Now that the election is done, here are some of the campaign signs we saw that elicited some unintended laughter.

Hunt Sherrif

I couldn’t decide between two captions: “But I did not hunt the deputy…” and “I didn’t think they were in season.”

Desmond

This isn’t funny on its own, but coming right off the Lost season finale, all I could think was, “Vote for me, brother!”

Go with Tan!

Uh… I hate to break it to you, but that’s green

The Los Angeles Times website had an interesting way of describing the results of yesterday’s state election:

No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No

It’s hard to believe that all eight propositions failed. Even the four Orange County measures failed. Every item on the ballot in our district was rejected!

On a related note, I still don’t like the voting machines we have in OC. The interface is cumbersome and the display is godawful slow. The controls consist of a dial, which moves the cursor, and a button, which selects the current item.

The display is so slow you can watch it redrawing the title and summary of a ballot item when it highlights it. First the rectangle turns blue, then it redraws the text, line by line, in white. It’s like watching print preview in Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS on a 386. You just don’t see that kind of performance on modern computers unless they’re massively bogged down.

As for trying to use the machine, it’s kind of like entering your name in the high score list on an arcade video game with only a trackball and a fire button. I’m sure they chose it for durability reasons—a touch screen would be much more usable, but much easier to break—and went with the low-powered processor to keep the costs down.

I actually liked the punchcards we had before. It was so much more satisfying to slam down that lever.

Woke up early (well, early for me) so we could get out and hit the polls before work. I was amazed that there was only one person in line ahead of us. Not only that, but there was only one line, not three or four broken up by last name.

Well, it’s a mid-term election. Plus it’s morning, and the last few years we’ve gone in the evening. (There was one year that I voted at lunch, but I had to drive Katie to the poll after work anyway, so it’s easier if we just both go at the same time.) It must have been last year that the line was so long that we got there at 6:30 or 7:00 and didn’t finish until after the polls “closed” — meaning they didn’t let anyone else get into line. (Sensibly, they allowed anyone who was in line by 8:00 to vote.) And there were a lot of people waiting behind us!

Now on to programming for a few hours until Microsoft kicks their patches out the door.

Current Music: Gettin’ Ready Rag (in head)

If you live in California and you’re a registered voter: vote!

If you like the initiatives on the ballot, vote them in.

If you don’t like them, vote them out.

If you’re disgusted with the way the initiative process has been subverted by the very political machines and special interest groups it was supposed to circumvent, protest it by voting them down, not by abstaining.