From T-shirt printing with stencils:

Now wear your shirt with pride, for a better quality of life, and remember: fuck grace and fuck modesty, accept all compliments with arrogance, for you are now better than everyone.

It looks like the Bush administration is working even harder to squelch scientists saying things they don’t want the public to hear. I saw this link to the New York Times on BoingBoing, but BoingBoing didn’t show the scariest portion of the text:

At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.

Where scientists’ points of view on climate policy align with those of the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on extracurricular lectures or writing.

From Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him.

I’ve been inexplicably intrigued by the idea behind OpenID. OpenID is a protocol for websites to share authentication. If I have a trusted site (let’s call it “PiePalace”), and I want to log in to some other site (let’s call it “LiveJournal”), LiveJournal can use OpenID to ask PiePalace if I am a valid representative of PiePalace.

It’s a nifty idea, but the idea seems to stumble a little on the implementation. I really do want to use this blog to authenticate myself on LiveJournal, but WordPress doesn’t support OpenID. No problem, after a bit of poking around, I’ve discovered that I can delegate the OpenID server with a
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://some.server"/> in PiePalace’s header. I can point that at a free OpenId server: videntity.org.

The problem is that LiveJournal’s support of OpenID seems a little sketchy. I can log in, and I can add comments to other people’s responses, but I can’t post on community boards. Which is a little silly.

The answer is pretty simple: I’m just going to have to create an account on LiveJournal. Blech.

It’s finally over. The election that wouldn’t die is done, our country has a new PM, and my party has slightly improved its standing in the popular vote (+.2% of the popular vote; +84,000 votes). Most importantly, in my riding of Ottawa Centre, the Green Party finally broke 10% of the popular vote, meaning that we’re getting half our election expenses back. Which means that we can finally do something meaningful between the elections.

From the IT side, this election was not a huge success. Our grand plans of voter tracking systems never quite bore fruit. We still did good with our customized code, but our printer problems still caused lots of annoyance.On campus, we failed to get new volunteers, and we failed to properly use the ones we had. Perhaps most noticably, I became a choke point: too many parts of the campaign relied upon me, and that cost us. When I let stuff slide, both the on-campus and ITs parts of the campaign got hurt.
The biggest hurdle we have to jump is the quality of our planning. We went into the elction with an almost entirely fresh team. We had done little or no ground-work in the riding beforehand. We organized everything that we did at the last minute, as we needed it (usually about 15 minutes before the final deadline).

The most startling thing is that we did so well despite all of that. That’s a pretty strong recommendation; for our candidate; our position in the public’s mind; and the national party’s policy.

With half of our campaign spending back, we’re going to be able to lots of good stuff. We’re going to be able to get our candidate our in local politics, and get him involved in stuff that people care about. We’re going to be able to build a reasonable organization in the riding; and a reasonable organization on the local campuses. In some senses, the election is over and done with, but in others, it feels like the real struggle has just begun.

I’ve had lots of luck with WordPress, so I decided to upgrade to 2.0. As promised, the post UI is pretty snazzy (although it does take a while to load), and the install was easy.

My only complaint is that the “Edit as HTML” link in the WYSIWYG editor launches a new window. And there’s still no preview.

Aww, and my theme broke. What the hell is that? At least the upgader could have warned me… =P

Every few months, I have dinner with gawp. His blog is pretty much dead, but, in Real Life, he has lots of interesting things to say. Our conversations are always fun.

Books to Read

• A Darkness in the Sky, by Verner Vinge.
• Mr Someone and Somebody Else, by some other author. Something tells me that this one is a little off, I’ll have to bug G about it.

Thoughts on My Thesis

Will remain hidden until it’s published.

Thoughts on Life

• Consider indexed funds for investing
• Before looking for a house, draw up requirements with your spouse. Agree on the requirements before starting the search.

Thoughts on the Green Party

We should try to turn the perceived medicare crisis into an opportunity. All industrialized nations are trying to deal with the rising costs of healthcare, but no country has managed to do anything to limit the rate at which those costs grow, let alone lower those costs. Instead of wringing our hands over the state of medicare, we should try and build a system that:

• Raises the value of each dollar spent, annually. In other words, instead of raising healthcare spending, our healthcare system should become more efficient.
• Improve healthcare’s IT infrastructure. We spend very little on IT for healthcare, which is stupid, because effective treatment depends on high-quality information. That information must include the history of the patient, and ensure that relevent information is brought to the attention of the staff.
• Use the improved IT infrastructure for long-term analysis of the quality of treatments, and value of healthcare spending. We should be able to determine: the success rate of specific procedures; health trends by demographic; and the relative performance of different hospitals.
• Uses our nationalized system to lower acquisition costs of drugs and equipment through bulk acquisition. In a situation where we cannot acquire pharmaceuticals or other items at a low enough cost (or high enough quality), we should spin off companies to do that production.

Thoughts on My Thesis

• Why not use the network protocol grammar to define other things? Like file formats.
• What about randomly generating grammars? Is there a value to doing that? There’s obfuscation, but is there ever a situation where we’d want to create an absolutely new grammar?
• If we have a client-side library, we could mask off portions of the protocol automagically.
• How is “Context bound grammar” for a name?

Zowie. I got the online donation portion of our website up a couple of weeks back. Since then, donations have been dribbling in, much slower than other methods (mail, phone, in-person, etc). In the past 24 hours, however, there’s been an explosion of activity, both in volume of donors, and in the volume of money donated. At the same time, there was a similar spike in sign requests.

It’ll be interesting to do some analysis of website usage patterns. Is all this activity the result of our weekend canvassing? Or people reading flyers they’ve received over the past little while? Or do people queue up their political reading and research until weekends? Is this the result of increased outreach on our behalf? Or are people just getting around to it, now that there’s only a week to go?

I was at an all candidates debate on Thursday. The various candidates (with the exception of the Conservative) were talking about the high cost of being a university student. One of them mentioned that most students have to hold down two or three jobs to be able to afford to go to school. I silently thanked the stars that I wasn’t one of them. Then I started counting the jobs that I do: teaching assistant, research assistant, and contractor. I’ve been doing this for a year and a half, so I shouldn’t be suprised. But I was.

The past few weeks have been fairly unpleasant. I was originally supposed to handle IT stuff for the campaign, but before Christmas, we decided that I should try and recruit on campus. The IT stuff was enough work, tossing campus organizing into the mix makes my volunteer load excessive. I’m not one to threaten resignation, but dealing with a particularly abrasive volunteer this week almost pushed me to bail.

This morning, I woke up to hear that CBC’s The Current interviewing Green Party leader Jim Harris. I’ve met Jim a few times, and he hasn’t inspired me. I appreciate that he’s brought the party in from the fringe, and helped make it a nationally recognized party, but I think that it’s time for a new leader. So I was suprised when Jim sounded great: he made good points, he made sense, he sounded well-balanced, and he responded to questions well. He mentioned all the good stuff: how the Green Party supports the ol’ triple bottom line (ie, not running a fiscal, environmental, or social deficit), how we feel that subsidies for polluters should be scrapped, and the shift of taxes off of income and onto resource consumption. On top of that, he did a good job at showing how the other three parties aren’t all that different from each other.

After listening to the piece, I felt much better about volunteering. It’s so easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day trivia of the campaign, and to forget that we’re doing something of value. So, my volunteer burnout has been postponed. I’d never thought that listening to Jim Harris, of all people, would be enough to keep me in. Good job Jim. Now get yourself elected.