I never thought I’d see those words together.

I tend to be pretty conversative in my views and that means that I usually vote Republican. But this election is different.

I did what I usually do before voting absentee – I take some of the online quizzes about my views and then see how they match up with the candidates’. I took two and they both came out strongly Kerry. The fact that he’s from New England and a Red Sox fan helps, even though that wasn’t on the quiz. 🙂

I guess the big thing that swayed me, even before I looked at the individual issues is the situation in Iraq. It’s clearly a mess. Whether the decision to invade was right or wrong does not matter anymore. We’re in there and the country needs to be rebuilt. I think the only way that will happen is with the support of other countries. As long as it appears to disenfranchised Iraqis that it’s Bush vs. them, the more angry they will become. The more genuine support we have from the rest of the world, the stronger the case will be that this is not about imperalism or any particular US agenda.

While it’s not clear what Kerry’s strategy will be in this regard, he’s a man that can be much more easily respected. Bush’s folksy demeanor makes him appear to be just a dumb Texan. What we need right now is someone who can at least talk the talk and make the US respected in the world community again.

Alright, enough coherent thoughts about important matters – 83 cents in postage just to return an absentee ballot?? What’s with that?

No hot beverages will be served due to a temporary reverse osmosis problem.

— Yahoo email explaning the tragic unavailability of coffee during later hours. Reverse osmosis problem? Sounds scary!

“Personally, I’m playing the worst baseball of my life.”

— Johnny Damon of the Boston Red Sox regarding his poor post-season performance, batting .083

MSNBC added RSS feeds today, following the long lead of Yahoo! News. Far from innovating, they actually copied much of the text from Yahoo’s RSS page.

Here’s one example from each page, but look at each page yourself to see ALL the similarities:

The Governerator gave me a ringy-dingy today, just as he’s in a habit to do every one in a while. It’s nice to hear from him – really. I know he’s busy, but really appreciate it when he takes the time to stay in touch with me.

Unfortunately I wasn’t home, so we didn’t get to catch up and chat. And he forgot to leave his number – again. That Arnold!

Anway, I get all my answering messages emailed to me these days (more on that later), so take a listen to my buddy Arnie.

Well, this page looks a bit different now and that’s a good thing. I switched from Movable Type to WordPress.

I switched mostly because I was losing the war on comment spam and WordPress looked cool. I liked the ability to hack on PHP to make it do what I want. I’ve been impressed with the number of helpful features it has and overall seems to have a much cleaner design on the front and back end. Since about 99% of my comments are spam, I’ll be using the moderated comments feature. I love not having not “rebuild” all the time and the editor is much more full-featured.

My Geocaching Blog is still in Movable Type, but I’ll probably move that over too once I confirm that my scripts to automatically pull my entries into there still work.

The one thing I miss is the ability to easily have multiple blogs in one installation, but I’m sure they’ll work that out eventually.

Update: Grr, somehow I managed to accidentally delete this post. Thank God for browser caches.

From the Garmin MapSource Software Update page:

Changes made from version 6.1 to 6.3:

* Changed software version number from 6.1 to 6.3.
* Fixed issue with searching in multi-product families where a map from the wrong product could be shown behind the search result.
* Fixed some alignment issues in the Japanese and Korean resource localizations.
….

Uhh, thanks for letting us how about the version change, Garmin.