June Primary

June 3rd, the proper primary day for California, is upon us again. There’s basically nothing to talk about on the US Representative side of things. Barring an act of God, Lynn Woolsey is getting re-elected. Heck, nobody’s even running against her in her own party. The state Senate and Assembly positions are also uncontested at the primary level. The Presidential contest has already been weighed in on back in February. Heck, we only have two ballot measures to think over, both on the same issue:

Prop 98 Grrr! Eminent Domain bad! Kill with fire! Rarr!
Also includes lots of fun little provisions that get rid of rent control and make it practically impossible for the government to ever impose new regulations on anybody that could possibly be construed as damaging their property value somehow. Probably a bad idea.

Prop 99 Grrr! Eminent Domain bad! Kill with fire! Rarr!
Basically like Prop 98 but with less gotchas built in. Basically a populist backlash against something the Supreme Court did a while back. I’m unaware of any actual cases of the State of California seizing property from homeowners that didn’t want to sell, then turning around and selling it to private developers. The pro-98 campaign is basically just an anti-99 effort operating on the assumption that nobody wants the government to take their land. Well, so far as we can tell, the government doesn’t actually want your land, so I’m disinclined to give this one the thumbs-up either.

So it’s looking like a “no” on both of the live propositions.

Board of Supervisors
If you live in District 3 for the County of Sonoma (like me) you’ve got a bevy of supervisory candidates available. Wright, Zane, and Smith all look like the most likely picks here, with Sharon Wright having won the notoriously lousy endorsement of the Press Democrat, our local newspaper. The endorsement was posed as a close call between her and Tim Smith. Tim Smith has the great virtue of having the exact same name (down to the middle name, identical) as the former incumbent, and further benefits from having an atrocious website. Veronica Jacobi is another Santa Rosa City Councilwoman looking to make the jump to the county level, but her curriculum vitae reads like exactly the kind of political actor better suited to represent the West end of our county, not the 3rd district. Shirlee Zane looks credible, and seems to be hitting all the right buttons to appeal to the local body politic, but suffers from an apparent endorsement from the sci-lon empire, her election signs having appeared on their local HQ’s front lawn. Not a great association there, from my perspective. Wright also suffers by association with Herb Williams, local power broker that has helped shoehorn a number of local figures into positions of power that they haven’t done a lot of good in.

I probably should have done a series of posts on these folks, but I know that most of the people who comment on this blog don’t actually live in the 3rd district. Of course, I also figured I’d decide who I was voting for earlier than this, and I’m still fence-sitting. Bad burrowowl, you should be a better voter!

1928-2008

Bo Diddley passed away earlier today. Easily one of the most influential musicians in America.

First 4th Edition Thoughts

OK, so I’m a big boy. I’ve been in this hobby for a long time. Things have changed over the years. New ideas come, old ideas go. Some good decisions are made, and a few bad ones. Moving on can be daunting, and there’s always going to be a learning curve.

But putting the weapons on page 218? What the hell was Wizards of the Coast thinking? Page 100 (or thereabouts) is where player character equipment belongs in a Players Handbook, damn it! </nerdrage>

I’ll surely have some more coherent observations to share after things have had a chance to settle in a bit more.

Fuel for the Fire

Many are angered when they look at the price for a gallon of gas these days. Personally I just feel a bit old. I rememberpeople getting upset about paying a dollar for a gallon, when ten bucks was enough to get my poorly-maintained Buick Century down to Berkeley and back. GasBuddy.com has put up a great map that shows prices broken down by counties all across the 48 contiguous states. A couple of clear trends crop up: the Northeast, California, and the upper Midwest have high gas prices, an the flyover has relatively low prices.

I’ve heard claims in the past that California pays extra for gasoline due to the strict emissions standards imposed by our state government. The idea here is that we can only use gas produced specifically for California, that we do not benefit from the market competition that includes all the other states. I’m not aware of any meaningful market competition driving down fuel prices anywhere else in the world, so I too a quick look at another colorful map, this one from API:

It is like a fuel-pricing Rosetta Stone. California’s state gasoline tax is fully $0.255 higher than that in Texas, $0.315 higher than in Wyoming. Gas prices in California were as low as $3.93 in some parts of California for the day shown (Memorial Day), and as high as $3.81 in parts of Wyoming, only $0.08 less after taxes. On the further end of the spectrum, we see $3.81 per gallon gas in most of Texas and $4.11 in most of California (the Bay Area and Los Angeles numbers). Adjusting for the state tax difference, Texans win out by a measly five cents.

So Wyoming, benefitting fully from the splendors of market competition, saves eight cents per gallon by taxing 32 cents less in tax, Texas saves thirty cents per gallon by taxing 25 cents less in tax. The difference? Texas is also a major source of the fuel. California has oil fields too, no doubt, but the biggest differentiating factor here looks like it’s happening at the state capitols, not on the spot markets.

Oregon is a bit of an anomaly, but they don’t let people pump their own gas there. All the other prices are presumably self-serve.

Hat tip to Infosthetics for the GasBuddy link.

Back to Madame Mirage

The release schedule was a little halted, but the Madame Mirage plot arc has reached its natural conclusion with issue six. The Kenneth Rocafort artwork held up nicely throughout, and the tale is wrapped up nicely with a rather predictable but well-executed climactic showdown and denouement.

A trade paperback version is slated for later this year, which I recommend if you get the chance. It is well past time that American comic books get past the tired old protagonists and villains of the past. The world only needs so many Batman, Spiderman, and X-Men stories.

Rounding out the ticket

There has been a lot of talk recently about possible vice-presidential picks for the likely Democratic nominee for the office of the president of the United States. At some point, Barack Obama has to make his choice. Much of the talk has been focused on notables such as senator Hillary Clinton as a form of bridge-building reconciliation between the two warring tribes that the Democratic party has fractured into during the nominating process. Others have proposed senator John Edwards as a possible pick, citing working-class appeal, a southern appeal, and a general reinforcement and amplification of senator Obama’s core message of change. Other names like Biden and Dodd have been raised as possible bulwarks against accusations of naïvité on foreign policy issues. This is just among the other contenders for the nomination. Kathleen Sebelius is another name I keep hearing, as is Jim Webb. Each have certain regional or topical strengths.

But people don’t vote for the vice president when they show up to the polls in November. The name will be on the ballot, but it’s the top of the ticket that draws the greatest scrutiny and consideration. As an opportunity to help secure the election, the choice of a running-mate has more to do with the news cycle during which it is announced, a minimal bump or hit in the polls after any vice presidential debates, and fundraising. As for the actual duties of the office, the vice president is to inquire daily as to the health of the president, and be available for tiebreaker votes in the Senate.

I just don’t know who would be truly useful for fundraising. Presumably Clinton would be strong in this area, as she has already raised and spent a stupendous amount in pursuing the nomination herself. For amplifying a message of change and a new direction unifying the country and setting aside the divisive politics of the past twenty years, though, I humbly suggest an alternative that may be mentioned frequently as a possibility for John McCain: governor Mike Huckabee.

That’s right, the Arkansas Baptist minister turned cultural-conservative second-place contender for the Republican nomination. Let us consider the upside:

He has executive office experience as governor. This could help offset potential claims that the ticket lacks leadership experience.
His public service experience includes working together with a Democratic-controlled state legislature. We know he can function when surrounded by crazy left-wingers.
His conservative credentials are centered almost entirely around cultural wedge issues. These are the major symptoms of the cancer that Barack Obama claims to be seeking a cure for before it kills our body politic. Inviting him onto the ticket is a major gesture towards spanning a multi-decade political divide.
His record on the actual operation of government is quite moderate, having implemented government programs and tax policies in a pragmatic manner that makes led many fiscal conservatives to turn their back on him. This man can work with Democrats on their key issues of trade, education, infrastructure, and health care.
He’s got a band. They’re not that great, really, but they do a passable cover of “Freebird,” and could save the campaign a few shekels on campaign-stop entertainment expenses.
Dude is seriously charming. Actually listen to him for more than six seconds and you may have diametrically-opposed policy views with him but probably won’t dislike him. Not a lot of people can do that any more.

These are all positives. I also suspect that inviting this specific man to be a running-mate would result in roughly three quarters of the Washington media punditocracy to crap their drawers and run screaming into the woods. Experts that once forecast a Clinton vs. Giuliani main event would likely spend no less than a month huddled up in a fetal position, rocking themselves an sobbing into empty Jack Daniels bottles. Multiple fire and brimstone preachers and vociferous atheists would wander the streets in a muddled daze. Very little could happen for several days that could knock this off the forefront of the political news cycle short of a foreign invasion.

The negatives are all too obvious:

He is a Republican. This means he is likely to no accept the position, and many Democratic party insiders would get their panties in a bunch over this gesture.
He has endorsed John McCain. This almost certainly means he would not accept the position at first blush. Senator Obama is a persuasive man. Get the two in a room together and let some magic happen.
He is strongly against abortion. He does not want Roe vs. Wade overturned, he wants a constitutional amendment. This isn’t really an issue, as it isn’t the purview of the vice president to revise the constitution.
He joked about somebody pointing a gun at senator Obama. Considering that being his veep would put him a bullet away from the presidency, this would be especially tasteless and probably require him to commit seppuku should something of the sort actually happen.

I don’t think that the negatives outweigh the benefits here. Every right-wing claim that Obama is some kind of radical Islamic Secularist Leftist (if such a worldview is even possible) would ring hollow to even the most credulous audience. An Obama-Huckabee ticket would win in New York and California, in Illinois and Arkansas, in Iowa, Virginia, and the Carolinas. It would beat McCain in most of the South, and force him to fight hard to keep even Utah and Texas on board.

TL;DR: we should let the funny southern guy back into the political limelight.

Deterring Spammers & Epileptics

JkCaptcha has to be a strong contender for most hideous regression in web development for 2005. What use is keeping automated systems from creating accounts on your web-based service (whatever it is) if it’s going to make your site look this bad? I have no idea why it took me so long to come across this very clever atrocity.

Picture above is just a random one from Rapidshare because I refuse to sully my site with the evils JkCaptcha produces.

On the Indignity of Forced Memes

Simply put, a meme is a thought pattern that is spread from one person to another. Some memes are behavioral, such as the process of building a fire or brewing ale. Some are intellectual, such as religion. Some are commercial, like the Big Mac jingle.

In the tradition of the commercial meme is a phenomenon called “forced memes.” This is when somebody attempts to contrive a new pattern and propagate it for the sake of having done so. Attempts are made to short-circuit the brutal process of natural meme selection. If you have an idea and express it, then I am somehow exposed to it, absorb it, and find some value in expressing it myself and this repeats through others, you have contributed to the process by which mankind has risen up from the primordial muck and dominated the Earth. This is normal, natural, and in the grand scheme of things is the continuation of a valuable social and mental process. Posting a screenshot of Milhouse on an image board until somebody else starts doing it too, however, is just sad. Sometimes it’s so sad it’s hilarious.

A few of the blogs I frequent have fallen into a creative quagmire that not only perverts the natural meme-propagation process, but one that actually proclaims itself to be the abomination that it is, taking things further down the path of evil than normal forced memes: forced blogger memes. Logtar has been especially vulnerable to this trend, through Daniel has started a couple himself. Meesha has even gone so far as to fight back against the pervasive Fridays Feast cancer, attempting to start up a forced meme of his own in opposition. While I share his disdain for the Feast, you’ll find my forced-meme participation right next to my Adsense ads. Oh wait, I don’t participate in Adsense.

TL;DR – if you really must pollute my Internets with your prose, make it your own. Write your own content. If you see a post somewhere that you think is really cool, comment on it, write a post about it on your own site, but please for the love of all that’s holy, refuse to participate when somebody tags you. Don’t do it.

Dying webcomics

Back when I first mentioned the Order of the Stick here, I lamented that far too many of the truly funny comic strips online have kicked the bucket or degenerated into something completely devoid of entertainment value.

Add to the list Chainmail Bikini. It never strayed from its core concept, following a group of RPG nerds fumbling through a grab-bag of hurdles both within the game and at the table. Mostly at the table. As the panels jumped back and forth between the game setting and the gaming table, the bad mix of player preferences and poor DM management of the situation created all manner of amusing conflict. The illustration was excellent, conveying the tone of both settings with deceptive ease. The artwork was unlike the American comic book or comic strip art I see all the time, nor was it some slavish weeaboo attempt at Japanese comic art.

Order of the Stick slogs on at an irregular rate, and Penny Arcade will probably always be good. Real Life Comics rounds out my final three now, which used to tickle a couple of geek niche points but now is mostly just good for poking fun at Texas and our Californian preconceptions about that odd, odd place.

Ten

Back in early April of 1998, I was doing data entry for my mom at her accounting office, taking some classes at the SRJC, and doing sign work for my roommate and his dad. After tax season I needed another reasonably-stable stream of income aside from the sign work, so I submitted my resume to a place my friend Mori was working at at the time, Sonoma Interconnect.

According to my pay stub, May 6, 1998 was my official hire date. Ten years ago. There have been a lot of changes in the Internet Service Provider game since then; 56k dial-up has gone from a novelty to archaic, disk quotas have shot up from around 3 megabytes for most providers to practically all-you-can-eat at some places, Netscape and Eudora have been unseated by Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, titans AOL and Earthlink have been nibbled down by competition from incumbent telcos and cable companies that formed a residential broadband market. Three market bubbles have hit (two of which have since busted), the United States has seen a federal election stolen and two wars started. I’ve gotten married, had a child, buried a grandfather, and bought a home all in this time.

Burrowowl

Infrequently-updated geek ramblings