I haven’t ever voted before… haven’t even been registered to vote. Throughout my youth (um, that’s the first 34 years of my life, apparently), I was largely apathetic about politics in general. That changed this year when I registered to vote. You can probably guess from a previous post why I did it.
Anyway, I actually voted on something recently. The city where I live (Irving TX) is currently dry, meaning they sell beer and wine in bars and restaurants, but not liquor stores or grocery stores. We recently held a vote to allow beer and wine sales for off-premises consumption, and I voted for it. We lost. But, hey, I voted.
As a side note, it took only a few months after registering to vote for me to get called up for jury duty. This is something I had avoided for years and years by not being a homeowner and not being registered. Sigh. I go in on Wednesday.
Civic Duty
Amateur Poker League
The Amateur Poker League is now running No Limit Hold ‘Em tourneys across the street from my apartment on Wednesday nights. Yeehaw.
The Upcoming Election
Chris Matthews from MSNBC’s Hardball was on the Bill Maher Show over the weekend, and he had a great point. He said “I don’t see how anyone can be undecided on this vote. The candidates come from two radically different sides.”
This is an excellent point, and I’d like to state it a different way. If you want Bush for 4 more years, great. I question your sanity, but whatever. If you don’t want Bush for 4 more years, then you absolutely must go out and support Kerry. Failure to act will result in George W(hat a fuckhead) Bush being in the office, fucking up this country, for 4 more years. We’ll be dealing with the shit he’s done in the last 4 for a long time to come. Regardless of how you feel about this nonsense argument about Kerry’s Vietnam record (a war Bush didn’t participate in), do you really want a 30 year old question to decide what happens for several more? I don’t.
Tom tomorrow recently had a great strip on the vote.
The other blog
If you’re a friend/family member that comes here for the occasional entry about our personal lives (such as the house hunting process), please check KyleAndLaura.com for that stuff. KyleBits.com will be Kyle’s “ranting place”. I hope you’ll still read KyleBits, but it’s not the channel to tune into for “human interest” news. 
TiVo
Have I ever mentioned how awesome TiVo is? Laura got me one for my birthday last summer, and it changed the way we watch TV. I don’t watch all that much, but at least with TiVo, something I want to watch is always on. I just bought a second one for the office (where the treadmill lives), and it has this super cool feature that allows me to record a show on one TiVo and watch it on the other. The show gets transferred over the wireless network. Love it.
TiVo is running 2 specials right now. The first one is a $100 mail-in rebate. So now is a good time to buy. The other special is a referral bonus. If you end up buying a TiVo because of my rave about it (and if you’re not sold, just talk to me… I can rave about it), please use me as a referral. The email address I used to register is .
Black Hat – Day 2 – Class
The class I have chosen to attend at Black Hat is called “Designing Secure Web Applications Through Enlightenment and Understanding”. Why not let hackers tell me what it is about web apps they find easy to hack!
Black Hat – Day 1 – The trip in
When you’re headed for Vegas, you want the trip to start off lucky. Unfortunately, mine didn’t. A maintenance problem on the plane caused us to leave over 1 hour late. Grr.
Black Hat
I’m attending the Black Hat Security Conference this year. Essentially this is where a bunch of hacker types come together to teach Corporate America how they’re hacking us these days. There are a few days of classes, followed by a few days of presentations. Also, for free, we get into DEFCON, which is where all the underground hackers get together to interact with each other.
So, as a corporate citizen, you can see I’m headed into enemy territory. Yeah, I’m going to use the wireless network they’re providing. Sure.
Did I mention this conference is in Las Vegas? Yeah, baby. Learning by day, gambling at night. What could be better?
The Art of War
I was reading about The Art of War, and how it pertains to business, and I was struck by a quote:
- “So the principles of warfare are: Do not depend on the enemy not coming, but depend on our readiness against him. Do not depend on the enemy not attacking, but depend on our position that cannot be attacked.”
Do We Need More Gee-Whiz?
I was just reading an article about a new desktop called Project Looking Glass being worked on by Sun Microsystems. While the Screenshots are pretty stunning, I’m not sure I get the point.
