Not Quite a Blog

So, I did a quick Google image search for an old friend from La Cueva High School (Albuquerque), Sean Garner... and I happened upon a pic of him in graduate school at Cornell in his Magnetic Resonancy Force Microscopy lab:

And, yes, that is a 40 oz. of Mickey's malt liquor he's holding in front of the magnetic resonance force microscope in the background. It's nice to know he's still got good taste.

[And, yes, Sean... if you're reading this, this is a passive attempt at making contact with you. If you're ever in the Bay Area, especially the East Bay, look me up. I decided not to email you outright as I figure you might one day Google for the phrase "Sean Garner" and this post might just be up there on the results list.]

So, in an amazingly link-unfriendly manner, Amazon has posted the non-teaser trailer to the upcoming Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.

I sent a note to an internal SIMS list, and Nathan Good responded with probably the funniest rant I've read in a long, long time (not do dis Dave):

WHY is mos def anywhere near this movie? Did I miss a meeting where they decided that the "geek is chique" phenom is allowed to cross over to the hip-hop world? As an old school geek who can remember when being a geek meant that all the things in hip-hop music really didn't apply to you at all, I am confused why they are infringing on my turf? Was the humiliation of playing D&D BY MYSELF not enough for them? How about spending all night as an 10 year old going through reams of debug printouts trying to find the memory location for "more gold" so I could get some fucking little item that no one else in the world even cared about? Oh I'm mad, so mad I will do what most old school geeks do when the world shits on them (aka always) and play doom all night and trash talk newbies. Maybe even make some sexual innuendos and question their masculinity, I dunno, I'm feeling a little loco right now.

I am both happy to see this happening but a little worried that they are going to fuck up one of the most entertaining escapist books I ever read by doing it really, really well, reinforcing my insignifigance in the world. The fact that the trailer is cool and really good has me even more pissed off. Its as if mos def is "slumming" in geekville, stooping to our level before he goes back to being an anti-geek. All they need to do now is but Jennifer Garner as Nell in the Diamond Age and my humiliation will be complete.

A man, lost and alone.

Nathan "is the whole world on crazy pills" Good

55.7% of all search engine hits to my site come from this query. Man, this is sooooooooo WTF.

Link: http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/~jantin/wordpress/index.php?p=60

Judd beat me to this one... he's written a searchbar in FireFox for Google Maps. The web just got that more useful!

emulsion n. - In pharmacy, an extract of seeds, or a mixture of oil and water united by a mucilaginous substance.

Politics and the task of election administration are, unfortunately, much like mayonnaise (an emulsion) without the consistency. Many election administrators are political appointees or elected into such an office and all of them likely have their own political beliefs.

Why am I making this analogy? Well, it turns out, that a month or so after OH SoS Ken Blackwell ordered counties to choose optical scan voting equipment over DREs, the OH Attorney General Jim Petro claims that SoS Blackwell did not have the authority to order counties to use only one type of voting machine.

Note that both of these guys are gunning for the republican nomination for OH governor. How do we take the politics out of election administration? We don't... we find ways to neutralize it.