Judebert.com

So, here's my 21st entry to a Fark Photoshop:

Photoshop this fellow passing out leaflets

I tried something new, inspired by a beautiful line-drawn version of the dragon from my Trogdor contest. Meh. I obviously have more learning to do.

I may have to give these things their own category, soon.

First, they had us shop this big structure with bamboo sticking out in all directions. As I haven't shopped in a while, I went for the quick and easy video game 'shop. From one of my favorite childhood video games: Yie-Ar Kung Fu.

Before

After

Then, I saw this shack. And nobody had done the Love Shack yet! Tin roof! Rusted.

All this talk of secrecy and abuse of power reminds me: early voting in my precinct was done with electronic voting machines.

When I heard about this, I wrote to Mike Ertl, the Supervisor of Elections through his website. I explained that I'm a programmer, and that without a voter-verifiable paper trail I considered electronic voting to be equivalent to disenfranchisement. (Luddite, I know.) I asked him to indicate which electronic voting machines we'd be using, and to explain why we changed when the current scantron sheets have been working so well.

Predictably, I received no response whatsoever. Gee, my government officials are SO accountable.

Now I find Diebold reduced to name-calling when their machines are demonstrated to be insecure yet again. In my opinion, this is another example of an abuse of power made possible by secrecy: the source code is a secret, so Diebold doesn't have to make it secure. They can just make claims.

At some point, I expect that marketing and propaganda will not sway the opinions of legislators. However, legislators will never look any farther than the majority of the constituents that elect them. So this will all become simple as soon as the American public gets smart enough to ignore marketing and propaganda.

We're doomed.

A program in Australia called Dateline (no idea if it's related to the American program of the same name) just covered EVs. I've got the video, clipped to include just the EV segment. Be careful, though, it's huge: 135MB!

You can download the 135MB Australian Dateline EV segment here!

Update: 9/22
I've just discovered that my favorite Windows DVD ripper, VLC, is available on Linux, too. And it does a great job transcoding. So, for those who had trouble downloading the MP4 file, you can get the original-size Australian Dateline EV segment in MPG format (195MB) or, for those with slower connections, the half-size Australian Dateline EV segment in MPG format (89MB).

Well, one of the guinea pigs died last night. We have no idea why. She was thin, but we thought she was just young.

We took them out to play in the grass today. Both Sugar and Cinnamon were doing fine. This evening, when Eri picked up Sugar, Sugar couldn't keep her balance, and fell on her side. I ran to the computer to see what I could find, but by the time I got there, Sugar had made one last peep and died.

We hope PetSmart will do a post-mortem and tell us what happened, but they won't give us any guarantee. They did give us another guinea pig, a calico we named Sundae.

We gave her the best home a guinea pig ever had for her short time with us. She was skittish, but polite. R.I.P, Sugar Anne Spice. Best pet name ever.