This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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Here is a hint, if you call me, and you get my voice mail, and you leave me a voice mail… there is then no need to call every hour all day long to leave more basically identical messages with no new information. That is annoying. When you also alternate the calls to me with calls to Brandy doing exactly the same thing, and leaving the same message on her voice mail time after time, that is also not helpful.
When I get around to checking my voice mail, I’ll get all of the messages all at once. Calling over and over again and leaving the same message over and over again will not get me to call you back any sooner. In fact, it will probably make me pissed off and not want to call you at all, even if I was actually expecting your call and did have business to conduct with you.
Also, if you leave me a voice mail, please leave an actual message giving information I can use to know the relevant information when I call you back. Don’t just say “This is Joe Bob from Company Q, please call me back right away.” Especially if you leave that message 16 times on two voice mail boxes in an 8 hour period.
Thank you.
Official information here (pdf).
This is the follow on to Question 1 which I blogged about on Saturday. There are two possible initiatives to choose from. If Question 1 passes, then the winner in Question 2 will appear on the ballot.
Boiled down, the first option “Initiative 26” makes a number of local offices that have been partisan offices into non-partisan offices. The second option “Council-Proposed Alternative” does the same thing, but also provides for candidates to still identify their party preference on the ballot. (Although such identification would not imply the endorsement of the party.)
WTF?
The argument is that it is better to be open about a preference which will exist anyway than to hide it, and that putting the party preference on the ballot gives the voters more information in order to make a educated choice.
I frankly think that is bullshit, and is just an attempt to essentially keep the positions partisan, even while calling them non-partisan. It is an effort to maintain the status quo while pretending to do otherwise.
I generally am displeased with political parties and think that any effort to disrupt the influence of such organizations, and rather have people make decisions based not on party identification, but rather by evaluating the individuals involved and their specific views, is a positive development.
If candidates want to make known a party preference, then they can put it on their websites, they can talk about it, people can discuss it. But it should not be on the ballot. (Frankly, I think all elections should be that way.)
And honestly, I think that if an office is truly a non-partisan office, then close identification with any political party should be a major negative for any candidate. If it is a non-partisan office, then people running for those positions, or elected to those positions, should make a significant effort to NOT be tied to beholden to any political party.
In any case, as I’m sure is obvious by this point, my vote is for:
INITIATIVE 26
As a semi-announcement, my Electoral College Prediction pages are now also being included as a feature on chrisweigant.com.
New CW.com Feature! Charts! Maps!
(Chris Weigant, 5 Aug 2008)
The last time I wrote a column about the Electoral College, I provided some graphs to liven up what I was talking about. I got a comment from someone who had his own graphs, who invited me to check them out. I did so, and liked his graphics so much that I asked him if I could cross-post them here for my readers. He graciously accepted, and I’ve got most of the bugs worked out (I think)… so I’m giving CW.com readers a one-day preview before I officially roll it out on Huffington Post as well.
As he mentions, it may get some additional exposure tomorrow.
Spent about five or six or seven hours at SeaFair with Brandy and Amy. Everything from the neck up is now bright red in color and tingly from the sun. Oops. I got home and immediately fell asleep for a nice nap. I’m now awake again and will try to get a thing or two done before heading to bed again for real.
So… a few minutes ago Brandy put the pizza box and pizza in the oven to keep warm… but the oven was hotter than she thought it was. A few minutes later when Amy went to get another slice, she noticed that inside the oven the pizza and pizza box were quite nicely on fire.
Brandy and Amy managed to put it out. But the house is now full of smoke.
Maybe we’ll go out for awhile.
I can’t breathe. Cough.
Official information here (pdf).
Basically, question one is just asking if either of two proposed initiatives to amend the King County charter should be on the General election ballot. Both amendments would make the county executive, assessor and councilmembers into non-partisan positions. They differ however in how that would happen, and how information would be presented to the voters. If Question 1 passes, then Question 2, regarding which of the two proposals would be on the ballot, becomes relevant. I’ll wait to Question 2 to discuss the merits of the two proposals.
For now, the question is if either of them should be on the ballot.
I am generally in favor of direct elections when it comes to questions of how government should be organized (as opposed to specific questions of policy).
So my vote here is:
YES
Just got my ballot in the mail. Like other times, I’ll post here on each question and how I end up deciding. The actual election isn’t until August 19th though, so I have time, and will probably space these out rather than do them all at once. But I’ll start with one tonight in a few minutes.
![]() I’ve had a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license sticker on AbulWiki since I started it, but I never got around to putting one on my main site. I just did. You’ll see it in my footer now if you scroll down. So, if you really had a hankering to reuse any of my content, but just weren’t sure on how to go about doing it in the way I would prefer, you now know. (Of course, I still stand by my position that all intellectual property, including licenses of this sort, are inherently obsolete in the digital age, and really more represent the preference of the author which a well meaning and polite person should abide by out of the goodness of their heart, rather than something that can or should be legally enforced, but that is a whole other debate.)
OK, after a long time of just ignoring it, I went back to try to finally fix the CSS for this website on IE. A number of months ago, I thought I had done so, but there were still some issues with it, and while it worked on IE 6, it broke on IE 7. And at some point I accidentally reverted to an older version that didn’t work in IE 6 either. So this site has basically been broken in IE for quite some time.
I spent a couple of hours on it tonight, and I think I finally have things working nicely, not just in Safari and Firefox, which have always worked pretty nicely, but also on IE 7. I no longer have a copy anywhere of IE 6 to see if it manages to do the right thing as well though. If anybody is running IE 6, please let me know if things look all messed up. Although, if it isn’t working, then perhaps it will stay that way. :-)
I did have to kill the Google Ad in IE to make it come out right, but I dare say I doubt anybody will mind that.
While I was at it, I also made the one character change in the CSS file to make the minimum width of the center column match the size I’m now using for images instead of the older smaller size.
So, I just (well, over the course of the weekend) moved AbulWiki off of my iMac at home, where it was connected to the Internet over a slow DSL connection and my local Airport network, where it would become slow and sometimes unresponsive whenever I was actually doing anything with my computer… to a new location at an actual hosting company. We’ll see how it goes in the new location. With luck it will be a little bit faster and more reliable at the new location. We shall see though. Ya never know.
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