Earlier today, while I was at a meeting, unbenounced to me my Treo was in my pocket with buttons getting pressed which resulted in a whole bunch of email I had received today being deleted. Not just moved to the Trash mind you, but actually deleted. I noticed after I left the meeting. The messages still showed on the Treo, just grayed out indicating they were deleted. But there was an undelete option. So I spent a couple minutes undeleteing one by one each of these messages. I thought I was fine. I thought I was good.

But then, next time I looked, all those messages were gone. I checked the Trash. I checked the spam folder. I logged into my mail via a web client and did searches. But no, they were all just gone. All of them.

And there was at least one I knew was important. (Although I consider all email important of course.)

I was very unhappy. I was very mad at my Treo.

Of course, meanwhile, at home, my Mac Mail client was open and happily getting mail every few minutes. And once an hour Time Machine was happily doing its backup thing. And it turns out it had done one of those happy backup things about 10 minutes or so before the time all of the emails got zapped.

So a few clicks in time machine, and I restored all the emails from 00:00 UTC Tuesday until 21:50 UTC Tuesday (the last backup before emails went poof). Some of those emails hadn’t gone poof, but I got the whole bunch just to be sure.

And thus I now believe nothing was lost. And I definitely got back the handful of mails I had already looked at and KNEW were missing.

Thank you Apple.

And damn you Treo. (Specifically SnapperMail.)

I think the countdown to Sam giving in and getting the iPhone is getting pretty short. :-)

Only five candidates this time:

• Brad Owen (Prefers Democratic Party): No website. You suck. And you are the incumbent. Therefore you suck more. How can you be the incumbent Lieutenant Governor and not have a campaign website? Have I mentioned that you suck? “As president of Strategies of Youth, he travels throughout the state with his musical, multi media program to deliver positive messages about substance abuse and bullying awareness to youth.” Really? You’re actually in office, and the kind of thing you can come up with? WTF? And he has been Lieutenant Governor for 11 years? Wow.
• Marcia McCraw (Prefers Republican Party): She wants to increase volunteerism and transparency in government. OK stuff I guess.
• Arlene Peck (Prefers Constitution Party): “All decisions made while in office will be based on these documents and Biblically prescribed moral values designed to protect the fabric of our society. Though some may bristle at the thought of bringing together Christian belief and affairs of civil government, I firmly believe, as did the Rev. Charles G. Finney, that ‘God will bless or curse this nation (and our state) according to the course Christians take in politics.'” Next…
• Jim Wiest (Prefers G.O.P. Party): His website is broken. “Warning! The specified site was not found”. And this is apparently the guy who was the Republican candidate in 2004. He says this election he is the only candidate with a plan to end homelessness. But there is no additional information. (Maybe there would be if his website wasn’t broken, but…) He says he got 1.1 million votes in 2004, so it seems he actually isn’t one of the stupid fringe candidates, but that seems hard to believe.
• Randel Bell (Supports Democratic Party): He submitted no information at all for the ballot. No picture. No statement. No URL for a website. Nothing. Absolute total fail.

All five of these people seem to suck beyond belief. I can’t bring myself to pick any of them. Therefore, I’m going to do a write-in vote.

My vote:

Samuel Minter

OK, here I find myself on election day and almost out of time. I of course intended to space out all these ballot items and have plenty of time left. But in fact, I have about 45 minutes right now before I need to get on the road for work, and then maybe I have some time at lunch. But basically, I am going to crunch through as many of these as I can, and will probably spend less time researching, and less time talking about my choices. Oh well.

In any case, the next item on the agenda is the primary for my Representative for Congress. Now, this is a good time to mention that as of this election, Washington State has a “Top Two Primary” where all candidates (regardless of party) appear on the same ballot, then the top two end up on the ballot in November. This was very controversial, but I like it.

For this spot there are five candidates:

• Boleshaw Orlini (States No Party Preference): He says in his little summary paragraph that he was inspired by Ron Paul, but provides no details, and has no website. Fail.
• Richard Todd (States No Party Preference): Seems to basically be running promoting the need to be independent of parties. I like that idea, but the website is painful and the little of it I read did not impress me.
• James Vaughn (Prefers Democratic Party): I was actually tempted by this guy. I really want to vote for someone other than the two front runners here. And some of the policy statements this guy makes on his site I completely agreed on. But then there were others I just did not like one tiny bit. In the end, I won’t make that jump.
• Dave Reichert (Prefers Republican Party): This is the incumbent. It was interesting noting what major issues were completely absent from his website (Iraq). In general, I would not be automatically opposed to voting for a Republican. And if Obama ends up winning in November, I actually would prefer a Republican congress for balance. However, I can not in good conscience vote for any incumbent congress person who has not been a extremely vocal critic of this administrations overreaches. And I have heard no such thing about Reichert.
• Keith Arnold (Prefers Democratic Party): His main emphasis seems to be on the need to eliminate the US Supreme Court. Nuff Said.
• Darcy Burner (Prefers Democratic Party): I saw her in person a couple of times when I was doing the local Obama Delegate thing. She seemed nice, but I was really turned off by how partisan she was at those events. Meaning how much she talked about how bad the Republicans were and how we needed Democrats in office. Now, she did talk about issues too. But the emphasis on partisanship turned me off a lot. Having said that, she did actually seem to be somewhat reasonable on many of the issues. And although I am not super excited by her, she seems like the best of this bunch.

So, my vote:

Darcy Burner

It is over 95 degrees in my office. The little portable AC unit stopped working last week some time. And it is hot again in Seattle. Not 95 degrees hot, it is only 80 outside right now, but the office heats up like an oven in the afternoon when the sun hits that side of the house, and it lasts for many many hours. It probably won’t be a temperature where I could feel functional in there until well after midnight.

I have retreated to the bedroom, where is is only 87. Of course, that is still too hot for me.

It might be a little cooler still downstairs, but for the moment I’m staying here.

But I hate the hot and sticky. I pretty much can’t function. So all the normal things I’d do in my office in the evenings are not happening. Instead I am lying here watching things on the Tivo. Completely non-productive. But doesn’t require movement.

The fact that air conditioning is rare in this part of the country is so annoying.

It is because it is only like this a few days a year, so for the most part it isn’t worth it.

But I can’t stand these few days.

And the thought of a new one of those portable AC units that actually works is very appealing right now. Of course, by the time I decide that maybe, just maybe, it is actually worth going out and getting one, the heat will be gone.

There is no electricity here at work. So everybody is having a little bit of trouble doing normal activities.

Actually, there is not “no” electricity. Looks like there is an emergency generator going or something. There are some emergency lights. One elevator is working. And the network is working. And people are using up their laptop batteries.

It does not stop certain types of meetings though, so I gotta go…