I can haz Absentee Ballot? No. Not Yours.

At a national level the McCain Campaign
and the RNC have been mailing out Absentee Voter Forms. On the surface
this is a non partisan act of good will to increase voter turn out. At
the simplest examination the logic is Old people like McCain Old people
vote Absentee lets help them out.

In actuality the mailings have the potential to disfranchise you and man
others. First look at the mailing you may have received. I bet it was
addressed to the Seaton Family or Current Resident. Mine was and so have
several others I have seen. The Seaton family is not some elderly
couple that used to live in your place its just a cover to throw you off
the intent of the mailing. The mailer includes an absentee ballot and a
envelope to return it to the registrar. This si step one in
disenfranchising a poor trusting student who received the mailing.

So you think great, I am from Richmond, I want to vote I just fill this
out and shove it in the mail and I am all set. But look closer at the
return envelope. The return address is that of the Montgomery County
Registrar in Christiansburg. If you send it there you wont get receive
an absentee ballot, the registrar you want to notify is your home
county's.

The second way this can get more Blacksburg residents disenfranchised is
by overwhelming the Montgomery county office. Local residents who have
moved, new permanent residents like me and those locals who really need
absentee ballots from the Montgomery Office may not get properly
registered in time because election officials are dealing with errant
absentee requests.

This mailing was mass mailed to Blacksburg addresses which are
overwhelmingly student addresses because of the demographics of our
college town. These ballots have the potential to trick you into
thinking you are all ready to vote absentee when you are not and swamp
the local registrar to the point where actual absentee voters and local
residents have trouble registering. The mailer looks innocent enough,
perhaps you though the campaign was trying to turn out those stalwart
Republicans the Seatons who are unable to leave their home. In fact
this mailer may have been designed to disenfranchise the students of
Virgina Tech and Blacksburg local residents by lulling them into
thinking they are properly registered to vote absentee when they are
not.

Check it out for yourself. Try searching for hard news articles on
McCain absentee ballot mailings. This is not just some conspiracy
cooked up in the minds of liberal bloggers. Its occurring all over the
place. In Ohio they leave off a check box that is required by state law.
In Wisconsin the return addresses are wrong. In Iowa its asks for the
wrong number off your drivers license.

Please check the Virginia State Board of Elections on how to identify
where and how to properly register. If you don't qualify as a Virginia
resident check you home states procedures to register.

DNC-SPAN

I watched the convention today on C-SPAN and it was so much better than the networks. No commentary no false storylines just the goings on. Thats two NBC. Hopefully Rachel Maddow's show can redeem you.

NBC sucks

NBC is really grinding my gears recently because of their olympics coverage. How hard is it to air a soccer game. The game coverage is part of a 4 hour block of tv with no indication of start or stop time. The coverage is incomplete, the coverage of the USA NEW Zealand Womens game ended before the final and USA scored a goal not recorded on my tivo. They take commerrcial breaks during the game.

The whole thing is totally bogus, with out the tivo Id never catch any of it. In the Showcases and Specials Portion of the tivo service you can select Go WORLD and it you can select sports to be recorded at the olympics. Saves hours of space of recording over using the wishlist options.

Ignorance is Bliss or I should have stopped reading

"If I don't know it, its not true."

That seems to have been a Republican and Other Right Wing enclave tactic to ignore things that don't coalesce into their little world view. A few examples from last weeks news.

Argument:
Sex is Bad therefore Contraception is Bad. Most people think abortion is something to be avoided so lets equate contraception with abortion to try and keep women from having sex.

Fact Required to be Ignored: Oral Contraception doesn't abort anything. Its explained in this satirical post at slate.

Oral contraception does three things prevents ovulation prevents fertilization and prevents implantation. The last one is used to call it abortion. To make that case you have to believe that Oral contraception fails at step one and at step two but is 100% at step three.

As you know, the risk that oral contraception will prevent implantation of an embryo is purely theoretical. There is no documented case of such a tragedy, since we have no way to verify conception inside a woman's body prior to implantation without causing the embryo's death. Even theoretically, the risk is vanishingly small, since the primary effect of oral contraception is to prevent ovulation, and the secondary effect is to prevent fertilization.

Argument: Oil drilling is good for America we need to do it. Conservation such as step to increase fuel mileage is mockable.

Fact required to be ignored: The bottle neck in supply is in gasoline production not in crude supplies.

Oil companies make money turning crude Oil into products we buy. Oil executives make money when Oil companies stock prices go up. If increased drilling and production would raise profits oil companies would be doing it in the lands they already have leases to. The prospect of new leases would raise stock prices soon but not do much to the price of gasoline especially in the near term. Read a well formulated explanation here

Argument: Obama is to famous and popular with the media. This is leading to irrational exhuberance instead of looking at who is better which would lead people to McCain.

Fact ignored: McCain has gottten a pass on all the dumb things he has said because he used to be cool to the press back in 2000.

McCain is a media darling and everybody loves him just look at his IMDB list of appearances as noted by TPM.

No long example here just watch the daily show and read talking points memo. They catch most of the horrible things that come out of his mouth, rape is funny so is killing Iranians and verbally abusing his wife.

Speaking of funny look at this. Paris Hilton lampoons McCain ad.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/64ad536a6d

Aureal Nerdery

I had a computer issue and threw an old sound card in my computer which lead me to write a how to on ubuntu to get a configuration utility for the Aureal Cards in Linux compiled under ubuntu

Check out the guide here
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=875674&highlight=aureal

Or read this and apply it to your distro.
Sorry about the BB code look at the original for a pretty version

Okay So if you have an old aureal card sitting around or in your computer right now you are sitting pretty because alsa supports it with the au88X0 drivers.

If you ever have used it in windows you know it has some extra features software rendering of 3D sound and other tricks.



This how to will install this utility that was written back when those alsa drivers were written that may help you use some other features of your card. Mine was only an au8810 so I haven't been able to fully test it.




First get some build essentials for code compiling


sudo apt-get install build-essentials checkinstall


Now we need to get the source from the old gnu project site

Source Link:

http://savannah.nongnu.org/file/vortexcontrol-0.1.0.tar.bz2?file_id=3959

Extract that to a folder with your archive tool or the terminal:


tar -xjf vortexcontrol-0.1.0.tar.bz2
cd vortexcontrol


Now we need to get all the development libraries. I installed thess in groups by trial and error so I am not sure if they are all needed.


sudo apt-get install libopenal-dev libalut-dev libopenal0a libesd0-dev libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-dev libasound2-dev


I had to install the intrepid versions of the libasound2 and libasound2-dev because of some dependency error in Hardy with Backports. You may not have that problem if you have standard hardy or gutsy or intrepid or whatever.

Go to packages.ubuntu.org use the search feature for the libasound packages and manually download and install them using gdebi if the apt-get command above fails.


Now we can follow the steps listed on the original site each one of these should complete without any errors now that you have the dependencies met. Make sure you are in the directory that you extracted. It should look like this:

ls

acinclude.m4 configure.in-gtk2 README
configure.in Makefile.am vortexcontrol.c


These are the compiling commands they link things and assembly the makefile.


aclocal
autoconf
autoheader
automake -a
./configure


aclocal is the one that I had the most trouble with it you get a

" macro `AM_PATH_ALSA' not found in library" error you are missing
libasound2-dev. And etc for other libraries.

Now we build and install a debian package using the make replacment checkinstall so we can remove it easily if need be.



sudo checkinstall


Follow the prompts and now you should have a Aureal Vortex Utility run from the command line with

vortexcontrol&

Post any problems or if you get it to work with au8820 or au8830 cards like those listed at the alsa site:

Known supported cards (please add to this list, if the driver works for you as well):

* Diamond Monster Sound MX300
* Aureal SuperQuad Digital
* Aureal SQ2500
* Turtle Beach Montego II
* Turtle Beach Montego 3DXtream
* Digital Research Vortex 2
* Diamond Sonic Impact S90
* Trust Sound Expert 128 PCI
* AzTech PCI 338-A3D (under 2.4.22 Kernel NOT 2.6.0)

Supported features:

* Quad speaker surround
* Hardware EQ

Thank You Slate

Original Here Slate

Ahhhg June - July

Weddings and thesis writing. I am trying to defend august 7th and be done by the 31st so I'll see you in September. Then its daily political diatribes time; tune in.