I’ve avoided commenting too much on the upcoming US election, however the news today that 58,000 postal ballots have been lost in Florida, especially when you realise that the county from which they were lost, Broward County, north of Miami, just happens to be the place that returned the biggest majority for Al Gore in the 2000 election. It puts further question marks over the wisdom of having people who publically favour one candidate running the election. In Florida the person in charge is a known Republican, and the company that produces the electronic voting machines gives money to the Republicans!

Of course it could be entirely coincidental!

Garry has been blogging about another strange event in the election, the blocking of the Bush website to non-Americans but he also finishes with an interesting comment, backed by readers of Radio Times, that Jed Bartlet would make a better President (although he came second to Homer Simpson in the poll!). What I found more interesting about the Radio Times article is that in a poll of the real candidates, George W Bush comes a distant third behind John Kerry and Ralph Nader, backing the general opinion that Bush is considerably less popular outside the US than he appears to be inside the country. This leads me to wonder why it is that there is such a difference. Having said that, watching the current BBC series The Power of Nightmares and seeing some of the ways that American Neo-Conservatives of the past manipulated the US population through the media, it is not very difficult to believe that they are being manipulated through the media in a way that we don’t see over here. A list of sites hosting recordings of the series can be found here.

Just surfin’ the ‘net when I should be doing other things, and came across The Advertising Slogan Generator. You know how, just randomly, sometimes non-sentient computers can get things right? Loaded it up, and the random slogan posted was…

…wait for it…

‘We Do Mediocrity Right.’

How true is that???

Check out some of my alternative names:
I am alternatively known as Dolly Loamsdown of Great Smials (in Hobbitton), Anaranë Tur-anion (in Elvish), my band is known as The Venemous Dog Method, and my children shall be known as Gali Licaelia (girl), Keyle Halet (boy), or Berlancar Isobe (gender-neutral – YOU work that one out…).

This is the freakish part – I remind you that this is TOTALLY random, and I did not have to type in where I was from. In fact, I gave my name as ‘Beth’ and my favourite colour as ‘chartreuse’…

My Pokéname is Humnerd, and I live in the prairies of Alberta. 15 gazillion (or so) users of the Internet, and they get that one right… My other characteristics are a bit cool, too. I quote: “You can puke Dr. Pepper. You can breathe acid. You have intimate knowledge of kung fu. You can spit Mr. PiBB. You can resist tahini. You can shoot sledgehammers. You can drink poison. ” Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to puke something that doesn’t taste of, well, vomit? And how did they know about the tahini incident… ?

My other personality is a pirate wench named Filthy Beatrice Bonny who works at the Broken Hippogiff Cellar. I was also part of a ground battle in Canada code-named ‘Eternal Guard’, and when I’m making a little extra cash by driving a taxi, I go by the name of Joomìtedie Brown.

Just think – how else might the Witness Protection Program come up with alternative identities for their clients??

On second thought, don’t answer that…

I came across this story on The Register – a man trying to sell an invite to a wedding he doesn’t want to attend!

It seems that the groom is a former friend of the seller, who didn’t overly agree with his grooms choice of girlfriend, and hasn’t had any contact with them since then. Now he’s been invited to their wedding. What is more amusing is that since posting the sale item, the number of invites for sale has gone up as other guests at the same wedding have tried to sell their invites as well!

I’ve finally got round to adding a miscelaneous list of sites that I have on my links, similar to Beth’s distraction list that has been on the sidebar for a while.

So far I’ve only listed two sites. The first Daily WTF is probably primarily of interest to people in IT, and is a daily collection of programming and IT experiences that most people have come across. It includes such gems as the user who only wanted a particular warning to appear 90% of the times the problem occured.

The other is of more general interest, but is on a similar topic. This Is Broken details a mixed bag of problems, confusing behaviour, and things that don’t work as expected or don’t work at all. The common thread through all of them is that they are all in the public ‘interface’ that a company presents to it’s customers. The site also includes the chance to nominate your own examples.