N.C. Seeks To Join National Popular Vote Compact

There’s a huge change underway in the process of electing a President. I happened to stumble upon this N&O article announcing North Carolina’s proposed plans to offer all of its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The plan calls for state officials to tally the popular votes from all of the 50 states and the District of Columbia and offer all of its electoral votes to the winner of that tally.

The plan, called the National Popular Vote compact, would give smaller states like North Carolina more clout in presidential elections. Campaigns currently focus most all of their resources on the battleground states. This plan would change all that. North Carolina joins California, Illinois, Colorado, Maryland, Hawaii, and Arkansas in advancing the measure through its legislature.

State representatives have been falling over themselves to introduce the measure. Bills from Sen. Charlie Dannelly (S760) and Sen. Dan Clodfelter (S954) are moving through the Senate, while Rep. Melanie Goodwin’s (H1645) is working its way through the House.

More on the plan can be found at the National Popular Vote website, or the book Every Vote Equal, appropriately available online for free.

If states implement the National Popular Vote measure, no longer would a presidential candidate win the popular vote but lose the election. Makes sense to me!

Raleigh: The City Of Bradford Pears?

Looking out my office window this morning, I spied a very visible sign of wind damage: a large limb on a Bradford Pear tree in the front parking lot peeled off like a banana peel. It happened last evening, landing on a woman’s car from what I hear. It reminds me why I hate Bradford pear trees.

They’re everywhere, for one. Way overdone. They stink to high heaven when blooming. They also lack strength. Any little puff of wind will shred them. They also have the habit of dying too young: you’ll be lucky to get 20 years out of them.

Why do so many people plant them? They’re tolerant of many types of soil. They also grow very quickly – at the expense of strength. But who wants to go to the trouble of planting a tree if its only going to die in 20 years?

I wish our area builders were a little more creative with their landscaping decisions. I wish we’d see more of what is Raleigh’s city symbol: the mighty willow oak (Quercus phellos). If we want to build a city with a future, we should be using oaks instead of Bradford pears. Too many times developers go for the short-term gain.

Too Much Of A Good Thing

We spent the day visiting the Naylors at their lakehouse. While Kelly socialized and the kids played with their nephew Wes, I spent most of the time getting the sailboat ready for the season. That meant cleaning all the leaves and mildew off the deck and fishing speaker wire into a new place. (If I use fish tape on my sailboat, does that make it a fishing boat?)

Before leaving I mentioned we might be back to sail Sunday. I knew there would be wind today but I didn’t appreciate how much! The NWS showed hurricane gale warnings all along the North Carolina coast. Lake Gaston was expected to get 20 knots of sustained wind, with gusts up to 35MPH! While the adults could’ve had a blast in that kind of wind, I didn’t feel comfortable taking Travis out there, especially when there’s a lifeline that needs repairing.

We’ll have to wait a little longer before setting sail. Arrrr!

Now Send Some Of That Good Beer, Too

My frequent travel has earned us some free plane tickets. We’ve been considering making a trip to the Pacific Northwest for a week or so. Instead, the cool, wet weather’s brought the Pacific Northwest to us.

Kinda nice, actually. Good writing weather.

Rush Limbaugh Boasts Being Bamboozled By Bee Blurb

Last week Rush Limbaugh joined the bee brigade when he mentioned the bogus Einstein bee quote. To his credit, today he admitted to being fooled.

“There’s a line in the story about this mysterious bee disappearance that is attributed to Einstein, says if the bees went away, that humanity would expire in four to five years, that we couldn’t survive without them. And Einstein never said it. It’s one of the these popular myths that circulating. It might be true, but Einstein didn’t say it.”

“But I was totally taken in by it,” Limbaugh said. “Even I, the great El Rushbo was taken in. I apologize for that, too.”

Wow … Rush Limbaugh is capable of occasionally telling the truth!

(By the way, friends, this is the first and last Rush Limbaugh link you’ll ever see on MT.Net.)

Shutterbug

Inevitably whenever I’m out in public shooting pictures, a total stranger will walk up to me and try to hire me to shoot pictures at his or her event. Last night’s fundraiser at Ess Lounge was no exception. A woman asked if photography is “what I do,” and when I nodded she invited me to shoot at tomorrow night’s Derby Party. I had to tell her I was already booked, having plans to visit our friends the Naylors, but I did appreciate the offer. There will be lots of classily-dressed people at that party so shooting pictures is bound to be fun.

The hook of local mags Social and zSpotlight is publishing party pictures. I could easily do that, perhaps for my own website. That was the idea behind my Eventwire domain before I sold it to its current owner. Certainly I could make some money doing photography on the side.

It also would’ve been a great occasion to have my calling cards with me (no, not the ones that say BMF, the ones that say “photographer”). I keep a pack of them in my car but we took Kelly’s car to the event and I neglected to bring them along. Parties like that are really the reason I got them. Who knows how many photography gigs I might have lined up just from last night?

I caved in today and purchased an external flash for my Nikon D50: the new Nikon SB-400. Its compact, uses only TWO (!) AA batteries, and can handle bounce flash, too. Ken Rockwell loves his, and that was good enough for me.

It was also helpful to learn why my old Vivitar flash doesn’t work with the Nikon: CCDs are too shiny for the camera to judge proper lighting. The Internets are good for all kinds of information.

Cheap Thoughts: Flash Drive Receipts

Once again we’re faced with a pile of paper receipts from our purchases, and once again we’re facing tedious and error-prone data entry as we reconcile our checkbook.

It’s 2007. Why are we still dealing in paper receipts? Mechanical cash registers are so 1870s. Computerized ones have taken their place. Why not take advantage of these computers?

A digital receipt could be provided on a customer’s USB flash drive. Or it could go on their smartchip-enabled “customer appreciation card.” The customer would take home a full, digital inventory of their purchases which could be direcly imported into their favorite checkbook application. No more poring over receipts at the end of the month, trying to figure out what’s what.

The receipts also be fed into a shopping list application, providing an easy way of keeping track of your fridge’s contents and when you’re likely to need more.

Coupons could be copied to the drive as well and redeemed the same way.

You’d never again have to wait in line while the cashier fumbled with a new roll of paper for the printer. You’d never wait for the impossibly-long paper receipt to print something you’re likely to throw away anyway.

What’s better, the digital receipt could be cryptographically signed by the store, verifying that the purchases were legitimate. In this way, these receipts would be even more secure than the paper ones, which are more susceptible to forgery.

It wouldn’t take much to make this happen. Any system would have to be backwards-compatible with existing systems (at least, to begin with). This means a terminal would have a serial or parallel port in addition to a USB port (or smartcard reader). If some modern registers use USB printers, that makes things even easier. The terminal app would take the output from the register, sign it, and copy it to the USB drive, perhaps in a CSV, XML, or some other open format. The register would never know it didn’t print to paper.

Who knows? Someday USB drives or smartcards may one day take the place of credit cards entirely. Anything would be more secure than a flimsy piece of plastic with no inherent security features.

I think I’ll take a closer look at registers in the next few days and figure out how this might work.

Children’s House Of Raleigh Fundraiser At Ess Lounge

We just got back from the annual fundraiser for my daughter’s preschool, Children’s House of Raleigh. It was held downtown at the Ess Lounge this year and it was rocking.

Thanks to Kelly for all the hard work she put into it, and thanks to all the other parent volunteers. Thanks also to the many, many businesses who donated products and services to make this fundraiser a success!

Pictures from the event can be found in my gallery. As with my recent RTP 2.0 pics, these are Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Attribution, Share-alike licensed. Spread ’em round, and tell folks you got ’em at MarkTurner.Net.