Appraisal: Got it today, should find out the results sometime late tomorrow or Monday. This appraiser seemed a lot more thorough and a lot less surly than the appraiser that we had for the Birch Street house: whereas the Birch guy cursorily snapped a few pictures inside, rushed outdoors to walk the dimensions of the house with a measuring wheel, and then took off, this guy spent a lot of time in each room taking measurements and making notes. We may not get the price we want, but hopefully we can get it close enough this time that we can make up the gap with a little money and a little negotiation.
Electronic Voting Machines: As a software person, stories like this one drive me crazy. My primary beef with electronic voting is not so much the potential for fraud -- although I think that's quite real and should not be ignored -- but is instead the complete and total incompetence of the companies that build these systems. I think that voting is one of those things where, if software is involved, the technology has to be absolutely perfect -- just a notch or two below air-traffic control systems or medical devices. Yet the companies building these systems seem to feel entitled to take hundreds of millions of dollars from public agencies and foist the worst kind of untested, hackish junk onto their customers in return. And along with this lack of performance comes an incredible arrogance and lack of transparency -- witness Diebold and other makers refusing to share the source code inside their machines with elections officials because of the "trade secrets" contained within. C'mon guys, if Microsoft can share the code to Windows XP and Office, you can divulge the relatively puny "secrets" inside your machines. Do you not want people to see your Visual Basic spaghetti code? Or are you hiding something more sinister?
The Debate: I don't think that Kerry knocked this one out of the park, but I was pleased -- I think that he was solidly in control throughout, and was by far the more "presidential" of the two. I'm always shocked by how inarticulate our President is, and tonight he seemed to have particular problems with thinking on his feet. Post-debate, spinners were saying how this very inarticulateness works well with voters, helping to convince them that Bush is just a regular guy -- I'm sorry, but I don't want the man who has the most important job in the world to be just a regular guy! I can see why both candidates' camps wanted a prohibition on split-screen 'reaction shots' -- I think they worked well for us voters, but didn't do either candidate many favors.
Posted by Kevin at September 30, 2004 11:25 PM