The friendly boys at Verizon painted a line down the entire street today. My area is one of the first in the country to get fiber to the home. I am not sure how that happened… But I am excited! Before long I’ll have 15 megabits to play with.
We’ll get our regular old commercials back. We’ll get to find out what the real news is again (now that the Politics section isn’t half the news paper, TV program, radio broadcast, etc). We’ll get to save our money and not donate to activist groups, or at least not have to hear why we should donate to said groups. We’ll get to ignore sites like DailyKos and PowerlineBlog. Superstar pundits will go back to being average professors and blow hard attorney’s. Pollsters will be degraded from zen masters to regular guys like us.
Mmm. Can’t wait.
So I learned that when you’re profiled in a business magazine, lots of people decide to spam you with unrelated business propositions. I’ve been asked to hock insurance, team up for a “prosporous future together”, send video emails, change my webhost and more. Fun!
I just thought of this, it’s quite possible it has been discussed somewhere else.
30 states this year have early voting, which means that for the 2 weeks up to the election you can go to a local library (or other special polling place) and cast your vote. According to various reports, the early voters are typically strong partisans, people who are very excited about their candidate.
There’s an especially huge push for early voting in swing states, such as Florida (where I live). Personally I have gotten phone messages and junk mail reminding me to cast my vote early. That doesn’t even factor in the TV and radio ads which take up about 30 minutes out of every hour of media.
Now here’s where it gets interesting, with strong partisans out of the way (pinko commies, neo cons, etc), there will be a higher percentage of new and undecided voters at the polls come election day. According to other reports, early and undecided voters are polling in Kerry’s favor by about 2/3. Thus, I believe it is possible for the exit polls to be unfairly skewed. It could be 2000 all over again, but for different reasons.
Since calling the election is going to come down to a few states, this could be big. I don’t know how much of an effect this could have on exit polls, but I have heard as much as 30% of the vote is going to be cast early or absentee in Florida. Since the 3-5% minority that only uses cell phones got a ton of ink, I cannot believe this hasn’t been talked about.
I have not voted early, I am going to cast my vote on a touch screen LCD the old fashioned way.
My 15″ 1.25Ghz Aluminum PowerBook is shedding silver to a minor degree. Where my hands rest on the area before the keyboard is looking spotty. Anyone else having this problem? I have used it everyday for almost a year, I suppose these sort of things happen. I’m wondering if AppleCare will be able to fix this (I need to send it in for the white spots problem anyway)…
Here’s a photo, I’m sorry about the depth of field blurring:
I was tired of not having really complete backups (burning DVDs is a pain, and it is only good for backing up hard to replace stuff like the Library, photos and email). So I went ahead and ordered an 80GB FireLite drive to mirror the PowerBook to nightly. It should be here Tuesday. The new drive will cover me in case of theft/damage, but I’ll still be screwed if the house burns down when no one is here. At least it’s progress.
The FireLite series is great–so small, powered by FireWire and decently priced. If you want to see for yourself, Apple Stores carry them I believe.
Why is WiFi so much easier on the Mac? We have lots of laptops in the house right now and just to shake things up we wanted to run the Verizon card in a Dell laptop and make it create a wireless network to feed another Dell laptop. So that was hell.
After we finally got it working, I popped open my PowerBook and it connected with me just hitting OK (it was a new network, had to approve). It could not have been easier.
I am working on an article for MobileTracker that compares some of the different data options available for nationwide service. Right now I am using Verizon Wireless’ BroadbandAccess service. It costs $79.99 a month but it provides super fast speeds (90K/s downloads anywhere in town). I am very impressed. Don’t listen to them when they say it doesn’t work with Mac OS X… There is a driver built in!
I think I need a new client… Mailsmith is slowing down for me. What do you use? How much mail do you have?
I have about 40K messages, and doing anything, especially deleting spam and marking messages as non spam in a search results list take forever. And I just looked and it is using 150MB of RAM, that is real memory not VM.
I use Spam Sieve for spam protection, and for the most part it does great. It has a hard time with some virus emails, but is pretty accurate.
I caught I <3 Huckabees tonight and was very impressed. I didn’t know much going in, but walked out a big fan. If it’s playing near you don’t miss it.
Why did I like it? Very, very creative. It reminded me of a pulp novel. Crazy at times, but refreshing.
[Thanks go to Sam for getting advance screening tickets]