A Few Thoughts…

To make it easier for people to find the topics (being as I wrote them out of order), here’s a list:

• Issue 1
• Issue 2
• Issue 3
• Issue 4
• Issue 5

I was going to leave issue #5 for another night – but after reading the gist of it, I cannot wait to rant about this one. This is simply atrocious – I can see their strategy in placing this one last in the list. People will be tired of reading all of other ones, and will simply vote with a coin toss on this one.

Here’s the idea: this amendment will create a state board of elections which will control all elections state-wide, and remove the secretary of state from any responsibility with elections. This will move all authority in ALL matters state wide dealing with elections to a central board of APPOINTED officials on staggered 9-year terms. The public will have no authority in choosing these committee members, they will be chosen by the governor, the opposite political party in the general assemblies, and a non-partisan appointee chosen from the state supreme court.

All and all, this is a VERY bad thing. Still, I will put both side’s arguments here:
For
Against

Onto state issue #3 – this one is all about campaign financing, which has been a big topic nation-wide, much less just in Ohio. Which is probably what the backers are hoping to play on: promising Ohioans “campaign financing reform.” Well, that’s what we’d get – big changes in who can give what amount of money and how. The arguments for are almost as long as the actual wording of the ballot text! And, once again, it ends with the line “RESTORE CONFIDENCE\\END CORRUPTION\\VOTE YES”.

Since the actual wording contains a ton of legalese, the arguments against this article help to clear up the text:

* The proposed amendment would change how Ohio political campaigns are funded to benefit the wealthy and labor unions, to the disadvantage of all other Ohioans.
* The proposed amendment allows labor unions to funnel unlimited amounts of money into the political process through a new type of political organization that is deceptively labeled a “small donor” action committee. In addition, there would be no obligation placed on labor unions to provide full disclosure regarding the source of this money, which could even be given people outside Ohio.

From the ballot text:

Permit labor unions, and other nonprofit unincorporated membership organizations, to contribute funds from regular membership dues paid by the organization’s individual members to a small donor action committee. The small donor action committee is not required to report the names of individuals who contribute in this fashion.

So basically, labor unions can contribute on the behalf of its members (not new I guess), but the small donor PAC doesn’t have to report the names of these members. The union could donate money for EVERY member – essentially leaving it an unlimited fund source.

But, don’t take my word for it – go read about it, ask questions, and educate yourself!

Ohio state issue #2 on the ballot in November proposes making a voting window in Ohio for 35 days prior to the actual voting date. Allowing voters to vote by mail or in person at the board of elections. On the surface this sounds like a good thing – giving people more opportunity to vote, and indeed thearguments for this issue list that as the primary reason it was even proposed: to get more voters.

However, think about this situation. I just moved. I register in my new county on the last day possible. I go vote in my old county 35 days prior to the election as this new bill proposes. I then go vote in my current county on election day. Since all of the records of who voted in which precinct are kept on paper(!), my two votes go through and are counted, and it is not realized until well after results have been announced. And even if it is realized before results are certified, since they do not know how I voted, it cannot be changed. This only works for the voting in person thing, not by mail, though I don’t see what could stop someone from doing something there too.

Anyway, as the arguments against note, Ohio’s laws for absentee voting is already very extensive in who can vote before the election and how. So, in my opinion, this issue is completely, and totally unnecessary. Above that, the arguments for it state some of the obvious lack of legal experience in the team pushing the act with the line “RESTORE CONFIDENCE\\END CORRUPTION\\VOTE YES” neatly tacked at the end of their arguments. Seems more like signs you’d see on a college campus or protest rally than a legal argument for a case.

As always though – its your vote, and as the quote goes “I may not agree with your opinion, but I will defend to the death your right to express it,” and voting is probably the best expression of your opinion!

Continuing in my coverage of the state issues being presented to Ohio voters on the November ballot, I now look at Issue #1. The first paragraph sums up what the proposed constitutional amendment is all about:

Be for the purpose of creating and preserving jobs and stimulating economic growth in all areas of Ohio by improving local government public infrastructure, including roads and bridges, expanding Ohio’s research and development capabilities to promote product innovation and commercialization, and preparing sites and facilities for economic development in Ohio.

This sounds good, it sounds like a great plan, and will do lots of good things – and I think it really will! The state is not going to add new taxes, they are not going to create new positions to manage new committees, they are going to sell bonds. You can read the arguments for and against this amendment. Even after reading the arguments against, which largely deals with the point that newborns today are going to have to pay off these bonds when they’re 30, I think that the state has chosen a good direction to get the money they need to fund academic and industrial research and development in the area – and plan to improve the public infrastructure in the state. Obviously, decide for yourself – but since it seems that both sides of the political line agreed on something, its probably a fairly good indicator that the plan is a good middle ground on a lot of issues that need to be addressed. Long term investments are perfect for government activities!

Oh, and this is the ONLY state issue which was generated by the state congressional bodies, and not by a third party…more on that in another post.

I’ve been thinking more and more about the viability of an LLC version of HTG. Tim and Wyatt and I have a bunch of ideas for profitable ventures, but need a place to work on them. I think that we could do some cool things without much cost incurred, have a lot of fun – and maybe in the long run have a nice group of random products to offer people. Who knows, we could even make some money!

So I can find forms easier later, I’m gonna put some links here:

• Ohio LLC Registration Form (pdf)
• Ohio Secratary of State

So, in my normal slashdot reading I come across a story pointing to an article entitled Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? by Charles Petzold. Initially I’m thinking this is the normal anti-microsoft droning that occur on slashdot (not that I’m a huge fan of M$ myself, I think they take a lot of heat unduly). But when I saw that it was presented at a .NET conference, and by a guy who has been doing windows programming as a profession for over 20 years, I decided to take a while and read.

Continuing on might not make sense if you haven’t spent hours coding and messing around with various IDEs. Read on at your own risk

(more…)

After feeling like I’ve had a few slow weeks when it comes to work projects, I was talking to a guy today who put it into perspective for me. He’s been out on vacation for the last week and asked me how my projects were going. Once I started recounting them, I realized that I really had gotten a lot done. I managed to get a spider’s web design polished into a linear, albeit bi-directional, flow – well, I condensed it a while ago, this was the documentation and polishing part. I did enough research to determine that Ruby on Rails + AJAX is going to be the way to go for a UI that I have to design – which involved actually explaining a lot more than I thought I knew about rails. Anyway, +2 for self-generated work morale.

In other news, at our all hands meeting today they announced that we were switching to the way our parent office schedules vacations. Normally not a big deal, except that our week off between Christmas and New Years that everyone just got now requires us to use some of our vacation time! And we don’t really seem to get a choice – apparently we’re supposed to get approval to come in to work on those days. So, we get to use our vacation, or just go unpaid because we can’t even go to work. It’s kinda crazy, and caused all of the engineers to say “This makes no sense” – which seems pretty typical when business people try to manage engineers. Oh well, at least we’re not moving to Baltimore!

btw – don’t expect many posts from this category…

So, as those in Ohio may know (or should know) there are five state issues on the November ballot. From what I’ve read of them so far, I don’t particularly like any of them. But the one that stands out as being just plain stupid is #4, which is “To provide for the creation of a state redistricting commission with responsibility for creating legislative districts”. Here’s paragraph 4 of the amendment:

Provide that the commission must adopt a qualifying plan with the highest “competitiveness number,” as defined in the proposed Amendment. The Amendment defines the “competitiveness number” of a plan by a mathematical formula, that is the product of the number of balanced districts multiplied by two, plus the total number of other remaining competitive districts, minus the total number of unbalanced uncompetitive districts multiplied by two. The competitiveness number for a general assembly plan is the sum of the competitiveness number for the house of representatives districts and the competitiveness number for the senate districts. Provide that the “measure of competition” of a legislative district be based on a calculation using the two average partisan indexes for the district, which are calculated on the basis of the percentage of votes received by each of the two partisan candidates who received the two highest vote totals statewide in each of the three closest general elections during the four previous even-numbered years prior to adopting a redistricting plan, keeping the index for one of the partisan affiliations always as the minuend and the index for the other partisan affiliation always as the subtrahend from district to district throughout a redistricting plan.

Now, I consider myself a bit of a math geek (reading textbooks on elliptic curves on the bus ride to work would make you think of yourself that way too – though, that was a while ago), but I think I’m gonna need to get out a pencil and paper and write out the equation for this one. I’ll post that in the morning, when I can think a little clearer.

That said, don’t we already have legislative districts? It seems as though this is wanting to make partisan districts! That just seems crazy! What’s the point? Does it make it easier for the candidates to know where they’ll be welcomed and where they’ll get eggs thrown at them? I’m also going to look into who sponsored this bill, and maybe write them an email to see what they were thinking!

So, as I’ve been playing with Ruby on Rails (henceforth RoR or just rails), I have come across some issues which seem to be interesting, not obvious, and all together well documented. First and foremost :Don’t name a database ‘logs’ and expect things to work! It took me a few hours trying to decode what scaffold was really doing when it gave the error akin to “no method ‘count’ for logs controller.” Best I can understand, [Ll]og[s]? is a reserved term of sorts within rails and should not be messed with. I changed the database name, recreated the model and controller and it all worked like magic. So, in order for others to avoid such issues, I’m posting this on the web for all to see!