I had been planning on spending the day working on a better comment tracking system (and I still might later), but I got distracted by other stuff on the page. I made a couple of small changes to the site: categories and recent comments are displayed again (categories were in a dropdown thingie that did not work in all browsers). I also added a Twitter box. We will have to see how long it is before I regret that one. It doesn't show every post, but the wife and I agreed on what should show given the limitations twitter already has in place. Twitter gives two easy methods to put these in pages, one flash and one javascript. So, of course, I did neither and hard coded it into rantfest. It took way the fuck longer to do, but I got to explore several perl modules in the process so it is all good. Besides, doing it this way we can make it fit in a little better.
The second thing (or I guess other thing, since it technically happened first) is we voted. I think it is pretty obvious by the few posts I have made about the candidates who I voted for for the presidential elections. And I don't plan on dwelling on that choice. I was struck recently by the concept of lawn voting. At work, we watch the news, so we basically get way too much coverage of the presidential race. That is nice and all, but then I have no desire to follow through with educating myself about the local candidates. I have tried to force myself, but I just can't. And then on the way to work, an idea popped: lawn voting. Given the coverage of the presidential elections, I feel confident about my choice there, but I know partisan voting doesn't really mean much. Hell, even the great Ron Paul said he ran republican because he wouldn't have got into office as in independant, and he is one of the few politicians I think is almost beyond reproach.
The lawn voting method (...that I did not follow, but it still amuses me): First, we take the candidate you are most afraid of to win in any election you are confident about, and look for their flags (going to call them Fear Flags). Drive around until you see a Fear Flag in someones lawn, it has te be a residence. Now write down every other name you see along with their office and party. Then put a little hash marks by them. If there are multiple Fear Flags in the yard, the names get multiple hashes. Cross party flags get double points. An example: lets say you are afraid Obama(D) and Burger(D) will win and you come across a lawn with both their flags in them. Every other candidate in the same lawn will get 2 hashes (one for each), but if one of the other flags is a republican, they get 4 (2*2). Now, after having driven around most of your town, add up all the points and sort them by office. Vote for who ever has the fewest points.
