Quote of the Day
“If you were a Massachusetts state senator over the last 16 years, you were three times more likely to be indicted than you were to lose a reelection bid.”
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“If you were a Massachusetts state senator over the last 16 years, you were three times more likely to be indicted than you were to lose a reelection bid.”
For Christmas 2007, I received a TomTom ONE 3rd Edition GPS Navigation System as a gift from my parents. While I don’t often do a lot of traveling beyond my daily commute to work, I do occasionally, so it’s come in quite handy, particularly as we don’t have a cell phone with which to communicate with someone else en-route if we get lost. However, over the past two and a half years, roads have changed. The only significant change in the local area that I’m aware of is the 146/I-290 intersection, but it’s likely that other roads have changed as well, and the point of a GPS is to navigate me through the places I’m not familiar with.
S/MIME has what in my opinion is a flaw: There’s no authentication of the time that a message is sent. As far as I can tell, there’s not even any proposed extensions out there trying to fix this. As a result, when one signs an email message with a valid certificate, and then the expiration date of the signing certificate passes, one gets an error when one then later tries to read the email message, as the authenticity of the message can no longer be verified. (Signed code doesn’t have this problem, as the signer can have a third party add a signed timestamp to the code signature, so that the code can still be verified as having been signed by a valid certificate as of the date of the signature, even after the certificate’s expiration date.)
Today is our seven year anniversary.
Happy anniversary, Jessi!
One of the interesting aspects of entertainment (TV, Video Games, etc.) has been the discussion of them with other people. As watching of episodic content becomes less synchronized (due to DVRs, Netflix, and even to some extent regional/time-zone-based release dates), this is harder to do without spoilers for people.
So, I think it’d be neat to have Internet forums for such media have a feature where each user put in how far along they were in the series/episode/game/whatever, and only saw the posts done by others when they said they were up to the point. That is, the time basis for the forum is however far along in the plot one is, and so you can have “interactive” discussions with others who are at the same point, even when you’re actually experiencing the forum at quite different times.
Candidate | Total | Precinct 1 | Precinct 2 | Precinct 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Peter J. Boria | 627 | 212 | 193 | 222 |
Joseph J. Szafarowicz | 233 | 66 | 102 | 65 |
Candidate | Total | Precinct 1 | Precinct 2 | Precinct 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Peter S. Cooper, Jr. | 423 | 151 | 133 | 139 |
Joshua Evans | 137 | 49 | 40 | 48 |
Carl Kaliszewski | 251 | 60 | 108 | 83 |
John P. McGrath was on the ballot and won the first seat with 614 votes. Richard Fiske Jr. won the second seat with 10 write-in votes.
Tomorrow’s the big election day. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day. I plan to be standing outside at the polls (Heritage School) for most if not all of the day, holding signs and greeting voters.
This week’s Charlton Villager (6.3 MB PDF) has an article on the race, with our file photos above the fold. I’m not sure my explanation of why I voted on the police issue really gets through right (I could see the “I’m not supposed to be a robot” line being taken the wrong way), but in general it seems alright.
I’m curious what people think about pros and cons of electing positions that aren’t policy-setting. For instance, Charlton currently elects its Town Clerk, and used to elect its Town Tax Collector and Town Treasurer. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts elects its Auditor and Treasurer. I’m not sure how policy-setting the Attorney General and Secretary of the Commonwealth are, but they’re elected too and might fit in this category.
Many of these positions require specialized knowledge and training, and it’s not clear that voters always know who would actually do the best job. Although, it’s not always clear than an appointing authority (in the executive branch, say) would do the best job either.
Articles likely to be of the most interest at Charlton’s May 17 Annual Town Meeting (that I’ll be presiding over if I win the election on May 1):
A couple years ago I constructed a graph of what percentage of my total tax expenditure went where, and I decided to do the same thing for 2009. My tax situation is a bit different now, as since my last chart I’ve had kids and I purchased a significant amount of land from my parents. This shows out of all the taxes that I keep track of, which agency gets how much of my total taxes. This includes taxes on income in 2009 (modified by refunds received in 2010 for the 2009 tax year), taxes on assets, and sales taxes that I kept track of. This does not include other taxes on expenditures like gas tax, cable tax, meals tax, or sales tax where I didn’t enter the sales tax amount as an itemized split into my finance program (since I’m not worried about tracking it that closely). I would have preferred a pie chart, as it’s more customary for this kind of thing, but it’s hard to show a negative percentage in there very well. Total appears to not be 100.00% due to rounding.