Nelson Mandela is a hero to many, myself included. May he rest in peace as we honor and mourn him, though we never shall forget him.

Before Hurricane Katrina, fuel prices followed a predictable rhythm, where gas was cheaper in the summer and diesel was cheaper in the winter. After Katrina, it all went to hell, and pretty soon everything was US$4 a gallon. Diesel has crept back up to that or higher, so even though I still get 42-45 mpg, it still costs plenty to fill up. And I think it blew away the ROI calculations.

About eight years ago, I was addicted to the idea of biodiesel. Loved it loved it loved it. Got a VW TDi just to eventually be able to run biodiesel in it. The mileage was great. Still is great, as I still have the car. But the cost of maintenance has lessened my interest in having it.

To be fair, part of it is problems that I've brought upon myself. I didn't listen when they said "after doing this upgrade, UPGRADE THE FUEL INJECTOR AND THE EXHAUST, or you will pay thousands in repairs." To be fair, I wanted to verify their claim. Which proved to be true.

If that weren't enough, part of it for me will be the cost of repairing body damage, which was not caused by the upgrade in HP/torque that I had done a few years back, but rather a side-effect of the car crash that I was in thirteen years ago (as seen on Slashdot!), which shredded my left eye and wrecked my depth perception. (Tight turns in and out of my garage are a bitch.)

That's got nothing to do with diesel vs. hybrid. It's all about my vision, or lack thereof. But take into account that at least with the TDi, you need to get synthetic oil, and religiously have it changed. You'll need a new fuel filter each year -- North American/European ppl, do this in October. And there at long last, the infamous VW ,,Elektriksystem nicht funktioniertin" problem is creeping in on my car. Or maybe the right headlight really is burned out. Either way, it's getting time to move on.

So now, I still want a car with great mileage. And I'd like get an American car, a UAW car. The Ford C-Max hybrid is of interest, as it satisfies both interests. Even if the mileage may not be all that it's billed to be. And the looks aren't all that great either. But, what can you do? Perhaps -- maybe -- deal.

...in a great fireball of self-wrought annihilation brought on by the inherent and overwhelming contradictions of running vim inside Emacs?

Looking at the image on the NASA page, it jumps out at you: it's a fractal. To quote Marathon 1, "They're eveywhere!"

I was elected a Milwaukee County Supervisor in April 2011. It is a non-partisan office. This was done in the 1930s (possibly the last time the two big parties worked together) to destroy the Milwaukee Socialist Party, which had dominated the mayor's office and the city council for a few decades in Milwaukee. By making municipal candidates non-partisan, there was no easy way to pick out the Socialists from the Republicans or Democrats. Between the Cold War and the non-partisanizing, it worked. And contrary to what you may think about socialists now, the Milwaukee Socialists ran the most efficient and cleanest government we've ever seen. They got elected because they promised to run a clean government, which they did. (The previous mayors had been friends of the brothels and casinos!) New Haven, CT also had a socialist mayor, though I don't know anything about that administration. The lakefront bridge connecting Bay View to downtown Milwaukee is called the Hoan Bridge, named in honor of Daniel W. Hoan, the city's third socialist mayor, and arguably the best. So there you go!

Okay, only two of them were contested, but... I am now the Milwaukee County Supervisor for the 14th district on Milwaukee's South Side, an area that includes a bit of Bay View, Mitchell Field (GMIA), Humboldt Park, Wilson Park, and eight other county parks. (People that knew me in my LinuxPPC days may be astonished to see a photo of me wearing a suit. Aye, I've traded t-shirts for ties much of the time, though I've now got a framed xkcd comic ("sudo make me a sandwich") in my office that I puzzle people with. County supervisors are elected to four-year terms, although I won a special election to serve the last year of my immediate predecessor's term. This meant that I had to run for re-election just eight months later. Fortunately, I was unopposed the second time around, meaning that while I did vote for myself in the primary and general, my victory was virtually assured. And indeed, I'm in. So now I am trying to drag the County into the late twentieth century, technology-wise. We may even make it into the early twenty-first! Inertia has been our major opponent; things were done as they were done for decades. Some departments, such as the county clerk's office, still rely entirely on paper forms; there is no digital input option. That is going to become a major project of mine as far as the technology committee goes. It's a lot of work, for sure, though I usually enjoy it, even love it. I'm up for re-election in April 2016. We'll see!

Yeah. What I typed up there about a "minimum of... dorkiness"? Yeah. That was me. NOT LOGED IN. Dork.

Not due to too much TV, but rather, to a drunk driver.

But dammit, I'm still here. (!!!!)

There was a story here on /. a few days ago about New Hampshire's big move to open source. I know Wyoming is moving toward it, and Washington, D.C. has adopted an entirely Google-based platform. Other governments may be on their way.

Here in Wisconsin, we've had some movement as well. The city of Kenosha has had an extensive OSS IT platform in place for years. And here in Milwaukee County, where we have a Windows-centered IT policy, I scored a significant chip at the monolith. In my days since being the guerilla marketer for LinuxPPC, I won election last year as a Milwaukee County Supervisor. That means I'm one of 19 members in charge of policy for a $1.3 billion body of government. Because I now help craft policy — code, even, for code = law — I couldn't let the all-MS policy continue.

In the 2012 budget, I had an amendement that directs our IT department to do a study of open source software integration. I just got an update on the progress of the study: it turns out that rather than writing a white paper, we're going to have a working production model in place within a few months. It will be built entirely upon open source products (some flavor of Linux, Apache-Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, Alfresco, and so on). So we'll have actual documentation of the cost of production, and cost of maintenance. Beyond that, once it's tested, it will be ready for deployment to replace a set of commercial packages that the County Department of Administration uses. The coding will be done entirely in-house, which is a big win. And the programmers are very excited to do it!

That's only the beginning. Milwaukee County still uses Lotus Notes. (Pause to allow groans and shouts...) It's easy to imagine possibilities to replace Notes. And MS IIS. This is going to make a great story for Slashdot in a few months, and I hope it will make a great story to share with my constituents. The trick there will be to put it in terms that they can understand, as most of them don't have what I presume is our shared background. But, that's part of what they elected me for.

I suppose the story here is "get elected, and make a subtle policy (with profound future impacts) that you can sell by saying it will save money." With any luck, the rest will come like gravy.

It's been a heck of a journey from my days as guerilla marketer for LinuxPPC, with a few notable stops along the way, to where I am now, a Milwaukee County Supervisor. I won election to this office back in April 2011, and won reelection in January 2012 simply by filing my nomination papers—and having no opponent. (#win!)

Back in November 2011, my colleagues on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve a small budget amendment that contained an order for our IT department to do a study on moving to OSS. That made it part of the 2012 budget. Work has already begun, and there were a few guys lurking in the basement that had been running Linux for years.

Milwaukee County's IT policy is predictably centered around Windows. But we also have a mainframe somewhere in the bowels of the government, crunching away after all these years. I'm not sure if anyone still knows how to write in COBOL, but it's in there.

Worse yet, we have dozens of custom Windows apps that do all sorts of things, over many departments. I don't know that there was ever a clear voice in guiding their creation. Removing them may be painful, if and when the time comes.

This is just a study to look at integrating open source into our mix. So far, it's going well, though we'll see how it looks when I meet with the IT folks next week. My hunch from initial talks is that we have a good opening for OSS.

Also, an assistant at the county board suggested that I introduce a resolution that would bar the purchase of software with recurring upgrade fees. We need to save money, after all. It would, in essence, guide the county toward the purchase of open source solutions. While not everything has an open source alternative, many of the basic tasks we do could be done for a fraction of their current price. I tell ya, I'll drag Milwaukee County IT into the late 20th century! If not a little beyond that.

Nothings against Macworld, which is still pretty good given the hard times publishing is in, but this English Mac magazine, MacFormat, is, to use a tired cliche, thicker and juicier. And apparently it does come with a DVD. (What's the deal with that? I remember when MacAddict shipped with CDs... but I guess US rags don't now?) The writing is much richer, the overall content thicker in MacFormat. That said, I do remember the 1988 issue of Macworld that covered the introduction of the NeXT computers. Back then, the pages were thicker and glossier, and it was evident that there was a much greater ability to spend time and money on producing a lavish journal. Of course that was before the Web changed the world. Appropriately, the Web was created on a NeXT. Curious how the world moves sometimes.

I worked at an MCI IP relay call center some years ago. I remember that shortly before I quit, management was bragging about their new Filipino call center. They said people would walk for hours and hours to get to the work site in Manila, and sleep there overnight. Their efficiency was top-notch, apparently. And I guess they didn't have or didn't mind what I referred to as the "Anal Sex Hour," which happened when bored suburban teenagers (mostly from Texas, it seemed) would prank call their female classmates and have the relay operator sexually harass the call recipient over the phone. All anonymously. All without recourse. Between that and our friends from Nigeria, I'd had enough, and quit.

the papers? was that a band?