Chovy's Blog

I had the pleasure in taking part in the voting, or at least witnessing it (I’m not a registered Green) at the Santa Clara County Green Party’s monthly meeting.

Here are the official Green Party recommended stances on the California ballot this November 2 (– is for “no position” by the GP):

Proposition 59: yes

Proposition 60: yes

Proposition 61: no

Authorizes $750 million in general obligation bonds for grants to children’s hospitals for construction, expansion, remodeling, and renovation.

Proposition 63: yes

Increases taxes by 1 percent on income over $1 million to fund expansion of mental health services and programs.

Proposition 64: no

Proposition 66: yes

Proposition 67: no

Increases an existing surcharge on calls made within California to 3 percent primarily to reimburse hospitals and doctors for uncompensated emergency services to the uninsured.

Proposition 68: no

Proposition 71: –

Creates the “California Institute for Regenerative Medicine” to regulate stem cell research and provide funding, through grants and loans, for research and research facilities.

Proposition 72: yes

Challenges the law signed October 5, 2003 , which requires large and mid-sized companies to provide health insurance for employees or pay a fee to the state to do so.

Find out more about the Green Party in your area.

I’m not too sure what all these ballot measures entail, for more info you can go here to read about the various California ballot measures.

Came across this little flash ditty today: Tech Support

Reminds me of when I called Dell tech support, Ironically I got the run-around by the American tech support, and after 3 months of calling and trying to get Dell to refund my money, it was the manager in India of the call center who got the job done.

PS – I will never buy from Dell, well, maybe not. I bought a computer, instantly started crashing, so I sent it back to them via United States postal. They claimed they never got it, and without a tracking number. I was out-of-luck.

FYI – I actually did have a tracking number, but because nobody signed for it in Houston, they just gave me the run-around for 2 months. If you return ANYTHING to Dell, make sure you use FedEx or UPS, and get a real tracking number. Otherwise they will tell you “sorry, there’s nothing we can do since you don’t have a tracking number” – Actual comment by Dell’s customer support representative.

Like I said, it took the Indian guy to rectify the situation, but that was only because I did have a half-ass tracking number from USPS which only proved it had arrived at their address.

Came across this on one of the joke lists I’m subscribed to at work…quite funny, especially since I’m into politics.

Click here for an explanation of the florida hurricanes.

The two funniest commercials I’ve seen in a long time:

“Terry Tate – Office Linebacker”

http://www.milkandcookies.com/keywords/terrytate/

There is a bug in Morningstar’s charting app for stocks. The bug is only present in FireFox.

You can view my explanation here: http://www.cat16.com

This is how I spent my Friday night, after working 10 hours at my regular job.

An idea I’ve had for quite awhile for a web site is one where people can upload photos of tech-related license plates.

One of the ones a friend of mine took was “MSN SUX” in San Francisco, CA.

I don’t think it would be too difficult to throw together a php script which will allow visitors to upload jpeg, however an approval process should be inplace to verify images are of tech-related plates. Also a brief description of when/where it was spotted would be interesting.

Some other plates I’ve seen around the valley are:

GREPROB (Linux Picnic 2004)

TCPDUMP (on 880 around 2002)

USEPERL (an old co-worker of mine, unfortunately his car was stolen, and he lost the plate)

LNUX (VA Software ticker symbol. This guy was driving a pimped out Lexus with gold trim and jewelry to match).

QAENGR (San Jose in 2003)

MSN SUX (Friend of mine spotted this one)

SYSLOGD (San Jose)

RENTNET (Hwy 101, dotcom days of 1999)

There was a somewhat lengthy discussion awhile back of tech plate sitings on the SVLUG mailing list.

Some others had spotted the following plates:

BOFH (motorcyle near SJCCC)

UNIX (shops near Portola Valley (by Hwy 280))

TCP IP (San Francisco’s City College)

I♥ROOT (near Cisco)

I♥LINUX

LINUX4U

More plates can be found here! Looks like someone already has a site going, not sure if you can upload though.

Here’s a very easy to use form, that will generate a javascript or html chunk, that you can simply include in your pages.

http://www.bigbold.com/rssdigest/

Here are the two rss feeds you can use from Top25Web.com:

Latest Forum Postings (Several posts daily):

http://www.top25web.com/bbs/rss.php

Blog Postings (Monthly Postings)

http://www.top25web.com/blog/atom.xml

Here are some other news feeds from Yahoo! which I plan on adding to It’s All Politics.

Yahoo! News:

http://news.yahoo.com/rss



Let me know what your experiences are!