Quick comment on state and local political stuff

 Politics  No Responses »
Dec 182003
 

I attended the EFF Austin roundtable on eVoting Tuesday night. Stepan summarizes most of what went on and I added a comment. The bottom line is that many state and local governments have rushed to find a solution to the Florida 2000 election debacle and have in the process made some poor decisions. It’s going to take a little time, but these need to be remedied.

Second, there’s a lot of blogging on the arrest of a Cleburne woman for selling sex toys from her home. I share my fellow Texans dismay at this use of law enforcement resources. I’ve been getting more politically active over the past year or so and I’m going to continue that trend. I sent an e-mail to Eddie Rodriguez, my state rep, to see what I can get him to do on both of these issues. I’m a little green on what it takes for one voter to get some action on state and local government, but I’m hoping he or his staff can help point the way. I’ll keep you posted. I think all of the bloggers mentioned and anyone else who’s disturbed by these two developments should contact their reps as well. With all this blogging, it shouldn’t be too hard to get together a large enough number of people to force changes on both of these issues. I know the second one is kind of minor, but I gotta start somewhere.

 Posted by on December 18, 2003 at 7:43 pm

ROTK and a car resolution

 Austin  No Responses »
Dec 182003
 

I managed to get a rental car approved and take my car to the body shop yesterday morning. They were supposed to call me today with an estimate, but I didn’t hear from them. I’ll call tomorrow. I ended up with a Dodge Stratus from Enterprise. The damn thing has a tape player. What is this? 1985?

I got to attend a lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup, the father of C++ at lunch and then headed to the Alamo Village for ROTK. The Stroustup lecture was a little underwhelming, but I think it was because the people who were hosting the lecture didn’t give him input on what to include in his one hour talk. All I can say about ROTK is WOW. I must say that I was disappointed with the new ending, but otherwise I was pretty impressed. The battles were totally amazing. I hope Andy Serkis gets a nomination for Supporting Actor this year. I’m sure there’ll be lots of Oscar nods for this installment with speculation running high that it’ll win Best Director or Best Picture. I’d tend to go with director. How cool would it be to be able to refer to the man responsible for Dead Alive as Oscar-winning? Poor Elijah Wood continued to spend most of his time either looking worried or falling in slow motion. I must say that even though I can’t STAND Sean Astin, he did a good job. Shelob was really cool as were the Nazgul. The set design continued to impress, especially the dark and evil places. I was struck by how a lot of the stuff in Heavenly Creatures hinted at the same style that’s seen in ROTK.

 Posted by on December 18, 2003 at 7:11 am