Shiner, we'll miss you.

I'm a morning person, so I left the house at my usual 6am to head to the polling place.  I figured waiting before and getting in to the office relatively early made sense.  A fair number of people had the same idea I did, but the polling location wasn't really prepared for anyone to be there early (except for a few chairs.)  A few minutes before 7 we arranged ourselves into a line.  A guy who had gotten there after me knew I was there first, and had me move in front of him in the line that formed.
For the first time that I've experienced, check-in was on a computer.  And they didn't have any way to test the system prior to 7am.  8-(  The setup was a Dell laptop (I'm guessing the Latitude 530 - it looked like a standard aspect screen, but was the black and silver color scheme of the recent Dells) hooked to a Brother label printer.  Each laptop had an odd USB dongle hanging out the side which was labeled Precinct X Key Y.  I'm guessing it was some kind of smart card or other authentication device.  They had a ton of problems getting the labels to print (that's what we ended up signing.)  They finally had to swap the label printers between the two laptops, and they started working.  I'm not sure I understand how that worked, but it seemed to do the trick.  The rest of the voting was relatively similar to other recent votes I've done.  A small slip with a code on it.  A click wheel type electronic voting table where you enter the code, and then vote each of the ballots.  I don't have any idea how you do a write in with this thing.

Except for the glitch with the printing, which cost me at least 30 minutes, it was pretty painless.  And I got a free cup of coffee out of it.

on a map.

I'm sitting in the foyer of my local polling place.  Thank God for 3G!  All you Americans, don't forget to vote today.  It's your responsibility as an American.

I finally got Live Mesh working on my Mac, my phone, and my fileserver.  I'm waiting on a new laptop for work, so I haven't installed there yet.

I have to say  this is very cool.  At the very basic, it does file sync.  This is what most users will see at first.  I've used several different sync applications, and within a couple of days, I've been quite satisfied with this solution.  One thing to note is that the Windows Mobile client actually does scheduled sync with your Live Mesh desktop in the cloud!

The Windows Mobile and Mac client sync with the cloud.  The Windows client has the ability to sync with the cloud, and to sync peer to peer with other Windows clients.

The interesting thing is that you can sync with other people's Mesh objects, if they invite you.  I can see this replacing Groove and FolderShare when it is release (it's a Technology Preview right now.)

More to come as I play with it.  BTW, there's a SDK as well.

With the new availability of the Mac client, I'm going to try Live Mesh again.  I was able to get logged in to my account, and download the Mac client.  I'm getting an error trying to log in, but I suspect the service is getting hammered right now.

Update: Looks like I'm not the only one getting this error.

On10.net has a good video on Live Mesh, and the Mac client.  If you're interested, it's worth the 10 minutes.

In a bizarre political move from the guys at CodeWeavers, they are giving away copies of their CrossOver products for today only.  Head to their website for all the details, and to register for your serial number.

 

Watch it tonight at 8/7 c on ABC.

Evernight by Claudia Gray was provided to me as part of the Amazon Vine program.

Evernight is a teen drama about a girl named Bianca.  Her parent's are teachers, and have landed jobs at an exclusive boarding school named Evernight Academy.  Most of the kids there are perfect: smart, attractive, world travelers, and very clique-ish.  Bianca doesn't fit in, until she meets Lucas.  Lucas has issues, but Bianca loves him, even over another boy he seems better in every way.

The first half of this book seems like your typical teen novel.  Trouble fitting in.  Back stabbing kids.  The works.  And then it takes a serious turn.  I liked the book after the turn, but I was a little frustrated in the secrets which were kept.  The second half of the book is full of action and intrigue, and a few smaller twists along the way.

You definitely want to think of this as a modern fantasy book.  I will watching for Stargazer (the sequel) when it comes out next year.

I read the hardcover edition.  The dust jacket was pretty normal (if you like red) but the cover itself had a wonderfully embossed Evernight title.

As mentioned before, I'm now running on my Mac as a Standard User.  Everything seems to work really well.  When you run an installer, it gives you the option to authenticate (the same dialog an admin user gets, except that the username box is blank.)  When you try to install an application using the drag and drop on /Applications method

gives you the option of authenticating.  Each time I have tried this, I have used my alternate Administrator credentials, and assumed that my Administrator user owned the app.

WRONG!

This morning Firefox wanted to update, and I let it restart.  Little to my surprise, it actually worked.  A quick look in terminal showed something very disturbing:

drwxr-xr-x   3 rlobrecht  admin   102 Sep 22 09:43 DVDSpanner.app
drwxr-xr-x   7 root       admin   238 Mar  4  2008 Darwine
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Feb  6  2008 Dashboard.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Jun  8 09:41 Dictionary.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       admin   102 Nov 30  2007 Drag-N-Scale.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       admin   102 Aug 14 15:21 Evernote.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       admin   102 Dec  8  2007 ExifRenamer.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Jul 10 08:30 Expose.app
drwxr-xr-x@  3 rlobrecht  admin   102 Jul 28 15:26 Firefox.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Feb  6  2008 Font Book.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Feb  6  2008 Front Row.app
drwxr-xr-x   5 root       admin   170 Mar  3  2008 Gallery Remote.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Mar  3  2008 GarageBand.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Nov 14  2007 Google Earth.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 rlobrecht  admin   102 Aug 16 15:07 HandBrake.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Feb  6  2008 Image Capture.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       admin   102 Apr 27 10:53 JetPhoto Studio.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 rlobrecht  admin   102 Aug 17 13:52 Librarian Pro.app

Every application I've installed using the drag and drop method is still owned by me.  This isn't better than Windows, it's just that the brokenness is a little less obvious.  Time to chown again...

This is a review of an Advance Reading Copy of Ted Bell's Tsar provided to me as part of the Amazon Vine program.

The tagline for the novel is "A Triller."  At its core, its a spy novel, with a little bit of future tech thrown in for good measure.  This book isn't deep or involved like a Clancy novel, or even as fast paced as a Vince Flynn novel.  I liked the story, and I liked the main character Alex Hawke.  The hero wins, and the bad guy gets it in the end.  That said, the end is quite disappointing, although probably necessary if Bell is to use Hawke in future novel.

My biggest complaint with this book is the detail.  There are certain sections which are well written and detailed, but other parts were barely glossed over, as though the author needed it for the story, but had no interest in writing them.

Overall this is a book which was ok to spend time with, but easily let me put it down, and I really had little desire to finish.