My parents were in-town from Friday after-noon into Sunday morning. Dad came in part to do a reading and book-signing at Mysterious Galaxy Books.

My parents were quite surprised by my appearance, not having seen nor been warned about the sideburns. My mother insisted that I now have a beard.

They brought with them a bicycle that my father used. He now finds it too hard on his hips, and so gave it to me. It has been more than fifteen years since I owned a bicycle, and more than twenty years since I rode on one. I'll hope that riding a bicycle is just like riding a bicycle.

He also gave me a couple of surplus Logitech computer mouses (one in need of repair and the other essentially brand new), and books and copies of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

I gave to Dad the crushable Aussie hat that I got for him, and a Beanie Baby husky. (Dad is not know for being a fan of Beanie Babies, but we have fond memories of our last family dog, a Siberian Husky.) I completely forgot to give to them any of the CFLs that I got when they were on sale.

I have plans to travel to Tucson for Thanksgiving, in part because my parents' computers need some sort of maintenance.

The Woman of Interest mentioned to me how some sellers manage to maintain acceptable or better feedback scores, and the initial negative feedback that they receive might not itself be particularly damning, yet one can discern from their replies that negative feedback that these are very problematic people. So I drew her attention to ohiopal (located in New Philadelphia):

• negative feedback given to ohiopal
• negative feedback left by ohiopal

I suppose that a few sloppy readers might actually be fooled by his recurring trick of signing a reply with the buyer's account, as it it were a follow-up. I've seen some of the photos that he claimed were inadvertantly misleading because of poor quality — they were clear photos, but of a different item than was delivered. And take special note to the entries on each page for lot 2164122076.

He's better behaved at GunBroker.com. [Edit (2008:11/17): Except in-so-far as he persuades buyers there to buy from him more directly, in which case they may get junk.]

(I've not myself ever done business with this account, nor to my knowledge otherwise with its holder. I just stumbled upon his record when I was investigating another seller.)

Surely many of you are familiar with TinyURL, which provides the service of turning long URLs into short URLs (useful, for example, if one wants to pass a link with a GET request by using an e.mail handler or chat app which chops-up lines of that length).

Now, by way of Ricky Catto, I am exposed to

As previously mentioned, one of my Corsair Voyager 8GB USB flash drives has failed.

Christophe Grenier's TestDisk was unable to locate a partition table. But his PhotoRec is racing through the drive recovering various sorts of files. I am quite pleased and impressed.

Unfortunately, the program has no way of identifying the file names! So the files are all being given new, opaque names.

Addendum (2008:12/17): A recent entry by oddharmonic reminded me to note here that PhotoRec reässembled video files like Frankenstein Flub-a-Dubs. Mind you that there was really no practical way for the program to know what bits belonged together, and the resultant files could be fixed by using a decent video editor to re·splice them.

One of the Corsair 8GB Voyager USB flash drives that I bought seems to have completely failed, before I even received the mail-in rebate for it. Grand.

Oddly enough, these were well away from the corner.

And, since the Councilman's party affiliation is mysteriously not given in the story, one might google

"Steve Lipski" (democrat | democratic | republican)

This time, I was amused to find that many of the first hits are exactly about the failure to report his party affiliation. I was also amused to find his declaration

Yes, I am a Democrat, but I have always put people before politics.

as urinating on the crowd suggests that he puts some peculiar things well ahead both of people and of politics.

I was up for about 23 hours, went to bed, and slept, uh, for about three hours.

I decided to get on-line and see if there'd been a further reversal-of-fortune for Proposition 8, the California measure to outlaw same-sex marriage. Although in the past the electorate had voted to ban same-sex marriage, conventional wisdom, going into this election, was that the Proposition would fail by a clear margin. I believed this convention wisdom, and saw it as the one real bright spot of the election.

But as the numbers started to come-in, it began to seem that the Proposition would pass by about the margin by which it had been expected to fail.

Now, with 22587 of 25429 precincts reporting, the measure leads 4,843,531 to 4,519,010 — about 52% to 48%. There has been a little drift in the percentages since I had last checked, but nothing that suggests that there will be some marked difference in the relative shares reported amongst the later-reporting precincts. Basically, the remaining precincts would have to have voted about 64% against the Proposition for it to fail.

I had been planning to remove the Vote No bumpersticker from my note-book computer if the measure failed. I'm inclined to leave on for a while now, as a gesture of protest. But I'm concerned that it may just depress some of the people around me, so I'm going to conduct an informal poll amongst them.

I guess that, one way or another, the sticker has a short shelf-life. A little more than eight years ago, a Proposition 22, perhaps better known as the Knight Initiative and as the defense of marriage act, set out to achieve much the same ends as this latest Proposition 8. Now-a-days, No-on-Knight is quite meaningless to the vast majority of people, and No on 22 would be mysterious to an even larger group.

On occasion in Hillcrest, I find footwear on the sidewalk, at some corner. And I don't mean a lone sneaker or flip-flop; I mean a matched pair of shoes or of boots, one placed beside the other. These were at the corner of Washington Street and Third Avenue this evening: