Go Vote

Following the theme of everyone else, go vote today.

Update:
One small observation from my polling place this morning: Unless you are personally willing to volunteer as a poll worker, don’t complain that things are moving slowly. In my particular precinct, we’ve had a good sized population increase in the last four years, but no one is ever sure of how good turn out will be until the day comes. So, preparing for the rush of voters before work, at lunch, etc is hard to do. 40 minutes out of this one day seems pretty small compared to the impact it could have over the next 4 years.
Also, if you are unsure of your polling place, you should have looked before today, but if you didn’t don’t get mad at the volunteer for sending you someplace else.

I’m still mulling over some other observations, but for now, that is all.

Great EULA clause

This has to be one of the best End User License Agreement clauses ever:

4.1 Permission to utilize Your computer. In order to receive the benefits provided by the Skype Software, you hereby grant permission for the Skype Software to utilize the processor and bandwidth of Your computer for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between You and other Skype Software users.

Lots of searching on the web yields very little about Skype that isn’t “it’s the greatest thing ever”, but there is this blog post where the author talks about the fact that Skype makes open hosts on the Internet into “supernodes” to facilitate conversations between computers behind firewalls and NAT devices. Smells a little fishy to me.

New Hardware

Well, I caved late last week and ordered a new Shuttle SB81P, a 3.0 Ghz processor, a couple of 200GB SATA drives, 512MB of RAM and a cheap Asus CD-S520 CDROM drive. The build was very simple, following the instructions in the manual, but I did run into a couple of snags.

  1. The Asus CDROM tray is just slightly taller than the opening provided. A little filing and sanding solved that
  2. The SATA connectors are formed with the wires coming out on what seems to be wrong side. (very minor)

Now, I think I’ll wait with the gentoo install until this weekend (but, I’ll be using these instructions.)

The Hard Edge

As a long time reader of Computer Shopper, I have to mourn the passing of The Hard Edge. Alice and Bill have long been the one shining star left in the ever shrinking Shopper. And now they are officially gone from it. But, like all things techy, they are setting out to learn a new skill, blogging.

And, even the founder of the Shopper sees the writing on the wall.