Monthly Archives: September 2006

More One-A-Day

After finding out about SteepandCheap.com I went looking for more Deal-A-Day sites and came across this listing of a suprising number of offerings.

Squidoo – http://www.squidoo.com/onedealaday/

Don’t go making yourself poor and blaming me… 🙂

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One at a time please…

So for a long time now I have been checking a web site most nights at about 10pm if possible. Woot is a fun little site for geeks that features one product per day for (usually) a much lower price that you might find it somewhere else. One product per day until it is gone or 24 hours have passed.

Honestly one of my favorite things about the site are the descriptions of the products. They have some incredibly talented and funny people on thier staff.

From today’s Woot:

O, the cruel tongues of the critics! When the curtain first rose on the D-Link DI-624M Super G MIMO Router, savage indeed were the pans of their pens! They cited its poor signal at long ranges, and denounced the firmware patch intended to fix the problem, claiming it killed their routers dead. D-Link spiralled into a deep depression, wondering if its public had abandoned it. But the company soon steadied itself, marched onward, and vowed to learn something from the bitter experience. Soon, new firmware was preinstalled into each unit, correcting all previous performance issues and rendering the criticism moot.

Another nice thing about Woot is no matter how large the item is, shipping is always $5.

Talking with one of my customers the other day I was alerted to the existance of a similar website employing the same model but dedicated to outdoors gear. As I am collecting useful gear for my upcoming trip I’m always up for cheap deals on durable clothes and whatnot. (If you want to know about a recent find of mine, drop me an email about Ex-Officio)

On that note, head over to Steep-And-Cheap.com for a rotating assortment of cheap and useful outdoors gear. They have one product at a time up on the site until it is gone. Most of this gear goes for much more in retail outlets.

If you find something fun drop a comment and let me know about it.

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Every Vote Counts

As we enter into the throws of the Mid-Term elections, I have a question. How can you prove to me that my vote was actually counted and counted correctly?

In Oregon we use a Vote-by-Mail system that has been heralded as an enormous success in raising voter turnout and easing stress. I find the system terribly convenient as I drop my ballot into a collection site at 2am, but I’m still left to wonder if the ballot will ever make it back to be counted. And if not, how do I rectify that situation and make sure it was counted?

I think about all the issues we have with voter registration, polling place contention, voting machine error, dangling chads and the like and think that we should have some system of accountability for our votes.

Note: This is not a fully developed idea. There are some holes in my process.

Why couldn’t my ballot have a uniquely identifiable number on it that, once cast and counted, I could validate it? I could easily log onto a website or dial in to an automated telephone system, and verify that yes my vote had made it through the collection process and into the categories I wanted.

I realize there would be problems in correcting the vote if it appeared incorrectly. Why not attach a pull-off tab that had my copy of the uniquely identifiable number on it? Or put the same serial number on the paper receipt that some states have required from the new electronic voting machines?

Basically I just want to know that my vote counted and I see no other way to do that than to just “trust” that everything went according to plan.

Anybody else have any ideas?

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Filed under Politics