Election over

I mailed my absentee ballot on Monday, October 20th.

Since mailing it in, I've received only one piece of mail re: who/what to vote for, plus one phone call that left a message about supporting one of the ballot measures. There was also a group of people on a corner one evening waving signs about supporting that same proposition. I expect more mail will be coming in soon. All too late for my attention.

This is the third election where most of the mail I've received has arrived after I mailed an absentee ballot. Given the high number of absentee ballots cast in California, I think candidates/parties/supporters need to rethink their mailing strategies.

Company doesn't live up to its reputation, and I'm glad

Yesterday I went hunting for a replacement AC adaptor for my portable DVD player -- the one that came with it had died.

I went first to a small chain with electronics: Hi-Fi Hovel or something like that. It had lots, but none that were 9v 2.1 amps.

Just for the heck of it, because I was already in the store to buy some sweatshirts, I also looked in the electronics section of a big-box general store, but it didn't have one either.

So that left the dreaded national big-box all-electronics-all-the-time store in my town. I had heard from several women that it has a reputation for not being very helpful to females, so I wasn't looking forward to it.

Turns out it didn't live up to its reputation. When I asked the concierge or whatever one calls the directional desk, one man called back an employee who had just walked away, and asked him to take me to the right shelves. That employee took me there and found a universal adaptor with a range of voltages and amps. He opened it up, showed me, at my request, how to set it for 9 volts (turns out, you just move a switch to "9," duh) and, looking at my old adaptor, pointed out the correct tip to use on the new one-- a good thing, as I would have chosen another. He did all of this without giving any sign of annoyance or condescension.

So points for that chain. I was in and out quickly, and, it turns out, the item was elegible for a rebate. Next time anyone says anything about that chain providing sexist service, I'll speak up in its favor.

The best part of all: I finally got to watch the final disk in Foyle's War.

Put a necktie on your cat when it's job-hunting

The State of Missouri has set up a recruiting site and job fair on Second Life. They recently made their first hire, an IT employee. The employee first appeared at the virtual job fair as a "small cat with a red bow tie." Perhaps because of the cat's tie, he got an in-person interview (no report on what he wore) and then got the job. The moral of this story is to be sure your avatar wears business attire (to the extent possible, given the avatar) to any virtual job fairs.

It's National Punctuation Day!

Today is National Punctuation Day -- see http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/24/happy-national-punctuation-day/!

Within that post is a link to an article that will cause heart palpitations in any lawyers you know who deal with contracts: an extra comma in a contract resulted in an increased charge of 2.13 million (Canadian) dollars to one of the parties. I hope whoever typed/word-processed that contract for the party getting the extra money got a bonus of some sort.

If you're looking for an appropriate way to celebrate, try making this resolution: I will not automatically put an apostrophe before the final 's' in a word, unless it indicates a contraction, or a possessive. (Yes, such a resolution is legal.)

Did Larry Ellison Listen to Me?

On September 27, 2007, I did a post in which I suggested, moderately facetiously, that server farms, which consume large amounts of electricity, might offer free or almost-free gymn services to the surrounding population, so the exercise bikes in use could generate some power for the server farms.

Today the SF Chronicle has a story about Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle's annual customer conference in San Francisco (see http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/21/BUOR13189Q.DTL.) In an effort to be a bit greener, there will be exercise bikes available that, when used, will generate the power to charge the user's laptop or cell phone (or, I guess, both.) "If they peddle hard enough, these folks will generate extra energy that Oracle will capture and use to help power the conference."

I am all aflutter at the thought that Larry Ellison might have read my blogpost -- hope he also read the November 16, 2007 post where I thanked Oracle for providing free museum admissions to the public at large during that year's conference. (Mr. Ellison: any chance of repeating that next year?) Or maybe, like me, he just got the idea from the dystopian movie Soylent Green, in which Edward G. Robinson peddles a bike to generate a bit of electricity to light a small lamp. (Let's hope the rest of that movie isn't coming true.)

Mr. and Mrs. Famous Male Author

Yesterday I received the Fall issue of Fiat Lux, the quarterly newsletter from the UC Berkeley Library Development Office.


As usual, it included a chatty one-page "letter" -- i.e., essay -- by Thomas C. Leonard, who holds the title Kenneth and Dorothy Hill University Librarian. Titled "Hauling it: how donors help" it started with a one-paragraph story about "a northern husband and his southern wife" who in the 1830s schlepped (that's my word, not his) discarded newspapers from "an exclusive reading room in New York City" to New Jersey. They searched those southern newspapers for information on how slaves were treated, and, ultimately, produced American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839. Mr. Leonard comments and, finally, reveals the name of at least one person in this saga: "By collecting the slave owners' horrifying words about how they treated slaves, Theodore Dwight Weld and his wife changed the national debate."

The emphasis in the preceding quote is mine. Just who was his wife? The noted abolitionist and women's rights advocate, Angelina Emily Grimke. (Note: those are links to three different sites.)She only lost her identity, at least in Mr. Leonard's mind, in 1838, when she married Weld. She has a lengthy list of publications to her name, including an essay -- termed "testimony" -- in American Slavery As It Is.


So, in a year when we have both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin managing to run for high political office with their own names, not as Mrs. William Clinton (as he now likes to be called) and Mrs. Todd Palin, we still have Mr. Leonard, who, I note, does not hold the title of Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Hill Librarian, not quite managing to name the "little woman" who helped Mr. Weld.

Ironically, the next paragraph starts with "At Berkeley, libraries today are the places a new generation goes to find what their society has overlooked or not properly valued." Thanks to Mr. Leonard, some of us don't have to go to the library at all to find that out.

Darwin Awards for Galveston Residents

Let's give a Darwin award to each person who, with Hurricane Ike bearing down, is staying in Galveston, despite: a mandatory evacuation order; anticipated waves of 22 feet -- or, in a different number base, Galveston sea wall height + 5 feet; storm surges of 20 feet -- or, ditto, sea wall height + 3 feet. See any online news stories for those factoids and mentions of those staying; I've been following it on http://www.cnn.com/.

Let's also send a prayer for the 1,000 or so prisoners in the Galveston county jail, and their jailors, who as of this morning, September 12, had not been evacuated, according to the Houston Chronicle -- try http://www.chron.com/ to find the story: a link doesn't seem to work.

And, after the storm, let's give multiple copies of Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, by Erik Larson to whatever remains of the Galveston Public Library, with a suggestion that future residents be required to read once a year Larson's chronicle of the 1900 hurricane that destroyed most of Galveston.