Election Day is here!

Yeah, you bet I’m excited.

I had my doubts, friends, that the day would ever come. The campaign seemed to go on and on like a mad cross between the Simpson trial and Groundhog Day. The closer we got to November 2nd the slower time seemed to go, until the hands on the clock were actually moving backward as if Ralph Nader was holding them there by sheer force of conviction that yes, he could still win this race.

I’m not one for making predictions — at least, not ones that pan out. But in this case I’ll make an exception since I’ve got a 50/50 shot at it. The popular vote will essentiall be a tie, but Bush will win the electoral vote by claiming both Florida and Ohio.

To be honest, I’m not that concerned about who wins the presidency. It looks as though the balance in the House will remain about the same and the Republicans will pick up two seats in the Senate, so even if Senator Kerry becomes President Kerry, nothing is going to get rubber stamped into law. And as others have observed, there is something to be said for letting the other party’s guy be the punching bag for a few years. If Kerry were to do well, it would be good for the country. If he were to make a mess of it, it would only cement him as a single-term president and damage the left’s hold on power.

What little concern I do have over the presidency comes from the fact that the Supreme Court may have several vacancies during the next four years, and the impact of SCOTUS nominations will be felt across the land long after the 44th president is gone. I think Bush would be more likely to select justices who interpret the Constitution strictly, whereas Kerry might favor activists and make his choice based on one or two issue litmus test. Kerry is not a man of political conviction, and that would not serve him well when the special interests started coming out of the woodwork to clamor for or against a potential Supreme Court nominee.

My primary concern, as I wrote at Damn Foreigner, is that faith in the American system remains firm. It takes a lot of character to be so close to becoming the most powerful man in the world and yet take the high ground when you lose by a hair. Despite the way Nixon’s presidency went to hell when he finally was elected, Tricky Dick certainly put the nation before himself in choosing not to dispute his razor thin 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy.

So even above my hope that President Bush wins reelection today is my fervent prayer that whoever loses does so with grace and puts the country before themselves by telling the lawyers to lay off.

Wishful thinking, I know.

One of the most interesting election scenarios would be a 269-269 tie in the electoral college. In that instance, the Senate would pick the vice-president and the House would, via state delegations, select the president. So we could end up with Bush and Edwards in office. It’s also theoretically possible that John Edwards could end up as both President AND Vice-President at the same time.

Anyway you slice it, it’s going to be an interesting day. I’ve got a staging rehearsal for Turandot at OCPAC later on. Thank God for opera! I’ll be doing something productive rather than self-immolating in front of the television.

The verdict is in: I’m a genius. My election prediction came true. I correctly called both Florida and Ohio for President Bush, predicting those two would push him to victory. And so they did.

I was a bit off on the popular vote, thinking Kerry would do better. My rationale was that the hard core blue states of New York and California — which have a combined 56 million residents, nearly 1/5 of the total U.S. population — would land strongly in Senator Kerry’s column and thereby impact the national popular vote total. However, the President did comparatively well in both states.

In California, Bush received 4.3 million votes, a 44% share. Kerry came away with 55% and 5.3 million votes. I was expecting the split to be more along the lines of 70/30 in Kerry’s favor. But in looking at CNN’s county-by-county breakdown, the Republican party is strong in most parts of the state. It’s the coastal areas, specifically San Francisco and the Los Angeles basin, that hold they keys to Democratic strength in the state. Most of the rest of California goes Republican. The eastern two thirds of the state are pure red.

New York is about the same. Any way you slice it, President Bush did pretty well.

There were a few surprises. For example, my former home state of Alaska has re-elected Lisa Murkowski to the Senate in a race I expected challenger Tony Knowles to win. Her appointment to the Senate by her father — while no worse than Jean Carnahan taking over Mel Carnahan’s seat after his death — was widely expected to result in a backlash from voters in the 49th state.

As of now, it looks like the GOP managed to:

• retain the presidency
• gain four seats in the Senate
• gain at least four seats in the House
• gain one governorship (Washington)
• defeat the highest ranking Democrat in the Senate

Not bad for a day’s work. Well ok, it was more like a couple of years worth of work. But it represents the largest shift away from the Democratic party since 1980.

The defeat of South Dakota’s Sen. Tom Daschle was especially significant, because it represents the first time a Senate party leader has lost re-election in 52 years. It’s easy to understand why. A powerful senator can route tremendous Federal resources to his state, and an electorate is loathe to exchange that for a freshman who’ll be lucky to land on a fisheries subcommittee. I’m a bit sad to see old Tom go, because he’s an avid pilot and strong supporter of general aviation. He’s opposed user fees, ATC privatization, and other cockamamie things.

Though it has been a big night for the GOP, it’s not all flowers and sunshine. This election will consolidate power, making the GOP a larger (and more legitmate) target for both the opposition and the voters in ‘06 if Republicans don’t deliver the goods. Of course, this would only happen on a case by case basis. My impression of Congressional elections is that the electorate never looks at them as national referendums. Those races are won or lost on local issues. Few people vote for a representative based on how he or she will affect the partisan balance of the House.

I’m glad the presidential popular vote margin was large. Whoever won, I was hoping it would be by a sizeable margin. Bush won by more than 3.5 million votes, which means the lawyers have less opportunity to stage an encore of their Y2K performance in court.

As the 2004 election’s loose ends are tied up, it’s time to turn our attention toward healing, coming together, and moving forward. The problem is, I’m not sure how we do that. Is the GOP suppsed to abandon the platform it ran on in order to accomodate those whose candidates were rejected by the voters?

It’s been sad to see the way some Democrats are stuck on the “what’s wrong with 50% of the country?” mantra. There is nothing wrong with 50% of the country. If you really think 150 million Americans are crazy, then perhaps moving to Canada is not such a bad idea.

When the GOP wins election after election and claims ever larger majorities in House, Senate, and governorship seats, perhaps the proper question to ask would be, “Why don’t more voters pick our candidates?”. The country hasn’t changed, it’s the Democratic party that’s different. Maybe Zell Miller, Ron Silver, Ed Koch are on to something. Perhaps Sen. Richard Shelby, Sen. Ben Campbell, Sen. Bob Smith, and others who switched to the Republican party did so for a valid reason.

The President and the GOP are far from perfect. But until the Democrats reinvent themselves and the way they play the game, this red state trend will not change. I’m hopeful this election will inspire the Dems to do that soul searching, because a well balanced two party system keeps everyone on the up and up.

I took a page out of Jon’s playbook and made a few minor modifications to the House of Rapp CMS code.

Now, when you leave a comment, you’ll notice that there’s a checkbox titled “Subscribe to comments”. If you select this checkbox, the system will automatically notify you when someone posts a subsequent comment on that entry. This fixes one of the major drawbacks of the comment system, the inability to have any kind of timely conversation due to the fact that you never know when someone has responded to what you’ve written.

If you’re worried about a deluge of email, don’t be. Anytime the system emails you a notification, it will include a link you can use to unsubscribe yourself from that entry, as well as the option of blocking all notification emails from the House of Rapp if you so choose.

I added the subscribe-to-comments feature because as I look over the 233 entries and 422 comments currently on the books, I’ve come to realize that the comments section is a great way of exchanging thoughts and fleshing out ideas with others. The recent Election Results entry is a good example, as is the Thunderbird crash post.

Knock on wood, I haven’t had the problems with comment spam, flame wars, etc. that others have had to deal with. The database is clean. As a general policy, I leave comments open on all entries regardless of age. So if you want to get in on the discussion, try the subscribe-to-comments tool.

The financial markets have been on a tear lately. Those who supported President Bush will tell you that it’s all due to his electoral victory last Tuesday. But my own feeling is that the markets were just happy to have a clear winner. They probably would have performed well even with a Kerry win as long as it was unchallenged, but that’s just speculation on my part.

If conventional wisdom holds sway, we’re in the opening years of a secular bear market that, despite the recent gains, will see stocks headed downward over the long term. But for the moment, I’m doing pretty well, and to celebrate I took some of the money and bought myself a new laptop computer.

I haven’t owned a laptop since the mid-90s. It was a Compaq Armada 1100T powered by a 90 MHz Pentium processor. I think it had 64 megabytes of RAM and about an 800 meg hard drive. At the time, it seemed downright ‘pimp’. Eventually the hard drive died and I never got around to getting it fixed.

Eventually I donated it to charity for the tax write-off, but I’ve wanted another laptop ever since. The thought of being completely out of touch for two weeks during my flight training session in Las Vegas was a convenient excuse for taking the plunge. Besides, laptops are far more useful today. It’s such a piece of cake to setup a wireless network and just sit outside or on the couch and take care of writing emails, browsing the web, etc. Battery life is improved, the screens are larger, and the price has come down dramatically.
(continue reading…)

The Seinfelt poker table has (more or less) been completed! The only thing left to do is airbrush the artwork onto the felt. Of course, that’s a pretty big part of the table, and the thing that’ll give it such panache.

But that didn’t stop us from breaking that bad boy in with a night of Texas Holdem last week. And I’m happy to report that I finished in second place with 30% of the pot. Which immediately went into my gas tank on the way home. OK, so it’s not exactly the World Poker Tour…

The table:

The proud owner:

The game in progress:

Update: I forgot to add that Paul is selling these tables for a reasonable price. Here are the details.

Turandot has finally opened. My thirty third opera. Damn that’s a lot of singing.

In keeping with the theatrical tradition of ‘bad dress / good opening’, our preview performance started off so dismally that we re-ran half of the first act after the show was over. Apparently we’re supposed to be singing behind the conductor, not with him. First time I’ve ever heard that.

The opera goes by surprisingly fast. I guess that’s what happens when you’re on stage the whole evening rather than sitting in the green room for two hours between entrances, a la Mozart. I’m enjoying the show immensely. Liu’s death scene in Act III is one of the finest parts of the opera, not on in the way Puccini wrote it, but in the way our Liu — Zvetelina Vassileva — sings it. In general, there’s a lot of energy in this show. The cast is huge. I think I counted something like 100 people, and that doesn’t include the 70 musicians in the orchestra, the backstage banda, the stage managers, dressers, and crew.

We’ve got four more performances, then it’s back to studying for the December CFI course in Las Vegas. I’ll be sad when this show ends, because it’ll be the last one that Paul and I do together. Opera without Paul is going to suck. I come up with all these brilliantly hairbrained schemes for funny stuff, and he’s always willing to act on them. Add in some Seinfeld and Jack Daniels, and you’ve got a brilliant combination.

During tech week, I managed to get in some glider flying from the back seat and received the signoff for my commercial checkride. Flying from the rear seat is about what I expected. The control stick in the rear seat has a shorter throw than the one in the front, which is an advantage because it’s easier to put in full control deflection, and I do that fairly frequently for things like no-dive-brake landings. Being in the rear seat also makes it tough to see the instruments since they’re all in the front cockpit, but it’s not a huge deal.

I’m a little nervous about this test, because I’ve never had to fly with the FAA before. The only pilot examiner for commercial glider ratings in the area is an FAA employee. On all my previous checkrides, I’ve been tested by a Designated Pilot Examiner. DPEs are independent contractors designated by the FAA to give practical tests for ratings and certificates. There’s no reason to be apprehensive about it. Every examiner works from the same book, the Practical Test Standards, so in theory it doesn’t matter who the examiner is. In theory.

There is one positive aspect to flying with an FAA examiner: it’s free. DPEs charge for their services, usually to the tune of $350 or so.

I’m hoping to get this checkride out of the way before the end of November because the current examiner is retiring and the new guy will probably be pretty stringent and by-the-book on his first few checkrides. I’d rather not slog through a four hour oral and two hour flight for a simple commercial glider add-on rating. If nothing else, I’ve been prepared for the way the current examiner likes to run his checkrides. With a new guy, it’s a total crapshoot. No one knows his history because he won’t have one yet.

CNN is reporting that one of Orange County’s richest ghetto fab hoodlums, Dennis Rodman, is going back to work.

Dennis Rodman signed a contract with the Orange County (Calif.) Crush of the ABA. Insiders predict he’ll get in a scrap with onetime Chino bad boy Ryan by sweeps week.

My first thought was: when did the American Bar Association field a sports team? Then I realized they were referring to the American Basketball Association, which hasn’t existed since 1976. Didn’t the ABA merge with the NBA a quarter of a century ago? Was the NBA not successful enough for them? Did they decide to seceed after Kerry lost the election?

Also, I thought Orange Crush was a carbonated beverage, not a basketball team. Orange Crush can also describe a particularly bad stretch of freeway where the 5, 57, and 22 meet near Anaheim Stadium.

And since when does Orange County have a professional basketball team at all? I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that Long Beach has a hockey team (another unfortuate name: Ice Dogs). On the other hand, perhaps a new pro basketball league is a great idea. You have to be George Soros to afford tickets to a Laker game these days. That might explain why I still haven’t seen the inside of Staples Center.

I liked the reference to television’s The O.C.. Perhaps Rodman can grab the mike from the announcer before every home game and taunt the opposing team with that famous line: “Welcome to the O.C., bitch”.

I updated the colophon page to read a little more like a personal narrative and a bit less like a legal brief. The only things it was missing were the double spacing and line numbers.

Hopefully it’s now more entertaining, easier to read, lower in calories, and will cause the reader to buy the world a Coke and teach them to sing in perfect harmony.

I’m all about setting reasonable expectations.

Speaking of harmonies, today is closing night for Turandot. Which is a bit of misnomer since we close with a matinee. Nevertheless, I’ve enjoyed this production. It’s been somewhat of a meat market backstage, but that’s what happens when the cast is young and nearly 100 in number. The audiences have given standing ovations every night, rare for an Orange County crowd. I have a feeling the next production (Mozart!) won’t produce the same response from the populi…

And with that, I’m off to the theatre.

It’s been a few months since I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress as a CMS solution.

Overall, I’ve been happy with Wordpress. However, there was one large bug I was never able to squash: it didn’t want to play well with Gallery. For some reason, I was never able to call Wordpress functions from within the photo gallery pages. I wanted to make these function calls in order to have the side bar menu (which contains recent posts, comments, and other Wordpress data) remain consistent on all the pages.

A simple server-side include should have taken care of this, but it never worked. I’d end up with the following error message:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/ronrapp/public_html/wp-includes/wp-l10n.php on line 37

The file referenced in the error message, wp-l10n.php, enables Wordpress to operate in different languages. Since it’s one of the first things Wordpress does, that’s where the functionality broke down.

Normally a Google search will turn up the answer to just about any coding issue, but this one was a rare exception. I posted several messages to the Wordpress support forum, but always came away with the feeling that I wasn’t explaining my problem clearly. Either that or the folks replying had no experience with Gallery, which is an admittedly wonky piece of open source software (the next iteration, dubbed “G2″, is supposed to be much better).

Anyway, I’m glad to report that the fog has finally been lifted. The answer: add the following line to the beginning of Gallery’s init.php file:

<?php
require_once('../path/to/wp-config.php');
?>

I’d swear that this is one of the first things I tried four months ago. But apparently not, because it’s working like a charm now. F*%$#ing computers…

Senator Harry Reid has been selected as the next minority leader in the U.S. Senate, succeeding South Dakota’s Tom Daschle after his reelection loss to John Thune.

It was a smart choice. I met Sen. Reid on a couple of occasions when I lived in Las Vegas, and he nominated me to the U.S. Naval Academy (I also received a nomination to Colorado Springs from then Congressman James Bilbray). I’ve been watching his career since he was southern Nevada’s sole congressman in the mid 80s.

I predict he’ll be an effective leader for his party in the Senate. Unlike House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Reid is a usually moderate, never shrill, and has shown a willingness to make reasonable compromises when necessary.

Reid has his own mind and does not blindly tow the party line. He is a big supporter of the mining industry, which puts him at odds with the environmental lobby. He opposed third trimester abortion and even garnered the approval of the NRA on his gun control. A true westerner at heart (a cowboy?), he is his own man. And like many of those folks, he’s soft spoken guy with a level head who does not seek the spotlight. In many ways, Reid is the antithesis of a Bill Clinton or John Kerry.

He’s also “old school” in the sense that he made a slow climb up the ladder over many years rather than rising out of political obscurity to buy his Senate seat with a self-funded $100 million campaign as so many seem to do today. He’s also extremely dedicated to the people of Nevada, having been a lifelong resident of the state. That puts him head and shoulders above Sen. Hillary Clinton, who moved to New York specifically to run for that state’s senate seat.

It’s also worth noting that Sen. Reid knows how to take a hit for the team. Literally. In 1981, Reid chaired of the Nevada Gaming Commission and was fighting organized crime’s control over gambling in Las Vegas. The mob attempted to kill him by wiring his car to explode. The plot failed, but Reid never backed down.

Who knows, maybe one day he’ll even climb the final rung and run for president. Were he to capture the nomination, I predict he’d do a lot better than John Kerry.

MSNBC is reporting that Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign had $45 million left going into the final days before the election, plus another $7 million in a legal and accounting complaince fund, much of which was never spent.

If Kerry really thought he had a chance to win — and regardless of party affiliation, who didn’t? — why would his campaign sit on millions of dollars that could be spent in places like Ohio and Florida? When it’s a tight race, campaigns are known to spend themselves into considerable debt trying to reach every last voter.

While it’s a sure bet that the full $52 million did not go unspent, I’d wager that a solid $20 million remains in the campaign’s bank account. That could have financed some serious ad buys in the battleground states.

Perhaps Kerry was in the dark about this. I can’t think of many other explanations. He campaigned hard up to the last minute. Kerry even went so far as to remember children who had given their piggy banks to him in his concession speech. In retrospect, it’s like rubbing salt in the wound.

If I’d given my hard-earned money to the Kerry campaign only to learn that it had gone unspent, I would not be happy, especially since there’s no chance of gettin that money back. If I’d seen my son or daughter give up their allowance, I’d been even more upset. They gave to the campaign, and now that money will be used for another candidate or issue, perhaps one the donors don’t even support.

I can only think of one explanation for the unspent money: if Kerry knew he was going to lose and was sure to run again in 2008. Is it possible the campaign’s polling data was much worse than they let on?

I’m not anti-Microsoft, but the folks at Apple and Sun must be smiling about this:

Forget trying to flood Bill Gates’ e-mail inbox with junk.

The Microsoft Corp. chairman receives 4 million e-mails a day, but practically an entire department at the company he founded is dedicated to ensuring that nothing unwanted gets into his inbox, the company’s chief executive said Thursday.

“There are two people who probably are the number one spam recipients in the world,” Steve Ballmer said.

“Bill Gates (is first) because he is Bill Gates. Bill literally receives four million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it spam.”

Spam or junk e-mails are unsolicited messages, generally advertising goods or services and usually sent to many e-mail accounts simultaneously, often indiscriminately.

Ballmer said Microsoft has special technology that just filters spam intended for Gates.

“Literally there’s a whole department almost that takes care of it,” he said.

Four million pieces of spam per day? That means he’s getting spammed an average of 46 time per second, every minute of the day non-stop. Think of it this way: if you’re watching full motion video, you’re typically seeing 30 frames per second. So for each frame that goes by, Bill is getting one and a half pieces of spam. In the time it took me to write this sentance, he received more than a thousand pieces of junk mail.

I wonder how much bandwidth gets used receiving all this junk. Even if they’ve got the best filtering software known to man, the email server still has to receive the message before it can be filtered. And much of the spam these days contains attachments.

But the real irony is that most of it is in HTML format. You might recall that Microsoft was the prime mover behind adding HTML elements to email messages because it would make them more ‘friendly’. Plain text messages are quite compact. Once you start adding images, backgrounds, fonts, javascript, sounds, and other junk to it, an email can grow to more than a thousand times its plain-text size.

Between Gates and current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the company probably has the equivalent of several OC3 circuits dedicated to receiving all this crap just so they can delete 99.9995 percent of it.

Sounds like poetic justice to me.

Leave it to Seinfeld to break new ground by inducting a sitcom joke into the Smithsonian.

The outlandishly unfashionable shirt worn by Jerry Seinfeld on his hit TV show went on display Friday at the Smithsonian, alongside Kermit the Frog, Archie Bunker’s chair and Dorothy’s magic slippers from “The Wizard of Oz.”

At the end of its nine-season run, “Seinfeld” — the “show about nothing” — left lots of well-loved lines but few tangible relics suitable for enshrinement in the National Museum of American History.

Thus, The Puffy Shirt, which appeared briefly in a single episode. What makes that bit of wardrobe so memorable is that it serves as an icon, not only of “Seinfeld” but American popular culture.

The show’s been off the air for six years and yet its power — much like the lingering scent of a stinky valet — only seems to grow. Part of the current resurgence in Seinfeld can be credited to savvy marketing. After all, the first three seasons are to be released on DVD in just a few days.

But with the astronomical syndication fees, the Smithsonian, the success of Curb Your Enthusiasm ( another “show about nothing”), and the depth with which Seinfeld has been ingrained into popular culture, it’s clear that there’s still a large following for the show.

Speaking of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David is the real genius behind all this. Witness the post-Seinfeld careers of the cast. Despite new projects from everyone except Jerry (who prefers stand-up), the only one who’s been able to recapture the magic and success of Seinfeld is Larry David. In fact, his HBO show is probably what Seinfeld would have looked like if it hadn’t been on network television and saddled with all the attendant restrictions on language and innuendo.

I’m glad Seinfeld was on NBC, though. There’s something about the warped creativity David used to push the envelope that made the show what it was. On HBO, there are no such restrictions, and as a result Larry David goes hog wild. Curb Your Enthusiasm is still brilliant, risky, and groundbreaking, yet somehow always remains in the shadow of its predecessor.

I’m sure Charmaine Simmons, the costumer who created the puffy shirt, has designed some beautiful clothing in her career. Yet the one thing she’ll be remembered for is a god-awful looking joke of a shirt. A very Seinfeld-esque irony, don’t you think?

For the past week, I’ve been having an interesting discussion over at Damn Foreigner on the subject of military recruitment.

Manish wrote an article suggesting that since there are so many supporters of the war, it shouldn’t be hard to find new recruits for the Army unless those who support it aren’t willing to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.

His analysis seemed a bit oversimplistic and I said as much in reply to his post. It’s turned into a relatively long — but civil — comment thread.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a place or person with whom to discuss opposing political viewpoints in an intelligent yet respectful manner. This is especially true on the internet, where contemptuous speech and peevish behavior are the norm. All the more reason to find these moments of sanity so refreshing.

I doubt I changed his mind. Nor did he change mine very much. But the civil exchange of ideas is where growth, knowledge, and understanding begin. I’ll go out on a limb here and state that we could probably use a bit more of that — not just in political discussion, but in general.

Don’t you agree?