- February 24, 2008 -

Last night Pat had a party for the tech staff- she's quite the cook! The main dish was lasagna, and she even made the noodles from scratch

Nader announced today that he was making a third run for President- I don't think he will have any impact though. How different things would have been if he didn't run in the first place.

- February 21, 2008 -

A good week so far, everything is ready to go to surplus, so I'll have time for more neglected things now I guess.

Looks like the maps are all obsolete now since Kosovo has declared its independence from Serbia. Both were part of Yugoslavia before it broke up a decade ago, and the US and many European countries were quick to recognize Kosovo's independence, but Russia, China and Spain were all equally quick to state they would not recognize Kosovo as a nation mostly because they have suppressed populations of their own that wish to break away. China has Tibet and Taiwan which they have bullied and threatened to remain Chinese- I think it will be most interesting if the International Olympic Committee recognizes Kosovo, thus forcing China to recognize them in the next Olympics. In related new China has stated that they are very disappointed after US Olympic officials said they would import all the food the US athletes will need because the Chinese have very week regulations when it comes to food safety concerning pesticides and other chemicals used in food production.

Georgia is trying to redraw their boundary with Tennessee to get at the Tennessee River. Georgia is still in a serious long-term drought and a document was uncovered that puts the northern border up into Tennessee.

- February 13, 2008 -

It was a good day... Mostly I spent my time getting computers ready for state surplus to come and pick them up.

Mom's Valentine's Day gift came today; I got her an ultra small Dell computer. She currently has a super old system back from the day when all computers were "desktops" where it was more of a horizontal layout that the monitor could sit on top of back before the tower configuration became omnipresent. I don't like the desktop as much- they're not as easy to tinker in or upgrade, but they are very good with desk space, and many people want to boost their monitor up a few inches anyway so that's what I got Mom. She has a very small computer desk so I think this one will be great for her. I didn't think to bring my flash drive with software home with me tonight though- it's much more handy at work and I hate when I leave it at home.

- February 12, 2008 -

Another Tuesday with more primaries and for a second time Barack has swept the states by a wide margin and it looks like he might now have the momentum to win the nomination. Hillary must now win Texas, Iowa and/or Wisconsin by a significant margin or she might not be able to catch back up.

- February 9, 2008 -

The Kansas Republican Caucuses were held today so now there's a more complete view of who Kansans would like to have as their next President and the results are quite surprising! The shocking thing to me is that 2/3rds of the people that came out to vote voted Democrat, and the Democratic Caucus was held on a day with very poor weather, and today was very nice.

- February6, 2008 -

SNOW! That's all it did last night, so I spent my second day at home. Meh, I hate winter.

Super Tuesday was last night and now the results are mostly known except in New Mexico where it is still too close to call between Hillary & Barack. Obama got more states last night, but Clinton got more highly populated states. The satisfaction rate for both is very high that it's hard to pick who you really like more.

$1.16 million... That's how much it cost Mitt Romney per delegate, and he has 256, it's been so costly it makes many wonder if he will be able to continue. Mike Huckabee has 194; unfortunately for Huckabee, there's only one more southern state left to gain delegates from so as much as he'd like to continue, his voter niche is exhausted. John McCain leads the Republican delegate count with 720 and appears to be the unstoppable nominee, but many of the staunch conservatives say they will refuse to vote for him. Quite the opposite from the Democrats many of the Romney supporters highly dislike McCain, but I think if Huckabee drops out he will try to sway his supporters to McCain.

The numbers are very telling of who will in the end will become President; Between three and five times as many young voters came out to vote compared to the election between Bush and Kerry, and most are voting Democrat. If you look at the number of votes being cast for one party or the other you can immediately tell the next President will be a Democrat:
In Illinois Hillary got 662,845 votes, as many as all five Republicans on the ballot, Obama got 1.3 million votes there.
In Massachusetts Obama got 511,887 votes, as many as all the Republicans, Clinton got 700,000 on top of that.
In New York Obama got 697,914, twice the Republican total, Clinton got 1,003,623.
In North Dakota 9000 people voted Republican, 18,000 voted Democrat.
In Georgia 950,000 people voted Republican, over a million voted Democrat.

There were a few exceptions though, in Alaska there were only 406 votes for a Democrat, and over 11,000 for Republicans. If the primaries, caucuses and straw polls were any measure of how people will vote come election day the people of 24 states will give their electoral 324 votes to the Democrat no matter who the nominee is. Three states will give their 18 electoral votes to a Republican, and 24 other state are close and will be the "battleground states". It takes 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency.

- February 4, 2008 -
Last night I finally got rid of my old IBM 21" CRT monitor (old desk picture) which had been sitting on my floor for a couple months since I got my new 24" Sceptre LCD (right). I hauled it downstairs and out to the car- I was half tempted to try and weigh it, it was just a massive massive thing, and it was pretty much a cube so it was quite ungainly to carry. I ponder it was probably the maximum my poor desk could support. I gave it to Brent who was just giddy to have it as it was quite a step up from his older CRT. Also having changed since my last picture is Tachyon (the tower on the bottom) which is now in its fourth incarnation... Tachyon III had a lot of issues and I finally gave up on it and just started over (but used many of the parts in Tach4). Tach2 is still clunking away... For some reason I pondered it was old and less useful so I took it to work to learn Linux on and renamed it Positron, Tachyon 3 was such a problem and pain that I regretted it though.... And then there was the first Tachyon... it was the first computer I built, and also a bit of a money pit, but it was awesome for it's day with one of the first dual processor motherboards- it was quite loud though. It started out more as an art project cause I had an old Gateway 2000 case and I took it all apart and painted it a glossy blue, and some other pieces I painted chrome, but they oxidized and weren't so shinny after a month. After one of the processors failed I just got another single processor motherboard and case and built Tachyon 2. Tach 4 has a 3.2GHz Pentium D Processor and 3GB of RAM.