Thursday, January 29, 2004

I'm quoted in the paper today, but the interesting bit is how they found me

The day after the NH primary I got an email from a local reporter looking for a
quote
to flesh out the article he was working on about undeclared voters. He knew from reading my blog entry(!) that I was an undeclared voter who was briefly a Democrat (long enough to vote) and then immediately returned to undeclared status.

I asked him know he came to my blog and he said he has been using geourl.com to see what people in the area are writing about. Cool.

BTW, here is the article.

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Are there election dirty tricks being played against Dean?

At 2:15pm today the Dean campaign sent email to their list of NH
voters asking them to get out the vote.

Additionally there was this information:

-----


Dean for America has received reports that Dean supporters are
receiving "robo-calls" telling them incorrect and misleading polling
place information.


If you receive such a call, please call Paul Twomey at the Manchester
headquarters at 603-491-2966. If you have a recording of the
robo-call on your answering machine, please let us know as soon as
possible.

You can also have the call traced via the following steps:


1. Immediately after receiving the call, hang up then lift the
receiver and listen for a dial tone.

2. Press *57 (or if you have a rotary phone dial 1157).

3. An announcement will tell you the call was traced and give you
further instructions.

4. You will not receive the number from Verizon. The results of a
successful trace will only be provided to the police or other legal
authorities.



-----

Great use of the internet to get word out quickly on election day!

Voted in the New Hampshire Primary for John Edwards



src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040127-thumb_IM000882.jpg">



On the way to drop the girls off at the YMCA, I stopped in and voted.
For a grand total of 5 minutes I was a registered Democrat. With the
Democratic ballot, the clerk handed me a 'change of party affiliation'
form to change back to undeclared after voting.

On the way out there were two organizations taking polls. More like
offering them, since the people running them were just standing there
and we had to ask to take the survey. One was from the LA Times and
had a middle/left of center slant and had a number of 'pick 3 of 12'
of most important issues. The other was by CNN/Fox/etc which came in
two versions, both were definitely right of center. On Wendy's they
asked if the "Dean Scream" had any impact on voting. Mine asked a if
'electablity' was a factor. Outside the school, there were two Dean
people asking if they their campaign had ever contacted us and if so
asked to remove us from their list. Clearly they are going to be
calling everyone on their list who hasn't yet voted.

Man, look
at all the other 'minor' candidates on the ballot.


Complete list of candidates on the NH Democratic Primary ballot:

* Katherine Bateman (Chicago, IL)
* Carol Moseley Braun (Chicago, IL)
* Harry W. Braun III (Phoenix, AZ)
* Willie Felix Carter (Fort Worth, TX)
* Wesley K. Clark (Little Rock, AK)
* "Randy" Crow (Wilmington, NC)
* Howard Dean (Burlington, VT)
* Gerry Dokka (Atlanta, GA)
* John Edwards (Raleigh, NC)
* "Dick" Gephardt (St. Louis, MO)
* Mildred Glover (Baltimore, MD)
* Vincent S. Hamm (Golden, CO)
* John F. Kerry (Boston, MA)
* Caroline Pettinato Killeen (Scranton, PA)
* Dennis J. Kucinich (Cleveland, OH)
* Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr (Round Hill, VA) -- he even has signs in Merrimack
* R. Randy Lee (New York, NY)
* "Joe" Lieberman (New Haven, CT)
* Robert H. Linnell (Lebanon, NH)
* Edward Thomas O'Donnell, Jr (Lebanon, NH)
* Fern Penna (Kingston, NY)
* "Al" Sharpton (Brooklyn, NY)
* Leonard Dennis Talbow (Scottsdale, AZ)

Monday, January 26, 2004

John Edwards Town Hall meeting at Nashua's Fairgrounds Junior High

Sunday we went to the John Edwards' Town Hall meeting and got on live
national TV (C-SPAN, but in a good
way).

Since
Wendy is now an NH Edwards delegate for the 1st congressional
district
, we feel obligated to show up for the events in the area.
It was scheduled for noon down in Nashua, but we left Merrimack at 11am to get
a good seat -- we knew it was going to be mobbed
after the huge crowd we saw Saturday night at the bowling alley.


We got there about 20 after and Wendy and Trevor stood by the
gymnasium handing out the remaining campaign literature we had at home
-- it will be useless after Tuesday. I headed into with the rest of
the kids and found some seats on the side in the middle. While we
waited a CNNreporter was making the
rounds taking notes. She was interested to know if I had decided
(yes, for Edwards), were
going to vote (of course), and when decided. I told her that we say
Kerry a few weeks ago and he
said to vote for him and not vote to send a message. Wendy and I
seriously talked about it quite a bit and decided
now was the time to vote for who we wanted and not just who may
beat Bush. The reporter also
was curious if there was anything that turned us off of href="http://www.johnkerry.com">Kerry or href="http://www.deanforamerica.com">Dean. It isn't really a case
of don't like but like better. I explictly told her that the Dean
Scream had no impact and made us see him as more human and passionate.

After that one of the Edwards advance team asked if the kids and I
would like to stand on stage. Sure! Later Wendy and Trevor (with
crutches) found us and came up to. They were trying to get a variety
of people up there -- a number of folks
from NH
, but also people that came just to support Edwards. If
you see the streaming video (href="rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/c04/c04012504_edwards.rm">
rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/c04/c04012504_edwards.rm) you see
most of the family about from about 41 minutes in through the end. We
are on the right side of the stage and you'll see href="http://www.nozell.com/griffin">Griffin getting Edwards to
sign the girl's "Go, John, Go!" signs. Past meetings were pretty low
key -- just a local Democrat doing the introduction, but now they have
a staffer to warm up the crowd ("Who is from NJ? Who is from NC?"
"Have you heard this song E-D-W-A-R-D-S sometime, something, now you
sing", etc) before the introduction. There were a fair number of
people (25%?) from out of state.

The actual speech was pretty similar to his standard stump speeches
we've heard before. There seems to be more emphasis on "Two Americas
-- one for Bush and his special interests and one for the rest of us".
He also took a few questions from the crowd which were again the usual
healthcare, job/economy, etc. Also new was directly asking for
support and getting the vote out. As usual he introduced Elizabeth,
his wife, but his college senior daughter and Glenn Close who were
also on stage.

The gymnasium was packed and a few hundred people in an overflow room.
On the way out we saw the MTV Rock the Vote people and someone
gathering 'Repeal the PATRIOT act' signature which I signed. It was
around 1:30pm by time we got out of there and rewarded the kids' good
behavior with a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521/">delicious lunch at
McDonalds.




-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000852.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000854.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000855.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000859.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
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src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000860.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000861.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000862.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
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src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000863.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
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src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000864.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000865.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000866.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
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src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000867.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
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src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000870.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000871.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
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src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000874.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
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src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000876.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
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src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000877.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
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src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000878.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)
-----

src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040125-thumb_IM000881.jpg">

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)



href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/stories/storyReader$712">Here
is another view of the same event, href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/">j apparently isn't
someone who arrives early enough for these things...

Sunday, January 25, 2004

John Edwards visits Merrimack Ten Pin Bowling Alley

Last night while the boys were at a YMCA swim team lockin, Wendy, the
girls and I went to the John Edwards event at the local bowling alley.
He was scheduled to bowl a few frames at 8:30pm, but by 8:00 the place
was mobbed. Before he got there there started to be frequent, and
increasingly stressed out announcements from bowling alley manager --
don't stand on the fountain, stay off the bowling area with street
shoes, move your car if it is in a firelane, move your triple parked
cars it will be towed to finally she was going to call the police and
fire marshal if people didn't start to leave. All this before John
Edwards showed up. She would have done better to cancel the league
games and just kept the food and beer flowing.

The girls had colored some homemade 'Go, John, Go!' signs and were in
their pretty dresses, but the spent most of the time on our shoulders.
We ran into a video crew from Germany and a photographer from
Switzerland. There were a few college boys from Union College from
outside Albany who were up for the weekend and another college girl
from NYC said there were about 150 from her school up helping with
campaigns (didn't catch which college or if they were only for
Edwards.)


On the way out I chatted up a reporter from the Boston Globe about how
the media seems to be covering NH as a Kerry/Dean horse race with no
real coverage of Edwards or Lieberman and just a little of Clark.
With Edwards surprise 2nd place showing in Iowa and Liebermans make or
break in NH I'd think there should be more coverage of that.

Edwards was late from attending the Democratic dinner down in Nashua
and came in and gave a 10 minute standad stump speech. Mentioned that
he isn't here to take swipes at other democratic candiates and
introduced Glenn Close who has endorced him (see the photo below).

AP News on Netscape.com has to say of the the event:




Hundreds of people who came to see Democratic
presidential hopeful U.S. Sen., John Edwards at a bowling alley in
Merrimack, N.H. Saturday Jan., 24, 2004 were told to evacuate the
building and sent out into the cold. Edwrads(sic) spole(sic) for about
ten minutes to the crowd inside before police told them they had to
evacuate. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)


one
two
three

The didn't kick out the crowd although the police and fire marshal
were there. The crowd rapidly left the building after Edwards left
and hung around the parking lot as people got in the cars and left.

Below are my photos from the event.






John Edwards in Merrimack, NH bowling alley (24 Jan 2004)



John Edwards in Merrimack, NH bowling alley (24 Jan 2004)



John Edwards in Merrimack, NH bowling alley (24 Jan 2004)



John Edwards in Merrimack, NH bowling alley (24 Jan 2004)



John Edwards in Merrimack, NH bowling alley (24 Jan 2004)



John Edwards in Merrimack, NH bowling alley (24 Jan 2004)



John Edwards in Merrimack, NH bowling alley (24 Jan 2004)



John Edwards in Merrimack, NH bowling alley (24 Jan 2004)



John Edwards in Merrimack, NH bowling alley (24 Jan 2004)



Glenn Close is right of this guy -- yeah, she is out of frame... (24 Jan 2004)



At noon we'll likely bundle everyone up for the -4F weather and check
out the event at the Nashua Junior High School...

Friday, January 23, 2004

Working on more complete 'share your opml' perl example

I've been hacking on a perl script that will 1) get the list of shared
opmls from feeds.scripting 2) put it in a table using a sqlite
database 3) iterate over all of them and grab the users blogroll and
also put them in an sql table.

Unfortunately when I turn it loose on all 600+ users, it dies on the 20th one o
r so with a strange message about trying to modify a read
only variable. The line is in an XML::Parser callback and looks
pretty innocuous:

my ($j1, $feedname, $j2, $type, $j3, $xmlurl) = @_;


I then tried iterating from the 'bottom' of the list of users (SELECT
userid, person, url FROM users ORDER BY userid DESC) and that cranks
through a few hundred users and then dies deep in the guts of
XML::Parser complaining about invalid string or other.

Bah.

I'll do some more thinking out loud later.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Pollsters calling NH tonight

We got *two* calls this evening from pollsters asking about my views
on the primary. I don't recall who the first one was from, but said
to be non-partisan and the other from NH's href="http://www.fpc.edu">Franklin Pierce college and will be
running all week.

The Kerry campaign also called inviting me (or whoever answered) to an
event Friday night. It was one of those automated calls -- Press 1 if
you will be attending, press 2 if you are not, press 3 if you can not
at this time....

Example perl code to parse 'Share your OPML'

I can't believe no one has contributed example perl code to play with
Dave Winer's Share your OPML'.

href="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/example-share-your-opml.TXT">
Here is my contribution.

=====

NAME
example-share-your-opml.pl

SYNOPSIS
Example perl that obtains opml from Dave Winer's "Share your OPML" site
(http://feeds.scripting.com),
parses it and puts the info into an simple sqlite database.

VERSION
0.1

AUTHOR
Marc Nozell , http://www.nozell.com/blog

USAGE
$ ./example-share-your-opml.pl

$ sqlite opml.db

sqlite> select person, url from users where person like "%_Nozell";

person url

Marc Nozell http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/opml/users/fef39f0cebade
2b96b037dedba86ba7a.opml

sqlite> .quit

$

Setup
Prior to running the script, you need to set up a sqlite database. The
steps are as follows:

$ sqlite opml.db

sqlite> create table users (userid integer primary key, person text,
ctupdates text, type text, url
text, lastupdate text);

sqlite> .quit

SEE ALSO
SDK for 'Share Your OPML' http://feeds.scripting.com/sdk

Marc Nozell's mini-blog http://www.nozell.com/blog

BUGS
If you find some, send them to marc@nozell.com and maybe I'll look at it
. Maybe.

LICENSE
This work is hereby released into the Public Domain. To view a copy of t
he public domain dedication,
visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ or send a letter
to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan
Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
=====

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Who is behind the "Doubting Dean? Vote Kerry" Signs

This evening I stopped to take a closer look at the signs mentioned
earlier today. The little tiny print says "Paid for and authorized by
IAFF FIREPAC. Not authorized by any candidate or committee".

Not surprisingly when John Kerry was at the Merrimack VFW, there a
large presence of firefighter union members.




The 'Doubting Dean? Vote Kerry" signs in Merrimack, NH closeup (20 Jan 2004)





The 'Doubting Dean? Vote Kerry" signs in Merrimack, NH (20 Jan 2004)

Search some one the IAFF, vis
it their FIREPAC part
of the IAFF website. I've not found
too much on the PACs section of
opensecrets.org, but surely
there is some info there as well. The Center for Public
Integrity
(never heard of them, main site is here), has some basic
info about the IAFF FirePAC
.

Doubting Dean? Vote Kerry

The campaign fairies were out last night putting signs around
Merrimack. There were a number of these red yard signs:

Doubting Dean?

Vote KERRY

Monday, January 19, 2004

Visited John Edwards' Manchester, NH headquarters today

Wendy and I were up in Manchester today and stopped in to pick up some
yard signs, video/DVDs, etc. The noon-time tracking polls had Edwards
in 3rd in Iowa and Sarah and company were getting ready for a while
ride starting tomorrow. There was a camera crew there getting some
background videos of the staffs too. I don't think were where in any
of the shots (didn't want to) but if you see a bright yellow Colombia
winter jacket, that is Wendy.

It is 9:45 and CNN is predicting 38% Kerry, 32% Edwards and Dean a
distant 18%!

If Edwards does well in New Hampshire next week, she may be going down
to Boston for the DNC nominating convention and she will be unbearable
to live with ;-) ;-) ;-)

2nd place at NH Winter Carnival Gymnastics -- Yay Trevor!

Trevor placed 2nd in Class 7's 8-9 age group at yesterday's Winter
Invitational meet at 'Gymnastics at Brentwood Commons' gym.

The Gymnastics Village Class 7 team came in 1st with Thomas, Trevor
and Franz in the 1, 2, 3 in the all around.

Way to go boys!

Trevor's scores and place:
* Floor 9.6 (1st)
* Pommel 9.2 (4th)
* Rings 9.55 (2nd)
* Vault 8.85 (6th)
* P-Bars 9.2 (3rd)
* H-Bar 9.25 (1st)

Friday, January 16, 2004

Reply from goldlasso.com

I replied to the unsolicited email offer pointing to my blog and got a
quick reply at 17:18 from "Elie D. Ashery", the President & CEO,
with the warning at the end of the email:
=====
This email is considered original works and cannot be published in whole or
in part without the express written consent of Gold Lasso, Inc.
=====

So my interpretation of what he had to say.

-> Sends his sincere apologies for any inconvience and will
investigate how my email got on one of their marketing lists. I
appreciate that and am actually interested to see what he finds out.

-> Stated that Gold Lasso complies with the 'CANN SPAM Act
legislation' and respects out-opt. That too is nice to see.
Personally I'd prefer opt-in to these and other marketing mailing
lists.

-> Unfortunately it ends on a sour note when he warns me that he takes
'serious offense for insinuating' that they engage in unethical
business practices. He considers my statements libel will take
legal action if what I write prevents him from doing his business.

I've since clicked on the link in the original email to have my email
address removed and presume I will never receive email from their
marketing lists.

GoldLasso.com is spamming me

I just got the SPAM email below offering to market my restaurant.
Clearly they got my email from scrapping the web or somewhere because
I never use marc@nozell.com to register at websites.

REMEMBER: Don't do business with companies that use Unsolicited
Commerical Email (UCE) to market. It is an unethical marketing
technique. Thanks!

=====
Start of Junk email from Gold Lasso
=====


Subject: New Restaurant Marketing
X-Subscriberid: 500153
X-Scheduleid: 923
Reply-To: Rebecca Matthews <glrest-reply@eloop.goldlasso.com>
To: marc@nozell.com
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Using iSCSI to Boot Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 on a Diskless HP ProLiant Blade Server


This document describes the concepts and steps necessary to config
ure
and boot Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 3 on a diskless HP
ProLiant BL20p G2 server blade using iSCSI to connect across the
TCP/IP network to an HP StorageWorks SR2122 iSCSI Storage Router.
These concepts and methodologies can be successfully applied to
similar scenarios.


Basically it describes how to use the UNH iSCSI stack to build a
custom initrd that when downloaded via PXE will bring up the IP
network and then mount the root filesystem on an iSCSI served disk.
Pretty cool if you ask me, but I'm biased...

Just a little guerilla promotion for HP and myself ;-)

There are more Linux-focused technical whitepapers on HP's ActiveAnswers'
site. Take a look here,
here,
here,
and here

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Spammers hijacking may domain name -- again

I was joe
jobbed
again, but this time it looks like they are Russian -- lots
of bounced mail destined for .ru, .ua and .su domains.

Time to update my procmail filter...

-11F this morning in Merrimack!

And that isn't talking wind chill which is predicted to be -55 to
-30F. Our schools, as are 245 others around New Hampshire, are closed
because of bitter cold!

Vote Bill Wyatt -- Republican President (Taking Anyone But Bush a little too far)

I was reading 'The 1590
Broadcaster'
, the local free newspaper in town and found href="http://www.1590.com/Stories/0,1413,222~23677~1892822,00.html">
this article about little known Republican and Democratic Party
candidates.

The following people will be on the NH primary:

* Bill Wyatt (R, Los Angeles, CA)
* Richard Bosa (R; Portsmouth, NH
)
* Ed O'Donnell (D; Lebanon, NH)
* Fern Penna (D; NY)
* John Rigazio (R (formerly D),
Barringon, NH)

Vote well.

Using a proxy server with liferea (0.4.7 cvs) and KDE desktop

liferea and uses the global GNOME configuration to find the proxy
server to use. Since I prefer to use KDE, setting those values is
problematic.

My proxy server is running on localhost:8080, so I needed to edit the
file ~/.gconf/system/http_proxy/%gconf.xml to make it look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gconf>
<entry name="use_http_proxy"
mtime="1072573677" muser="marc" type="bool" value="true"/>
<entry name="port" mtime="1072573677"
muser="marc" type="int" value="8080"/>
<entry name="host" mtime="1063901920"
muser="marc" type="string"><stringvalue>localhost</stringva
lue></entry>
</gconf>


Hope that helps someone...

Sunday, January 11, 2004

Trying out a new RSS Aggregator

I've been messing around with Dave Winer's new href="http://feeds.scripting.com">OPML sharing site and adding a
bunch of feeds to href="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk">Amphetadesk/AmphetaOutline.
For some reason it isn't showing a bunch of sites as having new news
(come on, nothing from fark.com in 3
hours!?)

This evening on got some email from the author of href="http://liferea.sourceforge.net">liferea who said he had
fixed a problem with the HTTP headers of my server and recommended
trying out the version (0.4.7) from CVS. It works! Thanks Lars!

So, I'm going to switch for a week to liferea exclusively and see how
that goes.

One thing that I'm going to miss is one click to add a feed from href="http://feeds.scripting.com">feeds.scripting.com to my
aggregator. I don't see how liferea could insinuate itself into the
mix.

Thursday, January 8, 2004

Pictures from last night's John Kerry event in Merrimack


src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040107-IM000791_Sm.jpg">>

The 'Jim Dinner for America' team (a parody website, dinnerforamerica.com. Think DeanForAmerica.com) was there and recording interviews (07 Jan
2004)



src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040107-IM000794_Sm.jpg">>

John Kerry serving yummy, non-Atkins-friendly, chili at the Merrimack VFW (0
7 Jan 2004)



src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040107-IM000795_Sm.jpg">>

Crowd at the event. Probably 300 people.(07 Jan 2004)


src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040107-IM000798_Sm.jpg">>

John Kerry stumpin' (07 Jan 2004)


src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040107-IM000799_Sm.jpg">>

More John Kerry stumpin' (07 Jan 2004)


src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040107-IM000800_Sm.jpg">>

More John Kerry stumpin' (07 Jan 2004)


src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040107-IM000801_Sm.jpg">>

More John Kerry stumpin' (07 Jan 2004)


src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040107-IM000802_Sm.jpg">>

More John Kerry stumpin' (07 Jan 2004)


src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20040107-IM000804_Sm.jpg">>

John Kerry and former NH Governor Jeanne Shaheen (07 Jan 2004)


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John Kerry after speech talking with folks (07 Jan 2004)


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John Kerry signing autographs for the Spencer/Griffin/Trevor (07 Jan 2004)b>


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Nozell/Thomas family with John Kerry (07 Jan 2004)


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Spencer with Jeanne Shaheen and John Kerry (07 Jan 2004)

Wednesday, January 7, 2004

John Kerry event with Chili at Merrimack, NH VFW hall

Man a long event! We got there at 7 and left around 9:30! The kids
were well behaved but tired. I have scratched notes on my palm pilot,
but translation to english and blogging it will have to wait until
tomorrow.

Highlights:

* very good, but non-Atkins, chili
* Mostly middle age, middle/upper middle class income crowd
* warmed up the crowd with a couple of jokes
* rude female heckler interruped a few times (education, taxes, why
did you Kerry & Sheehen do more when in office) who left early
* mostly well rounded stump speech, number of promises if elected,
executive orders, fair tax code, health care for all, military,
jobs, jobs, jobs, oil dependancy -> fund hydrogen
research/development, etc.
* NH Voters for me because only I can beat Bush, don't use your vote
to 'make a point'
* our 12 yr old had the last question "What makes you different from
all the other candidates?" (a surprise to my wife and I who didn't
prompt him)
* afterwards chatted up Kerry's literal coat holder about Bush's
immigration policy announcement (Kerry didn't mention it) and that
our particular issues were public education/special education and
civil liberties. He also dragged Kerry over for a picture with the
family.


On the way home Wendy and I talked about whether 'voting to make a
point' is the right thing to do to have someone beat Bush, so I guess
Kerry did his job.

For the brave, here are my notes directly from the palm pilot...

-----


Kerry
jeane
cold - cheny
dont see to mulh - comp conserj
fire fight
$ in irhq - not in us
not bush lite - not lite mil/fair midh
dress up bush
loss jobs
def
$ unfair
lobby - polut - big Bus - big Ag
money - to law
misson accomdlishe
pcc
lay off gwb
no pac $
money cink uotes
right to living wage
tyco - corporate mug ameaic
some on enaon in jail
tax code -no ins to move overssas
vision
write exe order no lobby 5yr
all meetng - w lob official record
truman vision - health care for all - personal - prost cured
bro of teacher - #what have you done# - bush cut a deal
repub to vote
nice spin - this dem
bush no $ in no child
will fullh fund no child (40 sped)
aud- mih age
no hostage youn die to mid oil
more 500m jobs - hydrogen
war
lose nukes - global warm - book : new war - over extended mil need work with o
thers
some want to raise tax
nat sec
who can beat gwb - dont just send mgg
jobs
harry sherr from harvard center?
Q1- health care - salary - for profit
kids covere
q2 - dave -
tax on rich - fed pay catastric - 1000 tax cut
q3 - russian democacacy on decline trust russia
q4 how win? Buildinq momemti
fighter
gwb/rove - standup to bush

John Kerry is hosting a Chili dinner at the Merrimack VFW tonight 7pm

Last night we got an automated message ("press 1 if you are planning
on attending") from ex-NH Governor Jean Shaheen inviting me to John
Kerry's chili meet-n-greet this evening.

The whole family will be there. Expect a write up and pictures later
this evening.

Saturday, January 3, 2004

Damn Blog writeback spammers

The bastards started spamming my writebacks with links to their site.
I've disabled writebacks for the time being, just email your comments
using the link below.

Dave Winer's latest experiment -- Sharing OPMLs

Cruise over to href="http://feeds.scripting.com">feeds.scripting.com and check
out his new hack of sharing/aggregating/exploring of OPMLs (aka XML
formatted list of RSS/XML/RDF/etc feeds)

If you are using AmphetaDesk, go
to the 'Coffee Mug Prefs' section and change the template to be this:

http://127.0.0.1:8888/index.html?add_url=[[xmlUrl]]

and you can just click on the coffee mug and have it automatically
added to *your* AmphetaDesk OPML.

Thursday, January 1, 2004

Trying out various RSS clients

Tonight I've been playing around with various GNU/Linux-based RSS
clients.

* liferea v0.4.5
C-based, gnome interface, Three paned interface, read in either the
pane or click to load in a browser. Over all pretty nice but
occasional hangs and some RSS that validate aren't recognised (like
mine). If would be helpful to give a clue why it wasn't accepted.
It doesn't import my amphetadesk opml file.
* rssowl v0.63b
Java-based with SWT graphics libraries so it looks more like a
modern GUI, three paned interface. No way to import opml files at
the moment, it is only alpha quality release, so that is
understandable. It comes with a nice list of RSS feeds. This app
does parse my RSS feed, but displayes the HTML markup in the reading
area.
* syndigator v0.12
perl-based with GTK/Gnome style interface. Imported my amphetadesk
opml and parsed my RSS feed. Like rssowl, sometimes it displays
HTML in the text. Hmm, perhaps it is blosxom's RSS output that needs
looking at. It still seems a bit young in in the GUI -- the
keyboard access is a bit lacking and while updating feeds is laggy.



There best of the crop so far is liferea, but I may stick with the
web-based/perl amphetadesk (with
amphetaoutline theme) for a while longer. Anyone have some
suggestions?