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Chicago to enlist graphic designers for friendlier ballots. [free reg may be req'd] There's been a bunch of discussion about the usability problems with various voting systems, notably punch-card ballots. Chicago didn't have anything as dramatic as a "butterfly" prexy ballot or two pages' worth of candidates, but we still had close to 120,000 discards from 2.1 million votes -- and when compared with jurisdictions using other systems, there's little evidence to suggest that voters are skipping the presidential ballot. That's just how bad manual punch card technology is. Even if we can't get rid of them just yet, at least we can make sure they aren't confusing. Did I just post the twenty-sixth link on Metafilter today? GO AWAY. METAFILTER IS FULL. :)
comment posted at 12:17 PM on Nov-30-00

<drool> Oh boy, do I want one of these. Unless, of course, the idiots at Kyocera/Qualcomm blew it again, and *didn't* make it capable of using CDPD to get to the Internet. [calls, gets wrong answer, screeches loudly enough that everyone on MeFi can hear...]
comment posted at 5:59 PM on Nov-29-00
comment posted at 12:41 PM on Nov-30-00
comment posted at 8:15 AM on Dec-1-00
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comment posted at 9:42 PM on Dec-6-00

Not a terribly serious topic, but I saw the Grinch movie on the weekend and hated it savagely. Just deplored it from beginning to end. And as time has passed and I've thought more about my extreme reaction, I've grown to hate it even more. This dude at Entertainment Weekly makes a pretty good case for why this blockbuster is a big chunk o' crap. Thoughts? P.S. I did see Quills last night however, and it was amazing.
comment posted at 6:55 PM on Nov-29-00

My hobby? Oh, yes. I used to garden, and collect ancient coins. Now, I just f*ck Rock Stars. I think maybe these girls got the wrong message from the movie Almost Famous. At any rate, it seems like this site maps out pretty clearly the best way for a young woman to be used sexually and then discarded by the musician of her choice.
comment posted at 7:09 PM on Nov-29-00

Would you swallow poison for $1000? 100 people did. (Actually only half, but none of them know who the controls are.)
comment posted at 11:41 AM on Nov-28-00
comment posted at 7:28 AM on Nov-29-00

"Gently does it: Mild sex can halve the risk of a heart attack" That's right, ladies and gentlemen - even pointless, lacklustre, unimaginative, dreary, workaday, missionary, vanilla sex with someone you are bored with can have tremendous health benefits. So get out there today and actively pursue some mild sex today!
comment posted at 11:43 AM on Nov-28-00

"I dated Yumi for awhile, and I have to confess I became very attached to her. Yumi could get very angry over small things. She would yell at me and ignore me the exact same way as all my other girlfriends have. Finally I decided to stop the relationship. It was too draining for me. It was hard sometimes to remember that Yumi wasn't real."
comment posted at 11:45 AM on Nov-28-00

Everquest guide suicides. Or maybe not. No one's really sure. Is this why they call it "Ever-Crack"? [ From Salon via Flutterby. ]
comment posted at 9:55 PM on Nov-27-00

When headlines ... get academic? The Boston Globe chooses a novel way to report Sunday night's news. Even the URL reflects it.
comment posted at 10:40 AM on Nov-27-00

Macromedia Purchases Clue
Looks like the folks at Macromedia have finally come around to the fact that Flash is getting a really bad usability rap. They have launched a token usability section on their site. I thought the four sites they picked as 'Usability examples' were very telling of their understanding of the issues. [via Flazoom]
comment posted at 11:26 AM on Nov-27-00

Phil Agre thinks there was nothing spontaneous about that mob scene in Miami a couple days back.
comment posted at 11:44 AM on Nov-24-00

Who's that in the park? Look at this image of Selhurst Park and tell me what you think you see? Via linkmachinego
comment posted at 7:34 AM on Nov-24-00
comment posted at 11:41 AM on Nov-24-00
comment posted at 9:57 PM on Nov-27-00

Mike Muuss, author of ping(1), dead at 42. Traffic accident, Maryland, tractor-trailer. Half a dozen bad pastiche jokes go here, but I'm not going to do them.
comment posted at 8:02 PM on Nov-22-00
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comment posted at 8:20 AM on Nov-24-00

Any ideas how this happend? No matter how you slice it, this is what my mom used to call "creepy-ass shit."
comment posted at 8:10 PM on Nov-22-00

Michael Kelly has a point
comment posted at 6:37 PM on Nov-22-00

Thousands Protest at U.S. Army School of the Americas -- 1700 arrested Man, that's one place I wouldn't want to be arrested.
comment posted at 6:56 PM on Nov-22-00

It's a tribute to our system of government that no matter how screwed up the election is or how these folks get jerked around, we don't worry about them taking things into their own hands.
comment posted at 12:57 PM on Nov-21-00

Joel 's a little smug when he says "Netscape Goes Bonkers and I'm very thankful, because Netscape 6.0 has been a terrific illustration of so many of the points I've made in Joel on Software over the last 6 months. Unfortunately, it's usually an illustration of what not to do." Too bad he's right.
comment posted at 1:01 PM on Nov-21-00
comment posted at 9:58 PM on Nov-27-00

There's one question which has been bothering me for months: How do you pronounce "L33T" and what the heck does it mean?
comment posted at 1:56 PM on Nov-21-00

ELECTION: Live coverage of (what's left of) the Florida hearing. I heard a solution I could live with: machine recount all the Florida ballots, and hand count anything that bounces. Came from the Bush camp, surprisingly enough.
comment posted at 1:54 PM on Nov-21-00

ELECTION: Dan Bricklin thinks the ballots sucked, too. Remember him? He helped write VisiCalc, and now runs Trellix? I'm still wondering why no one's agitating to invalidate that election in PBC.
comment posted at 12:47 PM on Nov-20-00
comment posted at 12:49 PM on Nov-20-00

CAUTION: VERY NAUGHTY WORD AHEAD (Via Obscure Store) You can't say I didn't warn you. This is perhaps the funniest "news" story I've read all year. I have to believe the (female) reporter was cackling madly as she wrote it.
comment posted at 10:16 AM on Nov-20-00
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comment posted at 1:28 PM on Nov-20-00
comment posted at 2:08 PM on Nov-21-00

DISQUALIFY MILITARY VOTES : A how-to.
comment posted at 8:32 AM on Nov-20-00

Some of us made jokes in the days after the election about "Gore stealing votes from Nader", to ape those who said the reverse. But we didn't read the Libertarian Party's press release, wherein they said the same thing, and they were both serious, and believable. [quote inside]
comment posted at 8:49 PM on Nov-19-00
comment posted at 8:55 PM on Nov-19-00
comment posted at 2:09 PM on Nov-21-00

Where's my Metababy? Damn it - I've waited a month! It's supposed to be back today, but it's not there. Crikey! When will I get my Trinity/Katie Holmes/suck it fix??
comment posted at 6:58 PM on Nov-22-00

Steal Something day offers an alternative to the earlier discussion on Buy Nothing Day
comment posted at 1:08 PM on Nov-19-00

George W. Bush is wearing a ZZ Top hat this morning. I wonder if he's a fan of the band's 1976 song Arrested for Driving While Blind ... "When you're driving down the highway at night/And you're feelin' that wild turkey's bite/Don't give Johnny Walker a ride/Cause Jack Black is right by your side/You might get taken to the jailhouse and find/You've been arrested for driving while blind."
comment posted at 1:07 PM on Nov-19-00
comment posted at 6:52 AM on Nov-20-00

"The rules of this game were set by the people, underwritten by the people, financed or not." Yet another opportunity for the British Observer to put the US newspapers to shame, with an closely-argued, even-handed reflection on the fun in Florida. "The system, full of inefficiencies and coagulations, may stink, but it is also a system which belongs to the voters who now complain so shrilly about it."
comment posted at 7:12 AM on Nov-20-00

No, PostgreSQL does not suck. Some of the people who wander into my weblog get there from a page at OpenACS, the site for the Postgres port of Phil Greenspuns' ArsDigita Community System wherein takes place a "MySQL's Better!" "No, it's not!" discussion. Here's a bit more data.
comment posted at 1:04 PM on Nov-19-00
comment posted at 8:38 PM on Nov-19-00

Next, they cheat death. Looks like those spam emails about US income taxes being illegal are actually getting results. [NYTimes: blah registration blah]
comment posted at 3:21 PM on Nov-18-00
comment posted at 1:06 PM on Nov-19-00
comment posted at 8:41 PM on Nov-19-00