The Abditory

This poor guy didn’t survive… will we?This weekend, we took off to Hilton Head, SC for a weekend on the beach thanks to Christie’s connections. We spent two nights there and had a great time.

Lighthouse on the island

Ben with a cacheOn Saturday, Ben and I attacked the Survivor: Hunting Island geocache. I carried the camera, but for some reason, I didn’t take very many pictures. We got to the island around 9am and didn’t complete the final task of the final cache until around 5:45pm, and that was with no significant breaks along the way. It shouldn’t have taken that long, but due to my complete stupidity when trying to remember how to project waypoints with my GPS, the first (and easiest) of the finds took us much, much longer than it should have. Another contributing factor is the parking restrictions on the island. On the second find, the description mentions to “park at the camp store.” Well, that would have been a great idea, and would have made for a fairly short hike to the cache, but Ranger Rick and the Lawn Chair Brigade wouldn’t allow it. The park ranger and his elderly volunteer cohorts told us to find public parking for our geocache (”what’s a geocache?”). The Park Store lot, he informs us, is 15 minute parking and intended only for campers. Not wanting to spend $425 on the ticket he’s assuredly thumbing in his pocket, we drove to the closest public parking lot to the trail. Unfortunately, this increased the distance of the hike significantly, and added a bit of time to the overall adventure.

Heavily eroded beach


Ben and Michael on the bridge over the lagoonInterestingly enough, the third and fourth caches went without a hitch, almost. The fourth cache begins on a gazebo at the end of a boardwalk. This boardwalk is currently closed (the sign said for the next 4-6 months), barring our access to it. Fortunately, the creator of the cache included coordinates for it, so we could project from this coordinate as if we were there, allowing us to continue on.

Ben and Michael at the final cache locationThe final cache was a great hunt, especially given our time constraints. We spent way too long on the first and second hunts, so it was getting late in the day when we embarked on this one. We finally located it just after sunset (which was a non-event due to the incredibly overcast sky). We walked back to the car in partial darkness. All-in-all, I personally think that this was our best cache ever.

One seafood dinner and subsequent all-night sickness later, we snapped some photos of the sunset and headed home.

• For more pictures from the cache, check out OutpostBabu’s gallery.
• He also has a little writeup on our trip over on his blog page.

Firefox … outside the boxFirefox turns one today. If you’re sitting there reading this from any other browser, I implore you to give Firefox a chance. It’s clean, slim, fast, and free.

This thing just looks too coolThis little device lets you plug a standard PS2 keyboard and mouse into an XBox. How great is that? I, for one, am tired of trying to play first-person-shooters like Halo and Unreal Tournament with a joystick controller. You just can’t get the accuracy out of these controllers that you can get from a keyboard and a mouse on a PC. The reviews for the product seem to be really good, and for under $30, it’s a steal!

Just in time for Halo 2!

Yes, it’s true. I’ve been an avid Slashdot reader for years, but I’m beginning to get tired of their left-leaning hippie antics.

CmdrTaco writes: “I’ve read dozens of submissions about election anomolies in the last week and they show no sign of slowing so I’ve decided to post a few of the main ones here to let you all discuss them. The first is the Common Dreams report that shows that optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly in florida: the Touchscreen counties roughly matched up to party registration numbers, but optically scanned paper ballot counties showed strangeness like one county where 69.3% registered democrat, but only 28% of them voted for Kerry. Palm Beach County, Florida logged 88,000 more votes than there were voters; that machines in LaPorte, Michigan discounted 50,000 voters; in Columbus, Ohio voting machines gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes; in Broward County, Florida voting machines were counting backwards; Lastly, precincts in New Mexico gave provisional ballots that will never be counted to as many as 10% of all their voters.”

I love the sources cited in this obviously unbiased article. Thank you so much, CmdrTaco, for your dedication to objective journalism.

I’m sorry … I’ve enjoyed Slashdot for years, but it’s just getting farther and farther from the tagline of “news for nerds, stuff that matters”. The sources they cited are, in order:

1. Common Dreams report: Nice. Common Dreams. An extremely “progressive” (in their own words) news source with rave reviews from Bill Moyers and (go figure) Ralph Nader, which Don Imus (of MSNBC) calls “a must read from the left”. Hmmm….
   
2. optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly: From UsTogether.org, a web site dedicated to “peace, democracy, and well-being”. The list of local resources display a myriad of internet sites dedicated to the Democratic and Green parties, and ONLY to those parties. Hardly an unbiased news source.
   
3. 88,000 more votes than there were voters: While I couldn’t find a clear agenda on their site, the article referenced in the posting has already been updated with the fact that Palm Beach County had no such discrepancy. If you look at the page that the Washington Dispatch quotes, the actual numbers from Palm Beach County are quite different. In fact, there were 544,378 votes cast for President from 547,340 voters that turned out, showing 2,962 voters that never cast a vote for President, as opposed to the 88,000 votes over voter turnout that the article claims. Interesting…
   
4. discounted 50,000 voters: CmdrTaco claims this took place in LaPorte, Michigan … when it actually took place in LaPorte, Indiana. This shows a complete lack of effort to verify this data. LaPorte was, in fact, a problem. They believe it was due to a power surge of some sort. They are still working on sorting through the mess there and are still counting ballots and working to certify the election there. At any rate, to state they “discounted 50,000 voters” is not only misleading, it’s flat out wrong. In fact, the current data from LaPorte, INDIANA states that they had 43,278 voters voting (with 42,582 votes being cast for President) with just over 79,309 voters registered. That’s a 55% turnout for that county, which is just about on par with the rest of the state. Whie I have yet to see viable precinct-by-precinct data for that county, it’s clear that “discounting 50,000 voters” is not what happened at all. Incidentally, for all you Kerry fans out there, Kerry actually had more votes in this county.
   
5. gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes: Oh. My. Gosh. The county in which this took place still shows more votes for KERRY than for Bush. However, this is actually a problem if you look at the (still unofficial) data from Franklin County. The key here is that the document here referenced is UNOFFICIAL, and even CNN (left as they are) admits to that. The offical tally for Bush in that precinct is 365 votes. Perhaps the headline should read “Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio According to an Unofficial Document That is Only Used by the Media and Has No Bearing Whatsoever on the Election Results”.
   
6. counting backwards: Again, a valid problem here, but one that only affected UNOFFICIAL early tallys and were corrected by cross-checking for the final results. In addition, the problem did not even affect the Presidential election, only a few amendments that were up for vote.
   
7. gave provisional ballots that will never be counted to as many as 10% of all their voters: Ok, people … get a grip. This is a BLOG for crying out loud, and one that doesn’t even hide their affiliations. The very name of the site is “Further Left”. Please. This quote of 10% is speculation by the author of the article, and never mentions the precinct by name, nor does it ever reference hard data.
   

Now, I’m not happy that there are problems in our voting system either, but it’s clear by digging just a little deeper than the autopilot posting of links you find on your favorite agenda-driven site that these problems mainly affected the early counts used by the media to call the elections. In reality, the end result of most of these “problems” was a correction of some sort by un-biased cross-checking.

Slashdot editors, can we please, PLEASE, do a better job than this?

Please?!

A very mötley crüeWe took a trip this weekend to Elijah Clark State Park. We spent two nights in a cabin on the lake and wasted as much time as possible grilling, fishing, and napping. While the park is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from home, it seemed much farther away once we got settled in.



We arrived late Friday evening and hung out in the cabin. The next morning John fished the virtually barren lake and returned empty-handed. We spent part of the morning walking around the park enjoying the weather, and grilled out back for lunch. In the afternoon, some of the group went for some miniature golf action, while Wanda and I decided to take it easy around the cabin. Saturday night prompted a heated political debate around the camp fire regarding morality-based legislation and separation of church and state. Sunday morning was clean-up and packing time as we parted ways and headed back home.

All-in-all … a nice, relaxing weekend.