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Everybody’s friends over at the TSA had a nice fail at some point when they posted a redacted ver­sion of their “Avi­a­tion Secu­rity Screen­ing Man­age­ment Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dures” on their web site. Unfor­tu­nately for them, redact­ing by draw­ing boxes over the text and images in Acro­bat doesn’t really do any­thing use­ful, the con­tent is still there. It took a few months before some­one noticed, but once that hap­pened the Inter­net took hold and the great guys over at Cryp­tome stripped all the cen­sor­ing, replac­ing it with red boxes to clearly mark what the TSA con­sid­ers “sen­si­tive” and posted the result on their web site. I’m also mir­ror­ing the same here. I’ve skimmed the whole man­ual and read the cen­sored parts in their entirety, I hon­estly can’t fig­ure out why they even felt the need to cen­sor. Gov­ern­ments should be open unless they can pro­vide good rea­son not to be, not closed by default.

Came across this thanks to Wil Wheaton (@wilw).

US Democ­racy Server: Patch Day.

Fixed the pretty URLs and RSS feed (blasted mod_rewrite), added Gra­vatar sup­port, a tag cloud, and a down­load sys­tem that I may or may not ever use.

The Sub­ver­sion install/upgrade method wins again, bump­ing up to 2.7 was a sin­gle com­mand while logged in as www-data on my server and then accesing wp-admin/upgrade.php

I just got back from vot­ing and sur­pris­ingly it was unevent­ful.  I say sur­pris­ingly because this is Ohio, where 2004 and 2006 elec­tions have shown sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns with the elec­tronic vot­ing machines AND on top of that they’re Diebold Accu­Vote TSX units.  Diebold of course being known for appar­ently not using a bit of their secu­rity knowl­edge gained from devel­op­ing ATMs on their vot­ing machines.

I showed up at the polling loca­tion at a bit after 8 AM, fail­ing to find it on the first pass even though there are huge signs out front say­ing “VOTE HERE”.  I blame that on being a bit hung over (yes­ter­day sucked, so Nick and I tried to invent a Jeremy Clark­son drink­ing game with a bot­tle of Skyy while watch­ing Thriller).

Here was the only real issue I had all morn­ing.  I hadn’t a clue what precinct I was in for my polling loca­tion, when I voted in 2004 there was basi­cally one place for every­one reg­is­tered on cam­pus.  The map they offered wasn’t help­ful at all, so even­tu­ally I found a list of names that I was on and caught a very tiny “D” marked in the cor­ner.  I wan­dered over to the Precinct D table, showed my ID, signed in, and was handed a smart card.  After about 5 min­utes in line I walked up and went through the system.

The UI was actu­ally quite nice, well designed, and clear.  The font ren­der­ing made it clear there was Win­dows behind it which is a bit annoy­ing, but I already knew that.  The ver­i­fi­ca­tion page was decent and I enjoyed how it printed the infor­ma­tion page by page as I looked at it on the screen, allow­ing for easy ver­i­fi­ca­tion.  The only com­plaint I have about this part of the process is that the printer was badly cho­sen.  Fonts are small and ther­mal paper just doesn’t last.

After ver­i­fy­ing my vote, the smart card popped out.  I handed it to a poll worker and headed to work.

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Orig­i­nally uploaded by fuz­heado

Food, friends, and no stress.

Fri­day night after work Nick and I went out hunt­ing beer, then came back to play Rock Band 2, dur­ing which Nevans joined us and made me look like a fool on the drums by comparison.

Sat­ur­day the Dish installer came by in the morn­ing and con­firmed that I couldn’t receive a satel­lite sig­nal, thus get­ting me out of my con­tract.  I then went out and bought stuff for the car to catch up on main­tainance and finally get it to stop com­plain­ing about my lack of washer fluid.

Sat­ur­day night Lacy came over and of course was the high­light of the week­end, she hadn’t seen Iron Man so after a House marathon we watched that and then went to bed.

This morn­ing after she left to go to work, Nick and I went up to Chardon for a bar­be­cue at some church his par­ents are affil­i­ated with.  We both noted the strange­ness of two hard­ened athe­ists attend­ing an event at a church, Catholic no less, but it was good food and a way to start off the day.  We then headed out to Welling­ton where I picked up some of my stuff that was still sit­ting around at Charlie’s place, then after a minor detour to Sam’s Club for food and Home Depot to replace the bro­ken toi­let seat here we headed home to relax with some beers and TV.

Around 1 PM today I got a call from the body shop over at Bron­des Ford.  The cur­rent esti­mate is $2600, with­out even know­ing how the sus­pen­sion looks.  The car’s only worth $3500, so it’s not worth fix­ing.  This means I have pulled my Crown Vic from eBay and I guess I’ll be back to dri­ving it around.

As if to add insult to injury, I couldn’t find my phone about an hour ago.  Fast for­ward to just a few min­utes ago when I went to check on my laun­dry.  As you’ve prob­a­bly guessed, I heard a nice thump­ing inside the dryer which was my T610 flop­ping around.  At this point it appears to be dead, bit I’m going to let it dry overnight before con­demn­ing it.

The worst thing is I can’t even fathom how it ended up in there.  I was mak­ing calls all morn­ing, I’ve been wear­ing the same shorts all day with the excep­tion of a food run where I left the phone behind, and I could have sworn I called some­one while the wash­ing machine was running.

Oh well, the T610 was near­ing the end of its use­ful life any­ways, the SIM card reten­tion issues I had before are back and not as eas­ily fix­able as last time.  It just hurts to have to buy a new phone when I’ve already got the upcom­ing bills of re-registering and repair­ing the Crown Vic to make it legal again.

I just updated this site with new pages telling about the things I love and a bit about myself as well. Links are at the top of the page.

I’m also try­ing out a new tem­plate which I really like.  I think I’ll keep it.