Is Christmas safe...

I am distracted by shiny things.

Cannonball

I've blown past Shel and moved into Dom DeLuise territory.

Calypso bulbosa

Crystal and I went on a great hike near Mt. Tam yesterday and right toward the end we saw a whole mess of these orchids. They bloom in late March and can be seen on the Benstein trail near the Rock Springs trailhead.

They're commonly known as fairy slippers. Which is pretty fruity even for a flower.

Horn of Plenty

Had my most common recurring dream last night: I somehow end up with a massive, seemingly inexhaustible supply of video games.

I've had this dream since the time of the Atari 2600. In the dream, I'm just surrounded by boxes of games and the games are more fantastic and amazing than any in real life.

I get so into the dream - figuring out what I'm going to play first, how I'll tackle this avalanche of games - that it's always very disappointing to wake up. It's my most realistic dream, the one where it takes me the longest to realize it was a fantasy.

I guess I could go buy a whole big mess of games. But I don't really want that. It's kinda sad that now that I can have the object of my dreams I don't even want it that much. But in the dream I do.

Of course, last night I also dreamt I had an inexhaustible supply of yogurt. So it's a little unclear what my subconscious wants.

Brother from the same mother

Haven't seen my brother in well over a year. Thank you Oracle Training Center in Pleasanton for bringing him to our shores.

The Giving Tree

Making a note here

I was trying to login to att.com to pay my bill. I logged in. And was successful at doing so.

I guess they thought I should stop there.

Political contributions from tech employees

The year-end campaign reports filed on January 31 provide information on how candidates raised money. I looked at contributions to four Democrats and five Republicans from five technology companies: Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay and Microsoft. The following graphs show these contributions first by company and and then by candidate. (Disclosure: I've contributed to the Obama campaign.)




Some observations:

• Ranked by total dollars raised, the top three candidates are: Clinton (38% of all money raised), Obama (29%), Paul (22%). Together, these three candidates took in 89% of the money contributed.


• Clinton raised the most money with 68% coming from Microsoft employee contributions of $86,360. In terms of raw dollars, both Microsoft and Ebay employees prefer Clinton, Google employees prefer Obama, Yahoo and Amazon employees prefer Paul.


• Microsoft employees contributed the most money in total at $169,421, but Google contributed the most per employee. Google employees contributed $111,160 which works out to $6.61 per capita (based on end of year head count data). This far exceeds the other four companies' per capita contributions which range from $0.64 (Amazon) to $2.14 (Microsoft).


• Given the strength of Ron Paul's fund raising, I'd conclude that technology workers skew fairly libertarian. And not as liberal as you might expect given that neither Kucinich or Edwards did not fare particulaly well.


• The presumptive GOP nominee, John McCain, was in 4th place among Republicans. Huckabee was the worst-performing Republican ($1,550) and Kucinich the worst-performing Democrat ($4,250).

He's got the Trinidad vote!

Ed wrote a great post explaining why Obama should be your pick in the primaries. To summarize:

He doesn’t just want to change our government, he wants to change the way that all of us speak about what our government should do.

This is a very good argument. I've been in a lot of arguments about Obama's ability to actually get things done. It's all well and good that folks believe in him, but half the Congress won't. How do you overcome the legislative problem.

The best answer is that you change what people expect of their government. Folks have become used to expecting nothing. We need to change the language around what people think government should do. Obama is the only candidate who can do this.

This also goes to the reason I'm so worried about Clinton as the nominee. Even if she wins - which I feel is unlikely against McCain - the best we can hope for is 4 years of obstructionist government. There will be members of the Republican party calling for her impeachment within the first 100 days.

Ed can't vote because he's a felon (check fraud) an immigrant (Trinidad). Help make his immigrant wishes come true!

Anatomy

The FCC issued a $1.43M fine against ABC for a 2003 episode of NYPD Blue. The episode contained shots of a woman's backside as she was getting into the shower.

Yes. The episode aired almost 5 years ago. It's like we live in a highly inefficient Iran. If you're going to have a committee for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice, you might wanna try to get that work done within the half-decade.

Also interesting, only ABC affiliates in the Central and Mountain time zones have to pay the fine. I had hoped this was because the FCC had determined the coasts were too indecent to worry about. Unfortunately, it's because the episode showed after 10p out here. In Civics class, we never covered the "Butts are ok after 10p" clause of the first amendment.

Finally, my favorite thing about this story is that the FCC determined the broadcast was indecent because "it depicts sexual organs and excretory organs — specifically an adult woman's buttocks."

ABC tried to argue that the buttocks are not, definitionally, a sexual or excretory organ. The FCC responded by saying "Although ABC argues, without citing any authority, that the buttocks are not a sexual organ, we reject this argument, which runs counter to both case law and common sense."

Aren't you dying to see the case law on this?