As I write this in the first minutes of Tuesday, November 4, 2008, I realize that I am — for the first time in my memory — really looking forward to this election day. There’s a buzz, an energy, an enthusiasm surrounding this presidential contest that I have never witnessed, and in the midst of all of our country’s troubles it is uplifting to see so many regular people recognize the importance of their duty to vote. I have mostly phased out politics on this blog, but I would be remiss to let this date pass unobserved, even on my own tiny little corner of the Internet.

What’s different about this election? Well, aside from the country being in dire financial straits, I think the candidates themselves represent a fairly distinct change from what we’ve seen over the last couple decades. Since I’ve been following politics, this is the first time we’ve had two candidates that I can truly — if I reach deep down — respect, at least on some level.

I strongly disagree with most of the policies and the dirty campaign McCain has run, but I’ve been watching the guy long enough — 10 years or so, I think — that I know he’s not a bad man. I think he got sucked in by the Bush-era Republican political handlers, who are for the most part parasitical non-humans, but at his core he’s at least intelligent and for the most part honorable, or at least as honorable as you can expect many politicians to be. Those are two qualities that, at the presidential level, you’d have to go back to at least Reagan, if not further. Unfortunately, since he started running for president those two qualities have been diminished by the structure and tenor of his whole campaign. Picking a wacko like Sarah Palin doesn’t help. It’s also refreshing to see the Republican party pick a candidate who doesn’t completely pander (read: lie) to the far right about religion just to get their votes.

My respect for McCain doesn’t make me any less passionate about my support for Obama, however. Here’s the guy who’s mostly responsible for energizing this election. Extremely intelligent, fresh, straightforward, and not afraid to confront the numbers (I like specifics), something that McCain’s handlers rarely allow into speeches for some reason (his and Palin’s speeches are mostly interminable soundbites). More than any politician I’ve ever heard, I think he actually believes the stuff he says, and more importantly understands it. And whatever disagreements I have with some of his ideas, there’s no denying the fact that this guy is probably this generation’s Kennedy in terms of revitalizing a dormant political demographic. We need this political shot in the arm to give people who have been depressed about the idiocy of the past eight years a chance to regain interest and maybe — just maybe — some degree of faith in our government. Hey, it’s not completely impossible.
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Toward the end of last March, I wrote about how I had ditched my iMac for a self-built Hackintosh. Given the huge cost savings and flexibility you get from a Hackintosh, I field a lot of questions about how well it works and if I’m still glad I did it. I thought after six months, it was time for a follow-up.

Am I glad I did it? Mostly yes, but a few niggles remain. On the whole, the machine runs brilliantly. It’s never kernel panicked or crashed, and with the Core 2 Duo at 2.8 GHz and 4GB of RAM, I can keep all the apps I regularly use open all the time with very little slowdown. I can pack a whole bunch of hard drives into the case, and have the connections necessary for up to two 30″ monitors should I want to connect them — all things that you can normally only do on the $2500+ Mac Pro. For $600, I can’t complain too much.

But I can complain a little. For one thing, the card reader in my Dell monitor has never worked right. This is solved with a separate USB card reader, but it’s another thing to have to hook up. The Line In/Microphone don’t work…which would be a significant problem if I didn’t also have a MacBook Pro for the times I need to Skype or something. And finally, system updates can be a pain. The small updates aren’t a problem, but the big ones (10.5.4, 10.5.5, next up is 10.5.6, etc) will hose your Hackintosh if you just run them straight from Software Update. They require varying degrees of handholding and third-party packages provided by the Hackintosh community, along with some dedication and patience.

So I am glad I tried this project, and it’s working out great for the most part. Will I do it again? Probably not. Ultimately, I’d like to buy a Mac Pro. Another option I’m considering is seeing if I can consolidate my life down to one machine — a MacBook Pro — for simplicity’s sake, which I would just dock at my desk when I needed a larger monitor. The home-based massive file store (2.5+ TB) would return to either a basic Linux server or a Drobo. I could use the home theater Mac Mini to run any secondary tasks (like long downloads) that I can’t leave my MacBook Pro behind for.

That’s very pie-in-the-sky stuff at the moment though, because I’ve never been without a desktop computer to fall back on. And while the simplicity of a single computer appeals to me, insofar as I would no longer have to be constantly moving files around and maintaining two primary machines, the lack of redundancy scares me a bit. So for now, the Hackintosh stays and continues to chug along. I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth, and if you’re a bit of a computer tinkerer a Hackintosh might work well for you too.

Karl Rove, Bush’s former longtime political adviser, architect of numerous questionable election victories, and runner-up to veep Cheney in the Be as evil and manipulative as Darth Vader pageant, is under investigation for his role in the firings of US attorneys whose political views didn’t jive with the president’s. In a nutshell, he was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee and he refused to show up to testify, citing “executive privilege” that makes him “immune” from such things like “the law.”

This is just disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. It literally makes me feel a bit sick. Once again, a member of the Bush gang has decided they’re magically exempt from the rule of law, and is trying to get away with it.

Guess what, Rove? You’re not the executive. You don’t even work for him anymore. And even if you did, “The courts have made clear that no one — not even the president — is immune from compulsory process. That is what the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Nixon and Clinton v. Jones,” said Rep. Linda Sanchez, California-D and chairwoman of the subcommittee on commercial and administrative law. And she’s right. This is just another example of how the Bush administration clearly thinks it is above the law, no matter what the Constitution states or how the Supreme Court has previously ruled. Yet while Rove refuses to obey a legal order to testify under oath, he gladly goes on Fox News and runs his mouth about this stuff for as long as they keep writing him checks.

No one — no one — is above the law. If we allow this kind of crap, there’s little point in our country existing at all. The “executive privilege” clause needs to be defined a little more carefully, it seems, because the Bush administration has used it to varying extents to spy on Americans without warrants, to protect telecom companies who illegally setup wiretaps, to prevent intelligence officials from testifying before Congress about what they really knew before the Iraq war started, and now to cover up political firings. It has unquestionably been abused, and little has been done about it because the administration just says “Terrorists!” and half of the country falls meekly into line and lets these people continue to trash our laws, our Constitution, and our very way of life in the name of “security.”

CNN: Rove ignores committee’s subpoena, refuses to testify

Yesterday candidate Barack Obama visited the building where I work in downtown Indianapolis, at The Indianapolis Star. He was there to meet with our editorial board. I didn’t get to see him unfortunately, since he came in through a back entrance and was quickly whisked away to the board room, and an internal memo asked us all not to crowd the hallways so he could quickly get in an out. But it was cool that he was there, and there was a live video stream of the meeting. I left work while he was still inside, and got to see his entourage and security force. They were everywhere…and yes, some of those secret service agents look absolutely scary. When the elevator doors opened on the ground floor, I looked up and saw a giant in a dark gray suit and an earpiece staring down at me through dark slitted eyes. I almost didn’t get out of the elevator.

Obama was visiting because for the first time in my memory, Indiana matters in this election. The primary is so close that both Democratic candidates need our electoral votes to seal a victory. Polls show Obama up slightly here, although Clinton is practically within the margin of error. Every poll ever conducted on the subject, though, shows that Obama provides much more competition for John McCain than Clinton would, so from a purely numbers standpoint I have to wonder why Democrats wouldn’t just choose the candidate that has the best chance against the other party. I guess we’ll find out soon enough — there’s not many primaries left.

Candidate Barack Obama:

“For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn’t the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn’t want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves. It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it.

Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”

Please let this man be our next president.

Full text

I drive 120 miles each day on the interstate, so I see a lot of interesting people who seem to call themselves drivers. But even before I began experiencing my current commute, I was known to not withhold my opinions from my fellow passengers about the relative intelligence of some of the other people on the road. Since my wife is fairly tired of hearing me complain, perhaps I can find a somewhat wider audience here for my crusade. Or venting. Whatever.

Crappy drivers of the world, this Bud’s for you:

1. You have cruise control. Use it. Or at least you probably have cruise control. This is just a guess, but I’d say that at least 85% of cars sold today have this lovely feature. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been in a car that doesn’t have cruise control. Yet almost every day I wind up jockeying for position with someone who can’t seem to decide if they want to do 65, 80, 70, 85, 75–MAKE UP YOUR MIND! The worst offenders are the ones who seem to unconsciously match speed with whoever’s next to them — so you go to try and pass them, and they speed up; if they go to pass someone else, they slow down. Half an hour of this crap gets really irritating. Pick a speed, press the button. Wow, that was hard.
2. Tailgating me when I’m behind a dozen other cars cannot make me go faster. Yeah, you in the big, ugly, compensatory Hummer behind me…I can’t even see the bottom of your bumper over my trunk lid. Guess what? You’re not improving the situation. Yeah, I know we’re going 15 mph below the speed limit…see, it’s called rush hour and semi trucks. Trying to kiss my rear bumper only tempts me to slow down even more to piss you off. Or, if I’m ever driving a car I don’t care about, to slam on the brakes (“I thought I saw a deer!”) and collect the insurance money from your sorry butt. Now back off.
3. If you can’t remember that you activated your turn signal a whole 5 seconds ago, you shouldn’t be driving. Seriously. Turn it off already. Even Alberto Gonzales could remember that, and he said “I don’t recall” 168 times during one Senate hearing. Beyond the memory issue, if you’re that unobservant that you don’t even glance down at your dash a couple times a minute (and you’d better at least be checking your speed, because I know you’re not using cruise control — see item #1) so you might actually notice the bright green blinking arrow, I’d say you have some other issues as well.
4. If you cut me off, you don’t get to flip me off. Say I’m going along in the left lane, about to pass you, and suddenly you decide that right about now is the time to pass that truck you’ve been behind for several minutes — yeah, right now, when I’m practically next to you. So you go ahead and cut me off, causing me to slam on my brakes and swerve at 75 mph, nearly causing a multi-car pileup in your wake. Then you proceed to flip me the middle finger through the window of your ultra-cool 1995 Dodge minivan. Wait, what? What the hell was that, a preemptive strike? “Hey, I’m an asshole…and just in case you weren’t convinced, here ya go!“
5. If crap is falling off of your vehicle, PULL OVER! In the last three months, I’ve almost been killed by flying truck tires, car bumpers, and a chair. You can’t tell me that you don’t feel it when your rear bumper is dragging on the pavement, when one of your giant truck tires is one rubber thread away from flying off the wheel at 75 mph, or that you don’t realize that when you don’t tie down furniture in the back of your pickup, it might — just might — become a high-velocity wooden missile. I’m calling the cops on you people from now on. You truckers too — if that tire’s about to fly off, call it quits before you kill someone. I’ve seen a big piece of retread smash the front half of a small car to nothingness. It’s not pretty.

I think that covers the big ones. Any major peeves of yours when driving? Post in the comments.

This is just a personal venting post. Move on if you are looking for interesting news.

So I’m trying to sell my 1997 BMW 540i, and have posted ads on AutoTrader.com and the like. The car is pretty nice, although not perfect, so I took the Kelly Blue Book value for “fair” condition and dropped the price over $1100 from that. Fairly reasonable, I’d say, against market value for the car.

I got a call yesterday from a guy a few hundred miles away, asking questions about the car. He asked me what kind of condition it was in. I answered every question honestly. Body? The typical number of door dings and scratches for a 10-year old car, along with a couple more notable spots that may require some additional attention. Overall though, it still shines up nicely. Interior? Clean, good shape, clean carpets, no stains, etc. Any problems or defects with the controls? Not really, there is a little bit of paint scratched off on the steering wheel controls but everything else is fine. Anything not work right? Yeah, the right rear window doesn’t go up and down, but the motor still works and all it needs is a little plastic part. OK, he says, and makes me a kind of lowball offer. It’s several thousand below even the “fair condition” Blue Book value, but I’m ready to get rid of the car so I say OK.

He and his wife drive all the way to come get it today, and, long story short, they think the car was misrepresented. They were pissed and didn’t buy it. The clinchers? Some wear on the edge of the driver’s seat (where you slide in and out of the car), and the driver’s door seal needed to be replaced (that’s a rubber strip that’s really cheap and easy to replace, by the way). Those were the only issues they found that weren’t discussed on the phone. Are you kidding me? It’s a 10 year old car! And it’s a damn door seal — that I never even look at or would think to describe to someone! So they left, and drove 3.5 hours back home, because of a cracked door seal and some wear in one spot on the leather. On a 10 year old car. Keep in mind, it’s in better shape than probably about 80% of the decade-old BMW 5-series cars I’ve seen, and I came way down on the price for him. I can understand that some people are looking for a car in excellent shape, but it’s hard to understand his expectations of one that is thousands below Blue Book and in the “fair” condition I clearly described to him.

For the record, the five other people that have looked at the car said it was in great shape. One said, “How do you keep this so clean?” Yet these two managed to make me feel like I was trying to rip them off — at a price far below what I was originally asking. They were understandably not happy that they spent 7 hours on the road today for nothing, but now I feel like crap for no justifiable reason.

A couple weeks ago I picked up my new car (new to me anyway…got it coming off a lease), a 2004 Honda Accord EX-V6 with every option except for factory navigation. This is a heck of a vehicle. It’s solid, powerful, quiet, smooth…and I’m coming from a 1997 BMW 540i. This Honda is almost as powerful as my V8 BMW, but rides better and gets much better gas mileage. You get a lot for your money with these Accords, and it should last forever…I think it’s appropriate that my friend who took me to pick it up in Columbus, OH drove us in his 1991 Accord with 220,000 miles on the clock. They just keep on going.

I love the car. Like I said, every option but factory nav…which would have been a fun toy, but most of this car’s life is going to be just shuttling me back and forth to work, and my own brain works a lot better than any $2k navigation system. I was also unimpressed with the voice command on the nav-equipped Accords I test drove:

[ Me ] “Find Honda dealership.”
[ Car ] “Radio off.”
…
[ Me ] “Find nearest Honda service center.”
[ Car ] “Passenger temperature 85 degrees.”

…and so on. Sometimes it worked, but not enough. One of the cars I drove had a fixation with XM channel 39…every time it didn’t recognize my command, it changed the radio to that station.

So no nav, but the rest of the car is utterly fantastic. I may be integrating a touchscreen carputer in the future, with my own navigation, Internet, and music library capabilities…that will be a fun project. But for now, I’m enjoying a nice, smooth car with good gas mileage, and have quickly started applying my 30k+ miles per year to my new wheels.

Read on for pictures.
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I just got a letter that opens the door to Matthew Rogers Identity Theft, Part III.

To review, part 1 was all my money being emptied from my bank account in December of 2004, thanks to 5/3 Bank authorizing transactions on an address I hadn’t used in two years; part 2 was when a drug conviction was attached to my driver’s license number because I have the same birth date, first and last name, height, and weight as some punk in Ft. Wayne, IN who, even at my age at the time, had a rap sheet as long as a Tom Clancy novel. Busy boy. That one was on my license record for almost two years before we noticed it in the summer of 2005 when we were trying to switch car insurance companies. Thank God I wasn’t pulled over for anything in that two-year timeframe, or I would have gotten to know the back seat of a police cruiser.

Anyway, back to the present: I got a letter from Purdue today, dated April 24, 2007:

Oh. That’s just freaking great. The letter continues…

Only 175 people. Lucky me. And fall of 2001 was the first semester I was at Purdue, so they managed to screw me over in almost no time flat. This was back when Purdue was stupid and used SSNs as your student identification number. If I’m just getting this letter now, and that data is five and a half years old, has it been accessible that whole time? Because of my other brushes with identity theft, I try to be very careful about my information. I shred everything that has my name, address, or bank information on it. I never order things from shady places on the Internet. I have a credit card with very strict fraud protection that I use as my sole purchasing agent online. I never post my address or birth date in publicly accessible places. Despite all this, there’s nothing you can do to prevent institutions you have to trust with your info — colleges, banks, etc — from screwing up on your behalf. Thank you, Purdue.

So it’s about 1:00 am (obviously, by the timestamp on this post), and I’ve been up trying to get some coding done. Coding makes you thirsty. Since I’ve promised Amanda I’ll watch my health or some such crap, I figured I’d have plain old water. I stumble into the kitchen, grab a glass, pull the Brita pitcher out of the fridge, pour…

…and stare, dumbfounded, as I realize I’m holding a glass full of solid ice. Not ice chips, mind you, but a solid piece — one whole solid drinking-glass-shaped piece of ice.

The scientists in the audience will know immediately what just happened. But because it’s 1:00 am, and I’ve mentally shut down for the day (I can’t wait to see what my code looks like tomorrow), it takes me a minute. I looked back and forth between the ice block in my glass and the tiny little 1/2-inch opening on the top of the Brita filter, suspicious of its tricks, before the realization dawned on me that I had just recreated something I had seen in all those Youtube videos: supercooled water.

If distilled water is cooled below freezing, it won’t actually solidify. If it is then introduced into a “contaminated” environment (like my drinking glass), it will freeze instantly. Apparently water cannot actually freeze unless it contains impurities. I had bumped the temp on my refrigerator down a couple notches earlier in the day because I thought it wasn’t quite cold enough; apparently I went a touch too far. But at least, as the title implies, this proves that Brita filters really do purify the water, and quite well apparently.

A very simple but cool (haha) thing. Still, it confused the hell out of my poor tired brain for a second. “I just poured water…why am I holding ice?”