There’s a natural inclination not to believe in voter fraud in this country, or to discount it as not a big issue.  After all, we’re the United States of America, not some backwards pseudo-Democratic state, right?  Right?

Er…

• Blogger Solicits Blank Signed Ballots
• I Voted All Republican, the Machine Registered all Democrat
• When I went to vote, Harry Ried’s name was already checked
• Hundreds of voters in Illinois won’t have their votes counted
• When we said to fill in the oval above the name, we meant to fill in the oval below the name, but nobody reads the instructions anyway, right?
• And let’s not forget: Vote Whitey!

Senator Al Franken was unavailable for comment.  Be careful out there, people.

A friend of mine was interviewed on the radio last night, so I wanted to record the interview.  The station is in Phoenix, I’m in Denver.  No problem though, because I could stream the radio station live.

But how to record it?  Some complicated freeware that comes from the bowels of the internet and is probably infected with spyware?

Nah… the easiest solution is always the best.

Use a cord, like the one you use to connect your iPod to your car radio. (With a headphone-sized jack, but a jack on both ends.)  Plug one end into your speaker out, the other end into the microphone in.

That’s it.

You can use whatever program you want to record the audio.  Windows has a built in sound recorder.  I used Audacity, which I had used recently for an audio editing project.  Worked like a charm.

I read that some PCs or sound cards disable this ability.  Mine didn’t.  I used the headphone out jack on the front of my PC and the mic in on the back.  My fallback idea was to use the headphone out on my laptop into the mic in on the desktop.

A teleprompter will be in use for the first time in the Central Hall of Parliament when US President Barack Obama addresses MPs on November eight.

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Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual–not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events, large and small.

Teleprompters are textbook-sized panes of glass holding the prepared remarks of the speaker and which rests on top of a tall, narrow pole and flank his podium during speeches.

I’ll be the first to admit two things:

1. I love Firefox
2. I abuse Firefox

I typically have at least a dozen tabs open over several windows.  Some of these, like Twitter, auto refresh.  So I’m not surprised when FF takes up about 250k of memory.  Sometimes it gets higher.  FF, for all it’s positives, has never been good about memory management.  About 400k is when I start to see a performance slowdown.  Restarting FF usually clears out the leaked memory and I get back down to about 250k again.  Rinse. Repeat.

But today I noticed an entirely different slowdown.  This one was because something called Plugin-Container.exe was taking up 750k of memory.

WTF is Plugin-Container.exe?

Apparently starting a few months ago, FF began launching Flash, Silverlight and Quicktime videos in a new process separate from the browser process.  This is so the plugin can crash, but your whole browser won’t crash.  The idea is to eventually launch all plugins in a new process.  Chrome already does this.

I had watched about four videos since I had last restarted FF.  Apparently that translates to 750k of memory use.  Not sure whether Flash or FF is to blame.  I’ll reflexively blame Flash because I hate Adobe.  Whoever is to blame, obviously there are some bugs to work out.

You can disable the process, but since the eventual goal is to launch all plugins in a new process anyway, you’re fighting a losing battle.

I would have thought that we’d be in a position by 2010 where you don’t have to get into the bowels of your PC and make hacks to browse the web, but apparently the future has not quite yet arrived.

I was reading the local newspaper this weekend during my trip to Paradise, NV, and there was a section that listed upcoming conferences and meetings at the local hotels.

Some were pretty standard groups that you’d expect to see having a conference in Vegas, like the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, or the National Credit Reporting Association.

However, one specifically caught my eye:  The Association of Old Crows, who are expecting 400 attendees at the Rio from November 1-5.

Association of Old Crows?  So many things come to mind.  Most involve slight variations of a group of the “ladies” that watched us on the playground in elementary school getting together in Vegas for a good time.  I also considered that the name was literal, and that a group of people who owned old crows were getting together.

Their website, crows.org, tells the real story.

It all started as an idea to have a small friendly gathering that would reunite men tied together through the common bond of having served in the Strategic Air Command (SAC) as Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) officers. By September 1964, the reunion idea had grown too large to be staged as an informal outing, and ended up in a large reception room at one of the largest hotels in Washington, DC – the original beginnings of the AOC as a non-profit association.

During World War II Allied ECM officers, tasked to disrupt enemy communications and radars, were given the code name of “Raven” to provide a degree of security to their existence. After WWII, a group of Raven operators were directed to establish a SAC flying course in ECM operations at McGuire AFB, New Jersey. From all accounts from those present at the time, the students changed the name to “Crows” and those engaged in the profession became known as Old Crows.

And the Old Crows today:

The AOC is an IRS 501(c)(6) non-profit tax-exempt professional association with an annual budget of approximately $2.4M, 10 staff, and over 14,500 members including 65 chapters from 19 countries (comprised of 29% government and active duty military and 49% defense electronics industry). Chapters located outside of the US include Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Republic of Korea, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

Membership peaked around 1988 with approximately 25,000 members and has declined from that number to around 14,565 in 2002, a reduction of 40% since 1990. This reduction is the result of a combination of factors, including reduced DoD spending on EW [Electronic Warfare] since the end of the Cold War and Desert Storm, reduced threat research by DoD, service mission transformations, and downsizing, consolidations and mergers within the defense industrial community. This results in fewer EW personnel involved in EW platforms and systems.

A teenage girl reportedly knocked herself unconscious then woke up and punched her girlfriend in the face multiple times, according to Mesa police.

Michelle Isaguirre, 18, of Mesa, was drinking Friday night when she became angry with her girlfriend, according to the report.

Police received a disturbance call about the incident and when they arrived they found Isaguirre sitting on a log outside her apartment on the 400 block of E 9th Avenue.

Officers said they found another girl crying inside the apartment who identified herself as Isaguirre’s girlfriend.

The unidentified victim told police that the suspect hit her own head against the wall so hard that she passed out, according to the report.

When Isaguirre regained consciousness, she repeatedly punched the victim in the face, police said.

Isaguirre told police she felt bad about punching her girlfriend and tried to help her up.

Police said that two other witnesses provided the same story.

Officers searched Isaguirre and discovered what was later indentified as marijuana in her pocket.

Isaguirre said, “Oops, I forgot I had that in there,” according to the report.

After a hospital cleared the suspect for her head injury, Isaguirre was booked on suspicion of possession of marijuana, domestic violence assault knowingly causing physical injury, and underage drinking.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/10/25/20101025mesa-teenager-punches-girlfriend-abrk.html#ixzz13PI6dDIU

I mean, I thought I was.  And I was nearby.  But I don’t think we ever entered Las Vegas.

That’s because most of the Las Vegas Strip is actually in Paradise, Nevada, an unincorporated part of Clark County, Nevada.

In the old days, casinos in Las Vegas had to be in the downtown casino zone, or located outside the city limits.  The Strip was the closest area to the city that was outside the limits.  So, people who wanted to operate a casino outside downtown needed a place to go, and The Strip grew.

The unincorporated part of the county is administered directly by the Clark County government.  The City of Las Vegas, on the other hand, has a mayor and city council, etc, like other cities.

In the 70′s Las Vegas was pushing to annex The Strip, arguing that they were better suited to run the area since it was becoming increasingly urban.  The county disagreed, mostly because they’d lose the tax revenue if they gave up direct control of the area.  The question of how to police the area became a big one, since Las Vegas had a police department, but the unincorporated parts of the county were policed by the Clark County Sheriff’s department.

In 1973, the police forces of Las Vegas and a few other communities were abolished, and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department was formed.  The LVMPD, which is overseen by an elected County Sheriff, now polices all of Clark County including the city of Las Vegas.

PRAXEDIS G. GUERRERO, Mexico — There’s a new police chief in this violent borderland where drug gangs have killed public officials and terrified many citizens into fleeing: a 20-year-old woman who hasn’t yet finished her criminology degree.

Marisol Valles Garcia was sworn in Wednesday to bring law and order to a township of about 8,500 that has been transformed from a string of quiet farming communities into a lawless no man’s land. Two rival gangs — the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels — have been battling for control of its single highway, a lucrative drug trafficking route along the Texas border.

The tiny but energetic Valles Garcia, whose only police experience was a stint as a police department secretary, says she wants her 12 officers to practice a special brand of community policing. In fact her plan is to hire more women — she currently has three — and assign each to a neighborhood to talk with families, promote civic values and detect potential crimes before they happen.

“My people are out there going door to door, looking for criminals, and (in homes) where there are none, trying to teach values to the families,” she said in her first official appearance on Wednesday. “The project is … simple, based on values, principles and crime prevention in contacts house-by-house.”

Under an interim rule, the USDA agreed to bar WIC participants from buying potatoes with their federal dollars. Potatoes are the only vegetable not allowed. Next year, the agency will roll out a final rule on the WIC program, which last year served 9.3 million children and pregnant and breast-feeding women considered at risk for malnutrition.

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The USDA is expected to release changes to the federal school lunch program by the end of the year. The program subsidizes lunch and breakfast for nearly 32 million needy kids in most public schools and many private ones, and those schools must follow guidelines on what they serve.