How good is voting? Very Good!

A quote from the Badger Herald article, Wait to vote early long, problematic:

“It was well worth it,” Lueck said. “I learned more voting and was a better person for going to vote than going to that class.”

Right. I wonder how many people will read this and inadvertently agree. Hopefully Lueck didn't miss a time management class.

In any case, for those of you who also want to be better people, you can still skip class on Tuesday (or don't, polls close at 8PM), and you had better get out and vote; politicians only ignore those who don't vote! The collective student body of Madison makes up more than 12% of Dane County's voters. That's power right there!

Weird Power Outages

I just found out yesterday that the 3rd floor of my house has had problems with their main circuit breaker tripping almost weekly. Today I was using my computer and my battery backup kicked in - the power had gone out. Ok, so I check out the other things in my house. Living room lights work, kitchen lights work (the room nearest mine). So I narrow down the problem. As it turns out, only one outlet in my room didn't have power. To the circuit breakers! Only one is tripped, and it's labeled "3". Interesting. I chatted with the guy from 3 who came down to fix the same problem. Then I come back upstairs to find out that someone was having trouble blow-dry their hair in the bathroom.

Ha, there's our problem. The best part is, I never even noticed it. My battery backup would routinely kick in when someone used a hair-dryer and the guys from the 3rd floor would reset the breaker.

I just wonder who wired a house to have a circuit breaker for the 3rd floor connected to 2 seperate outlets in two rooms that aren't even next to each other. I love my house :)

ASM Voter Turnout = :(

Sound the alarms, ASM has once again failed to interest students. I'd say surprise, but nobody is anymore. I'm just curious how much progress people expected already. The funny thing about blogs and instant reporting is that people start expecting instant change and instant improvement. I'll be honest, I thought voter turnout would be higher (CB Voter Turnout Contest) with all of this presidential election stuff going on, but I didn't realize how different these two things were until I voted for ASM myself.

I try to keep myself informed on whats going on, so I kind of know the responsibilities that I was choosing someone for, but the problem is that I still have no idea who these people are. the 6 question survey didn't prepare me enough to choose the most qualified applicant. In fact, I don't even remember who I voted for anymore. The worst part is, I'm not sure that this problem can be nullified very easily. A few of the candidates were freshmen, and while we could ask for their opinion on past issues, they likely will be unable to draw a good conclusion after the fact.

Now's the hard part: we get to see what happens at the spring elections. We can't expect ASM to have new ideas tomorrow, or even next month, and we wont see results for a good half of a year. On the good side, the elections committee isn't bound by any very constricting rules about how they help inform voters, so there's opportunity for big changes.

One last question for anyone: Has anyone seen any chalking by candidates for the election? The rules state specifically:

Campaigners may use water-based chalk in areas of campus that are readily exposed to the elements. Any place where it rains is fair chalking ground, but chalking shall not be used on the sides of buildings.

Man Skills and Life

Popular Mechanics recently released a list of "100 Skills Every Man Should Know." Pretty awesome list. It's broken up into categories, one of which is a tools to own list.

Not too shabby of a list. The thing that caught my attention is that I learned half of the things in Boy Scouts. It was kind of strange seeing how Boy Scouts has benefited me in such a quantitative way.