Househusband: Day Two

Gave the office a thorough cleaning this morning. It takes forever because of all the stuff piled up on shelves, desks, etc. Tomorrow: the bedroom. Yes, you wanted to know that.

After I was done with chores, I was nosing around on the web and found something that looked interesting called Slicethepie. It's a music review site that you can actually make real money from. The music is pre-contract, so some of it is really bad, and it takes a serious investment of time to make anything from it, but it was fun. At least until the site blew up and kept giving me zero-length music tracks to "review." I headed over to the forums to see if it was a Firefox or Java problem and the very first forum thread, going back several months, was people complaining about zero-length tracks screwing up the works. (sigh) Never fails; a great idea shot down by shoddy programming.

Speaking of shoddy progamming, more problems with the Diebold voting machines. The audit trail is so poor, there is no way to know if votes were counted, re-counted, uncounted, or randomly deleted by the software. I spent the better part of a decade writing accounting software, which has audit trail requirements that are on the somewhat strict side (if you ever want audited financials, that is). If my work had been this grossly incompetent, I wouldn't have lasted a week at VWoA. With all the conspiricy nuts out there claiming that Obama is a Muslim, Obama isn't a US citizen, Obama's pastor (I thought Muslims called them imams?) is a racist, Obama is a communist, you would think voting machines that randomly delete votes and allow election officials to delete batches of votes without leaving any sort of audit trail would attract at least some attention.

I've mentioned several times that there will be another wave of bailouts when all the defined-benefit pension funds run out of money due to their portfolios losing 30-40% of their value in 2008. I've also mentioned that states, counties and municipalities will also need bailing out due to the drop in sales tax, income tax, and property tax receipts. Now combine those two disasters.

Evidence of global warming: 36 below.

Well, need to start thinking about dinner. I'm thinking tacos....