Not so live blog: Caucus day

Well, the one thing about the iPhone is that it is very conspicuous, so my plans to sit and casually blog about the goings on of my precinct caucus while in my precinct caucus didn't work out so well. I did manage to make a couple of notes:

• There was a huge line to get in. Since no one ever goes to caucuses no one know what district they are in. And since districts are literally the size of one city block pretty much everyone who showed up needed to be directed to the right place. I count myself as one of those people.
• When I finally found the right building there was a long line there too.
• As I was standing in line I wondered: Is it a valid reason to support the candidate who's volunteers are cuter?
• I don't understand the whole "suspended" thing. There were signs everywhere telling people that Edwards' campaign was suspended rather than over. Is there really a difference? I don't know anyone who voted for Edwards, but I know that "Uncommitted" won at least one delegate. Wouldn't it suck to lose to Uncommitted?
• It turned out that we didn't really have a precinct chair. Which, in a caucus, is a ridiculously important job. Primaries are simple: you show up, you vote, you leave. There's a whole process to caucuses that no one understands. Our precinct's solution: find the last person who walked into the room and make them be the chair. The chair's first job: find someone to be the secretary, and then find at least 12 people willing to be our precinct's actual delegates for the county and state nominating conventions.
• My precinct was mostly women, and it kind of struck me that the caucus was turning out to be a fantastic place to find a date: politically like-minded people, cute girls, passionate arguments, etc.
• Sadly, it later turned out that most of these women had brought along boyfriends.
• Our precinct chair also claimed to be some sort of radio host, and interviewed me briefly. I think my insightful, witty comment was something like "No one has any idea what is supposed to happen here today."
• My precinct's initial vote was 50 to 13 to 4 (Obama, Clinton, Uncommitted). Something happened to two of the uncommitteds, and we never saw them again. People then had to move around and stand with their fellow supporters. Each side was given 5 minutes to make their case for their candidate. It was astonishingly like listening to meet Meet the Press: Obama didn't vote for the war, Hillary has more experience, Obama brings in new voters to the fold, yada yada yada. The idea of "caucusing" is a good one, but at the end of the day no one was particularly persuaded by the arguments of the other side.
• The two uncommitteds who we could find both ended up going to the Obama side.
• Perhaps the most bizarre portion of the event was after the voting was done. In what seemed to be a ploy to get people riled up and start donating money willy-nilly the Chair told us that we were supposed to go around the room and discuss what we didn't like about the current administration. This is like asking people to strike matches in a room full of gasoline. Our precinct voted to save time and skip this, since we all generally agreed there weren't any secret Bush supporters who had infiltrated our caucus.

So that's pretty much it. Frankly, I still prefer easy democracy to hard democracy, and the total events of the day took nearly three hours to complete. And I didn't even get a date out of it.

Live blog: caucus day

Whoever invented the robo dialer should be thrown in jail. My phone has been ringing off the hook since before 9:00 this morning. I've only picked up the phone once, and it was a Huckabee call.

In other news the moving company that stood me up yesterday seems to be standing me up again. Needless to say their quote will need to be approximately free if they want to earn my business.

A caucusing we will go

I like democracy. I'm not so sure that we need to start wars to promote democracy in other places, but it seems to work pretty well here. One of the nice things about democracy is that it's relatively easy: I go somewhere, I vote, someone counts it, done. Sometimes I can mail my ballot in, meaning I don't even have to go somewhere.

But not now.

I got a ballot for the Washington state primary in the mail last week. After the relatively even Super Tuesday results I became excited that my vote would actually count. I filled out my ballot and mailed it in.

And then I found that it would count for exactly nothing.

Turns out that Washington state has both a caucus and a primary. And the primary doesn't count, at least not for the Democrats. And it only kind of counts for the Republicans. So rather than being able to choose my parties candidate from the comfort of my own home I now have to spend some time (one hour? three? ten?) on a Saturday to go stand around and caucus.

I haven't yet decided on a caucus strategy. I'm probably just going to stand around and hope that no one bothers me. But I may also decide to pledge my vote to someone stupid, like Mike Gravel, and start yelling at people who think that Hillary or Obama are the better candidate. Gravel: any man who throws a rock into a pond on YouTube can be my president. Or, I may choose to just walk around and scream "Ca-CAW!" like Gob on Arrested Development. You know, caucus. Ca-CAW! That's comedic genius.

Oh yeah

Some of you may have heard through the grapevine, but it's finally official:

I'm leaving Seattle. Got a cool job at a startup company in DC. Will be moving back East in a couple of weeks. Details to follow.

The iPhone

It's here. I hesitated after it first came out, thinking that there might be bugs or glitches or new features that would be added. But the yearning and desire? It never went away. I need the iPhone. And so today?

I bought it.

It's gorgeous. It must be so easy to use that Apple doesn't even bother putting instructions in the box. Just the phone, a dock, a charger, and some headphones. Lovely.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use the phone yet, despite having owned it for nearly 10 hours now. It would seem the activation process doesn't quite work. I first ran into problems when I tried to transfer my number. It would seem that I can't transfer my 703 number to a Seattle billing address. So I had to set up my billing address as my parents. First hurdle cleared.

I continued through the process and got to the final screen. No dice. It would seem that there was an issue on my credit report. This isn't a surprise: I put a bunch of fraud blocks on my credit reports after I got robbed. This makes it impossible for anyone to pull my credit without my explicit permission. Well, the iPhone activation process doesn't take this into account, so I had to drive back down to the AT&T store to get approved in person. Sweet. Way to improve the AT&T experience.

After getting the necessary codes I took a six hour break to watch the Super Bowl and have some fried turkey. Got home expecting to finish up the activation and start playing with my phone.

No dice.

Despite have the right credit activation code, and all the other information, I got forced into a manual queue. And so now I wait. I've got nothing. The iPhone just stares at me, wanting to do something cool. It mocks. It laughs at me. The hours pass by. The hole in my heart gets bigger.

Come to me iPhone. Please.

My favorite Christmas present

It's tough to rank Christmas presents, because they are all wonderful in their own way. But I would say the best thing I got this year is my laser rangefinder. Ostensibly it is for the golf course (it's actually called "The Pinseeker"), but since it's been too cold to play golf this year I've had to find alternative uses. Which means "stand out on my balcony and measure the distance to things." Here's what I've discovered:



The boat's mast is 576 yards away. Even down hill it's a 3-shot par five. The edge of the water on the left side of the photo is 408 yards.

The red brick apartment in the dead center of the photo is 266 yards. The yellow apartment to the left of center is 607 yards. The apartment building in the foreground is 62 yards. The Space Needle? I thought that would be just a touch out of range... but it's just at the edge. 1332 yards. Just over 3/4 miles away.

More blogs on the way

Here at West Roy headquarters we had a pretty significant technology upgrade in the past couple of days. I managed to install some new RAM and a new hard drive in my laptop. Amazingly nothing broke, although I did need to take the machine apart an extra time because only about 1/3 of my keyboard worked after the first reassembly.

Anyways, with that out of the way I should be able to get back on the blog train. There will certainly be some interesting things to write about in the coming days.