Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Waah, waah, waah. And yet... Chris Gregoire was inaugurated as our state's governor today.  She made a fairly eloquent and somewhat conciliatory speech, and then went on to the photo-ops and inaugural balls. Republican protestors are still protesting.  They started wearing orange today, mimicking the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and making noise about our corrupt political system. I can't even tell you how much that offends me. And yet... Gregoire only won by one hundred votes and change.  Republicans are poring over every county - focusing, of course, on King and Snohomish County, which went strongly Democratic - looking for errors, mistakes, and bureaucratic foulups.  Will they find them?  Oh yes.  Ohh yes.  King County has achieved a certain level of notoriety for its problems getting elections right, as has been documented in many recent columns.  In 2002, the county mailed out 150,000 absentee ballots too late, and then the elections supervisor was terminated when she lied about them.  They also ran out of ballots during a local election in April 2002. In 2003, the county sorta kinda forgot to mail 1800 absentee ballots.  The elections manager was asked to resign after that one, too.  So we have a squeaky tight election decided by a few ballots, and the county that made the difference has a troubled history of electoral snafus.  Could the Republicans win?  Sure.  Could there be a new gubernatorial election in April?  Sure. Even yet another reason why Gregoire should have been out, aggressively campaigning, making bold statements instead of mincing little steps.  Yes, she should be allowed to be the governor, and the Republicans should follow their own advice on letting the system do its work instead of running to the courts.  And yet, they're still fighting.  And yet, as much as I think they're whiners and spoil-sports and crybabies, they still have a chance.  8:11:41 PM     Speak up!  []

Steve Jobs Shrinks Everything Down! Holy cow, have you seen the new mini Mac? That's about as cool as the new iPod. I kid. I'm a kidder. Seriously, though, the new Mac's pretty amazing. Um ... it's small. About the size of two CD cases stacked. Plus FireWire ports.  Plus 40 Gb of memory - twice what I have now. Plus, I hope, the new OSX version (codenamed Tiger) when it's released later this year. I was reading some business analysis that said a lower-priced Mac was a bad idea, because instead of attracting first-time Windows weitchers, the main buyers would Mac users who were downgrading to the cheap model. Well, here's my scenario. I have owned three Macs in my life. (Four Apple computers, but the first one was an Apple IIe.) Two were hand-me-downs from my brother. One was a refurbished Mac that I bought at Re-PC. I have never owned a new Mac. Now that there's one at an affordable price, I will almost certainly purchase my first new computer sometime within the next year. 6:15:09 AM     Speak up!  []