Burrowowl

The National Novel Writing Month starts tonight at midnight. Fifty thousand words, thirty days. I’ll be toting my laptop along on a trip to Washington DC, and hope to be able to make good use of time spent in airport terminals. My main priority for being in the nation’s capitol on election day is simple: don’t get arrested. Whatever happens on Tuesday or Wednesday, I need to not put myself in a position to get arrested. Secondary priority: don’t get physically beaten by anybody of any persuasion. Tertiary priority: have a great time with my wife away from the kid. That leaves the NaNoWriMo at an unfortunate quarternary priority.

This year I’m hoping to more aggressively embrace the format of the challenge. I don’t want to unduly limit myself with self-editing, pressing myself to write the story in the order in which it would be read. This time there will be some skipping around, maybe some derailing, and some character exposition that won’t necessarily fit where I’m putting it as I’m writing it. One of the big tips that past winners give is to not edit yourself as you go along; you can fix the typos and the poorly-crafted sentences later, in December, maybe January.

Looks like Chunkbot, Daniel, and Jase are all participating this year. Break a keyboard, boys!

Damned commies and their communism…

Don’t ask me silly questions
I won’t play silly games
I’m just a simple choo choo train
I’ll always be the same
I only want to race along
Beneath the bright blue sky
And be a happy choo choo train
Until the day I die
–Blaine the Train

On November 4th, the people of Marin and Sonoma will get another shot at getting the funding for the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) up and running. This failed very narrowly two years ago when gas was about a dollar a gallon less around here, so there is a good chance that the curmudgeons that squeezed out just enough votes to deny the needed 2/3 majority will be on the losing side of economic momentum this time around. This is Measure Q, and I’ve already marked it “yes” on my absentee ballot. Hope you did the same.

All of California will also get a chance to weigh in on Proposition 1a, a high-speed rail bond intended to provide bullet-train service along a largely pre-existing right-of-way corridor all the way from the Sacramento, through the Bay Area, and down to Los Angeles. It isn’t cheap, but it is a massive infrastructure improvement that should help ease the crowding at some of our busiest airports, and take some burden of long-haul corridors like I-5 and Hwy 99, which see a lot of pass-through traffic. Unlike most of the recent bond measures, which I habitually vote against, this is a proper use of bonded debt: to build infrastructure that will help reduce future costs to the people and state, encourage economic development, and produce something that will be in use long after the bond is repaid. Prop 1a gets a thumbs-up from me as well.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I have a (nearly) three-year-old son and would love to buy him two big choo-choo sets to play with. Also, I’d much rather kick back and read a book than drive for eight hours to visit my nephews and niece down in Long Beach.

A lot of people are going to vote in ten days. Many already have, either at early-voting precincts or by absentee ballot. Some people aren’t going to. Many because they do not consider their choices appealing enough. Some because they do not feel their votes will account for much. Some unknown number will, however, show up to the polls and not actually vote. Vote suppression, caging, registration purges, broken polling equipment, and uncounted provisional ballots may yet steal the franchise of thousands of citizens this year, just like in 2004. This is essentially the last remaining path to victory for the John McCain campaign, which is trying desperately to put up a fight in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Virginia.

If they do it again, if Ohio voters in predominantly minority and urban areas have to queue up for hours in the rain, if thousands of registered voters are turned away at the polls due to a typo in some database, if contested voters are forced to use provisional ballots in Colorado, Indiana, and Florida that will then be re-contested after the voter has left, and the election is stolen, what happens next? Some pretty broad-scale election fraud is already under way, so what do we do about it?

Keep an eye on the news November 4th. Election fraud is a hard story for the nightly news to cover, as it involved actually getting reporters out on the streets to interview poll workers, voters, and election officials. It takes more than two seconds to explain what “caging” means, so the producers on the 24-hour news networks are reluctant to tie up air time with it.

Get your buddies together and plan yourself a party. A celebration of freedom, democracy, and the rule of the people. Don’t have it at your house, have it at your town square. Have it on the lawn in front of your city hall. Bake some pies, bring some drinks. Invite everybody. Plan on having a grand old time, like 4th of July on the 5th of November. See if you can get the local campaign HQ of your presidential candidate of choice in on the act. Make up lemonade for their campaign volunteers and have a big shindig. If things go sour on election day, you may be able to have a few hundred people already set to hit the streets.

tl;dr – the power to govern comes from the consent of the people, even by way of apathy. Don’t give it and they don’t have it.

This seems to come up a lot, though Sonic.net does not officially support the iPhone interface and therefore has no public documentation on the subject. To get an Apple iPhone to use email properly, using IMAP, for a Sonic.net email account, follow these steps:

1. If this is your first mail setup, start by tapping Mail
2. Otherwise tap Settings
3. Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars
4. Under Accounts, tap Add Account…
5. Tap Other
6. In the New Account window tap Name and type in your Full Name
7. Tap the Address field and type in your Sonic.net (or domain) email address
8. Tap the Password field and type in your Sonic.net password
9. Tap the Description field to change the description name if you wish. (Optional)
10. Tap the Save button
11. Tap IMAP
12. Under Incoming Mail Server, tap the Host Name field and type in imap.sonic.net
13. Tap the User Name field and type in your Sonic.net username
14. The password should be filled in for you from the previous screen
15. Touch and scroll to the Outgoing Mail Server section
16. Tap the Host Name field and type in mail.sonic.net
17. Tap the User Name field and type in your Sonic.net username
18. Tap the Password field and type in your Sonic.net password
19. Tap the Save button at the top of the screen
20. Mail will verify your settings by connecting to the server

To confirm your settings are correct:

1. Tap Settings on your home screen.
2. Tap the name of the account you want to check the settings for. A settings summary should appear.
   • The Host Name is your incoming mail server, imap.sonic.net
   • The User Name is the Sonic.net account name of the mailbox you’re using
   • The Password field should contain a series of dots
3. For your outgoing mail server, the SMTP should be mail.sonic.net. Tap this to view more information about your outgoing mail server.
   • Tap mail.sonic.net to see its settings
   • Server should be ON
   • Host Name is mail.sonic.net
   • User name is the Sonic.net account name of the mailbox you’re using
   • The Password field should contain a series of dots
   • As you are likely to communicate on your iPhone on a variety of networks, Use SSL should be ON
   • Tap Authentication for authentication settings
   • Password should be checked in the Authentication screen
   • Server Port is typically 25. Many networks block port 25 access to anything but their own mail servers, so it may be a good idea to specify an alternate port. This can be accomplished by replacing mail.sonic.net with mail.sonic.net:587 in the Host Name field.
4. Tap Advanced for additional settings

This is in no way an endorsement of Apple, the iPhone, nor IMAP.