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www.crankycoder.com

mix equal parts comic book nerd and python programmer. bake until crusty.


Voting Liberal won’t make your vote countOctober 2 2008

Haven’t posted in a long time now.  Let’s try getting on the posting wagon again…

I’ve been helping with the Green Party this election and something I hear time and time again from people is this :

“I’d vote Green, but my vote would be wasted - so I’m voting Liberal.”

While I understand the sentiment - this is pure logical fallacy.  If your vote was to count - that would mean that your vote would have to be decisive in winning the riding for the Liberals by breaking a tie.

It’s never a tie.

The only way your vote would count in the “I’m voting Liberal” scenario is if your vote was decisive - that is - if the vote count without your specific vote was a tie.

To reiterate my point - it’s never a tie.  Your vote never actually counts in a plurality voting system because it’s never a decisive vote.  Your single vote is never the one that puts a candidate into office.
So your vote would still be wasted.

Vote with your conscience, not with bad math.

Just to beat a dead horse one more time - this is a good example of why people should really want proportional representation.  People constantly complain about the quality of their politicians, but we institute an electoral system where voters have a perceived incentive to vote for a candidate who does not have the same interests as the voter.

Or more simply - yeah - the politicians we have in office may suck - but we keep voting the


I’m apparently a bumJuly 31 2008

Or at least Rosie seems to think so.

Boo yeah. A game I can actually win at.April 25 2008

Finally. An online game that I have a good chance at beating people at. :)

http://play.typeracer.com/

booyeah
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

crankycoder@gmail.com is part borkedApril 3 2008

If you’ve emailed me in the last month or two @ my gmail.com account and I haven’t replied to you - I may have not gotten your email.

Several people have messaged me telling me that I was sent email, but I swear - I’ve never gotten them.

So if I seem like I’m snubbing you - I’m probably not - technology is just conspiring against me. Or maybe just Google.

Addendum - I wasn’t seeing emails that were BCC’d to me. I think I’ve fixed my gmail filters so that won’t happen again.

victor’s solution to drowning in paperMarch 23 2008

I’ve found myself drowning under a sea of paper the last copule of months. It’s pretty shocking how much paper we get at our house - in just the last 2 weeks, there’s been:

  • bank statements
  • credit card statements
  • insurance documents
  • mortgage documents
  • contracts for work
  • articles from magazines i wanted to keep
  • piles of receipts for taxes

It piles up fast.

I finally bit the bullet and settled on a document management system.

Enter - the Fujitsu S510m.

S510M

I make no bones about saying that most things are poorly thought out and the general suck factor is pretty high, but the S510m is very very far from that.

It’s fucking brilliant.

This little scanner will do 18 pages per minute, double sided, in color - and you push just one button. Out pop PDFs, all OCR’d up thanks to ABBY FineReader and bobs your uncle. Shred or recycle your documents when you’re done.

Wooo!

I went whole hog actually - got myself a copy of