Sunday, October 31, 2004

Today's Political Rant(s)

I'll not insult your intelligence by thinking I can convince you at this late date to vote my way...or that you need me to remind you to go vote at all. I will suggest that if you go vote Tuesday, you prepare yourself for a very long line at the polling place. I think we're about to see a record turnout, to the extent that polls will be ordered to remain open long after the official closing times. The fact that many of them will also be cluttered with observers and cameramen and exit pollsters will further add to the chaos, and make many of us think we were lunkheads for not going the absentee route.

Unless the exit polls indicate some tremendous landslide, I doubt we'll know who won on Tuesday evening. Certainly, there will be whole precincts where the machines go kablooey or the ballots mysteriously don't line up with the candidates or even show all their names, and you'll see people swearing they touched the button for Bush but the machine registered a vote for Michael Dukakis...or something. Whatever, it's going to be messy.

Maybe it's just me, but I sure get the impression that the pollsters — the non-partisan ones, at least — are a lot less sure of their projections this year than usual. An unprecedented number of ballots...more new registered voters than usual...technological changes like cell phones and early voting and so forth...if I were a pollster, I'd sure think this was a good time to not go too far out on a limb. These folks deal in models that are based in part on previous elections, and we've never had an election quite like this one. Perhaps their surveys really are calling it this close to 50-50, but there may also be a little "playing it safe" in there.

For some reason, I was reminded today of the joke about Hubert Humphrey in 1968 when he was running against Nixon. He and his wife actually went to bed before the results were all in and — and this part begins the joke — he turned to her and said, "Well, Muriel. Tomorrow morning when you wake up, you'll get to make love with the president-elect of the United States." The next morning, she woke him up and asked, "How does this work? Do I go to Dick's house or does he come over here?"

Someone wrote me and asked, "If Bush wins another four years, who or what will you think was responsible?" In that event, I'd blame the entire Democratic Party for even fielding a candidate. Because if Bush ran unopposed, he'd lose for sure.

• Posted at 10:31 PM · LINK

Electronix

Never mind the election. Let's talk about important stuff. Let's talk about TiVo.

Since Jay, Dave and Conan were all in reruns last week, I seized the opportunity to have my office TiVo upgraded. On Wednesday, I took it in to a company called Weaknees and on Thursday, I went by and they handed it back to me. When it went in, it had a maximum capacity (on the slowest speed) of 80 hours. Now, at Basic Quality, I get 322 hours and 18 minutes.

I found Weaknees by asking about on some TiVo-oriented Internet forums. Their main stock-in-trade is selling kits with which you can upgrade your TiVo at home with very little technical expertise. I could probably have bought one and done the conversion myself but since the Weaknees office happens to be not far from my home — and since I'm busy and they'll do the installation for fifty bucks — I decided to let them handle it. Their website, as you'll see, explains the process in a pretty clear manner...and the site's also chock full of info about TiVos and how they work and what to do when they don't.

The neat thing here, beyond the fact that I can now record every stupid show I could ever want to watch, is that my TiVo is reborn...but it's still the same one with the same lifetime subscription. As you surely know, a TiVo requires a sub to the TiVo service and that will run you (currently) $12.95 per month or $299 for the life of the machine. I bought the latter...but that means that when this TiVo wears out and needs to be replaced, I'll have to buy a new subscription. The TiVo upgrade I had done installs two new hard disks and since that's the part most likely to wear out on the machine, I have an almost-new machine which continues the old sub. So far, I'm very happy.

In other electronics news around my house: My favorite digital camera is my Nikon Coolpix 990 — it's the one I use for all those fabulous raccoon pics — or at least, it was my favorite. Today, I found that a tab on the battery compartment has broken off, making it impossible to close the door...which makes it impossible to use the camera. A quick search of our beloved Internet yields the info that this happens an awful lot on the Coolpix 990 — a design flaw that has been corrected on later models. And of course, it's one of those design flaws that usually doesn't show up until the thing is out of warranty. Lovely. I'm told Nikon will fix it if I ship them the camera and $150 and wait a few months to get it back...and there's no guarantee that little tab won't snap off again. You can imagine how happy I am about this.

• Posted at 10:38 AM · LINK