating at the chance to please their big music- and film-industry donors by passing more and more draconian legislation, almost got a bill through Congress that would have taken the music industry’s lawsuit frenzy against downloaders and made it a federally-funded program (like that’s what we need our law enforcement people doing instead of catching violent criminals).

I tend to agree with Orson Scott Card on this one: downloading MP3s is illegal, but the music industry are parasitic blood-sucking leeches. Additionally, I agree with the argument that the downloads are not really hurting the industry one bit–they’re just so greedy that they did not offer an alternative that enough people would accept, although the online music stores are slowly changing that. They’re still parasites, though.

It’s VHS vs. Betamax all over again, this time for the next-generation high-capacity HDTV DVDs. (Why do new recording formats always come in pairs?). We’ve had a similar which-one-should-I-buy format battle over recordable DVDs, that being the plus-versus-minus war (now you can get DVD recorders that read and write both formats). The new standards are made by Toshiba and Sony. Toshiba (with NEC) has the “HD DVD” format (really called “AOD”), which can save up to 20 GB of data, a bit more than three times what today’s DVDs can save. Toshiba just got the backing of four major movie studios for their format. A consortium led by Sony makes the “Blu-Ray” DVD format, which can save up to 27 GB. Both technologies use a blue laser beam to read and write the data; the higher-frequency blue laser can etch smaller holes into the DVD disc, allowing it to save more data than a standard red laser today.

Toshiba’s advantage is primarily that it will likely hit the markets first, before Sony. But Sony, which lost the videotape war to Victor’s VHS a few decades back, looks like it will probably win this battle. The Blu-Ray format not only saves more data, but it has a consortium of ten companies, not two. Also, the studios that just decided to back Toshiba can also back Sony’s format at the same time to cover their bets.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs’ plan is working. It seems that more and more Windows PC users are switching to Macs because of their iPods. A survey done by a financial analysis firm found that 6% of iPod users have already switched to Macs, and 7% intend to the next time they buy a computer. This trend is expected to continue–but only as long as Apple “keeps that ‘cool factor’ going.”

But there are also people switching for security concerns, and that is also why more and more are switching browsers, from Internet Explorer to Firefox. Now that Firefox has v. 1.0 out and has been very favorably reviewed–with many respected writers urging users to dump Explorer–many are doing just that. Explorer’s market share is now between 90% and 93%, and Firefox should have a 10% market share by the end of the year.

I wish I could corroborate that with my own site’s stats, but actually my own numbers tell a different story: Firefox mostly takes away from Mozilla, not from IE. Of course, that’s just my own little microcosm with a specialized readership. Here, consistently 60% use IE. Mozilla used to get around 20%, but when Firefox came in, that share dwindled to about 10% as Firefox shot up to 10% (in just two months). Apparently that is not market-wide, but at least from people who visit here, the people who are already cool are just getting more cool, is all.