Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Taddeo Gaining Fast

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Michael Froomkin

New polling released today shows Taddeo has lept from a 15+ point deficit in the previous poll a couple of weeks ago to only a seven point gap among voters who have made up their minds about the race in Florida's 18th district. Most importantly, Ros-Lehtinen remains under the magic 50% — the incumbent's recent ad blitz has netted her a statistically insignificant 2% gain over the last poll while Taddeo has surged. Add in the leanings of the uncommitted and this election is nearly tied.

Why? National events — plus Taddeo's name recognition has almost doubled in the last few weeks.

Here are the key stats: Taddeo at 41% and Ros-Lehtinen at 48%, and 11% undecided. Meanwhile, 78% of [somewhat] undecided voters lean toward Taddeo; only 22% to Ros-Lehtinen. That's almost a 4:1 split. Allocate that [remaining] 11% undecided according to the same 78-22 ratio, and the candidates are within 1% of each other — 50.42 to 49.58. If these numbers are right, they must be freaking out over at Ros-Lehtinen HQ.

As the pollster's memo notes,

Ros-Lehtinen’s favorables have declined while her unfavorables have increased. Moreover, because she is so well known in the district (94% are familiar with her) Ros-Lehtinen has very little room to grow her support, while Annette Taddeo is in a far better position to become better known to the electorate.

If the election were held today, these numbers suggest it could still be a squeaker win for Ros-Lehtinen. But there's still two weeks to go — and the more McCain looks like a loser, the more that Republican voters may stay home.

Like I've said from the start, this is going to be a turnout-driven congressional election. Here in south Florida we're enjoying a full-court press by the Obama get-out-the-vote team, plus some serious field work by the Taddeo forces.

And that's why blogging may be a spotty for a while: A few days ago I volunteered to be a precinct captain for the Taddeo campaign. Starting this past weekend my kids and I have been working our way through our precinct, going door to door identifying likely voters, and talking to independent voters and other identified persuadables about why they should vote for Taddeo. So far the response has been excellent. (PS, if you live or work near me — I now have Taddeo yard signs.)

Meanwhile, you can send Taddeo a few dollars, or buy a TV ad (prices start at $100 for two or more).

[Slightly improved from original version for clarity.]

Below, full text of the Taddeo Press Release.

Continue reading →

Posted in Politics: FL-18 | Comments Off on Taddeo Gaining Fast

In Which I Register With Zipcar

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Michael Froomkin

I've just registered with Zipcar, the $8/hour car sharing service.

We only have one car because we live near enough to campus to walk to work. But as the kids get older there are more and more occasions where they need to be schlepped in two different directions at the same time. So I think the idea of a car sharing service is wonderful and I'm delighted that it's finally come to Miami.

Except that it sort of hasn't.

In towns where Zipcar is really present, they have multiple locations — sometimes a plethora of locations. If your close location is out of cars, you go a bit further.

Will a car be available when I want one?

It's natural for new members to worry that cars won't be available when they want them. About half of all reservations are made the same day. We monitor utilization very closely, adding more cars as usage rises, keeping availability high. But the beauty of the system is that Zipcar members are entitled to use any of the cars in our fleet. So even if the Zipcar right around the corner isn't available, you'll still be able reserve one located only a few blocks away.

But in Miami, as far as I can tell, at present there's only one location. Yes, it's on the campus, and yes, it's near my house, maybe 10-15 minutes walk and almost as long to drive there, as the relevant entrance is on the far side of the campus. But still.

As far as I can tell from the occasional online spot check, they have a grand total of … two cars. So far, they do seem to be available most of the time. But if neither of those two cars is available…I think the next closest car is in Gainesville! Where, incidentally, they have a lot more locations.

We'll just have to see how it goes.

Posted in Personal | 6 Comments

Early Voting Starts Today in Florida

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Michael Froomkin

Early voting starts today in Florida.

Early voting should not be confused with absentee voting.

Absentee voting is where you or someone pretending to be you asks to be sent a ballot, and then you or they fill it out with any number of close friends watching. Absentee balloting is a rolling feast, which I think began some time ago.

Early voting is just like regular voting, complete with new optical scanning voting machines, except the hours and locations are different. You can't do it in as many places, nor for as many hours in the day.

Eye on Miami kindly provides a guide, Miami Dade Early Voting Where and When.

I've never voted early — there's something about the democratic ritual of the polls, plus the convenience of the local site, only a few blocks from home, that makes it very appealing, even as I wonder whether it should be legal to use a Catholic Church as a place to hold state balloting on state constitutional amendments regarding things like abortion or gay marriage. Might it sway some religious Catholic voters on some issues? But I digress.

I'm somewhat tempted to try early voting this year, as I think the lines at the polls will be long. But I hear they will probably be long at the early voting stations too.

Posted in Florida | 6 Comments

Surveying the Wreckage

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Michael Froomkin

Despite the post's title, this has nothing to do with the election. Rather, I will attempt here to describe the high points of an unfolding, even-worsening, personal computer disaster brought to you by some eldritch combination of Microsoft, Symantec, Western Digital, Samsung, and (maybe) Diskpeeper, with cameos by Mozilla, and the idiots who defined the original SATA hardware disk standard. My objective, dear reader, is not to engage your sympathy, that might have had value back before I was a gibbering wreck some days ago but no longer, but rather to trigger your schadenfreude, in the hopes that the computer disaster you had last week, or will have next week, will not seem so terrible. Let something good come of all this.

(Note: Above does not apply to reader Ed Bott, I'm sure this stuff never happens to him.)

This is, to my eye, a ridiculously complicated story, and even as it is, I'm sure I'll be leaving out parts as the mind dulls pain, and what the mind fails to dull, lack of sleep probably takes care of. The only things I can promise the reader who perseveres through this long sad geeky tale, is that things only get worse until the end, at which point they are very very bad and remain unresolved.

Let us begin.

I'm runing Windows XP, service pack 2 on an aging Intel Pentium 4 system. I tried SP3 at work, it hosed my machine, and I've been afraid to try it at home, at least until I got my backups sorted out better.

Recently, the system has been a bit weird, with very slow file access times (windows explorer would take forever to open, ditto with file dialogs in programs), and I also was worried that my copy of Firefox was compromised, at it (1) always opens connections to places it shouldin't when I start the program (even in same mode) and (2) every so often something would apparently get firefox to try every port number in sequence trying to make a connection out of the machine. Fortunately, Spybot had modified my localhots file (making it rather suspiciously enormous, in fact), so all these connection attempts ended up at local host. But it was worrying. I decided I had to do something, or several somethings.

First, I decided to take the plunge and migrate to a larger disk, and ordered up a “green” WD7500AACS. (Three quarters of a terrabyte! Whoohoo!) About three or four weeks ago, I copied my files on to it using using XXClone, a nice piece of freeware that basically makes an entire copy of Drive A (including operating system) onto drive B. But the cloning program is very slow — 12-16 hours slow for me. It didn't help that I have to jumper my drives to run at SATA 1 speeds instead of SATA 2: my ASUS P4C800-E deluxe motherboard is old enough that it will not recognize a SATA 2 drive, and without a PCI-E slot there's as far as I can tell no point in getting a new sata drive controller card.

But once that was past, my new environment was much better. I had lots of spare disk space. But things were still slow sometimes. I decided it was time to kill the trojan, or whatever, that seemed to be infesting my system. I also decided that I should go back to hardware RAID, since I don't back up my files enough.

But first things first. I called the help desk about my virus. We get our virus software from the University, which sensibly decided that it would better protect its network, if it also protected the computers that most often interact with it — the students' and the staffs'. They first upgraded me from our old Symantec software to the new “Symantec Endpoint Protection”. But that didn't seem to do anything. Using a netstat agent I could still see from time to time firefox working its way down the series of ports. So I called back, and the UM help people sent me on the Symantec help people.

Contacting them took a little time, but once done a very competent sounding tech walked me through a few things, then announced I had an old version of the software, and should upgrade — by uninstalling my version and then installing a new one. He guided me to downloading the uninstall tool, and the install tool. These were big files, downloading veeery slowly, and I had to go to a meeting, so we ended the call. He warned me that the uninstall might take a couple of reboots.

When I got back, the files were there, and I ran the first one. It duly called for a reboot and I did it — only to get error messages and a lockup. I called back, and they said to reboot again. I did, it unfroze the machine, and they said to run it again. Which I did, at which point the disk wouldn't boot any more.

But no problem, I had my backup, the 160GB version. Nervously, I copied that version onto another 160BG disk I had spare (the old hardware raid I used to run), then back on to the 750GB disk. But now that the two disks are in the system, with the 750Gb disk on the second pair of SATA ports, which are RAID capable (but were properly set for ordinary non-RAID use in the bios), the Windows system on the first 160GB disk decided they needed to be reactivated. And windows didn't give me a code to input or use when I called. And I couldn't fnd the Widows media. So that was a disaster, it seemed.

But the 750GB version worked. So that's good. But now I'm nervous, things seemed jinxed. So I order up a second WD7500AACS, and plan to RAID mirror them.

Diskeeper version 9 doesn't work on big disks. I get the 2008 edition of Diskeeper and install it. It says my MFT tables are almost full, I should grow and defrag them, so I tell it to go ahead. Nothing bad seems to happen as a result.

Now, time extra backups. I'm a little nervous about hardware raid, in part because I'm a little dyslexic. I have this nightmare that I'll take the real disk and copy the blank on to it and lose my data. I've never actually done this, but the raid setup isn't a very friendly dialog, and somehow it feels like something I could do.

So I decided to make a software clone onto the new disk with XXClone, so that whichever way I copied the data would be OK. Both disks would have the right data, so whichever gets deleted, it wouldn't matter.

The new WD7500AACS arrived the other day, and this weekend I got around to formatting it preliminary to running xxclone to stuff it full of my data. I installed the disk, started up the format, and went of to do some stuff. When I got back, I found a blue screen of death, a 0024 failure (that I gather means a loose wire, something version one the sata hardware standard made all too easy). When I tried to reboot, I got a smart drive error – the disk is bad. I flip some disks around. One of the 160GB disks won't boot either — “Disk error”. When the dust settles I have some very high-tech paperweights.

  • WD7500AACS #1 – Smart drive monitor says the disk is BAD
  • WD7500AACS #2 – disk error if I try to boot from it (which is hardly surprising, since it's probably not even formatted), but unrecognized by the machine if I put it as a second disk (which I don't understand, and yes I tried a wire I know works).
  • Samsung HD160JJ #1 – disk error.
  • Samsung HD160JJ #2 – boots up just fine (no Microsoft Activation issue perhaps because the other disks are all, from the OS's point of view, not there?).

I've lost 3 weeks or more of personal data, only most of which can be reconstructed. My work files, on the other hand, either on a unix server or on a USB stick, which I religiously back up at home and work, so that's OK. My personal financial info, which isn't backed up for the last 3+ weeks, I can recreate: the sad prospect of reclassifying a month of credit card transactions in Quicken will be followed by the fun of reliving the crash of my 403(b). There are a few other miscellaneous notes I've lost, I hope there's nothing really major.

I'm still on the old version of Symantec Endpoint protection, and SP2. Having gone back in time, hard-disk-wise, I also again have the flash 9 that hangs all the time instead of flash 10 which doesn't. And a Quicken update. And varous firefox plugins. And don't let's even talk about when I'm going to install Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The WD's are brand new, so I guess there's warranty replacement, unless I want to schlep a long way to the good computer repair store, and see if they can pull my financial records and some other notes off disk #1. I gather if smart says “BAD” there generally isn't much one can do.

I'm not sure about the warranty status of the Samsungs.

The more important question is what I do next. I'm worried. As it happens, I do have one more large unformatted hard drive in the house, a WD50000AAKS, that I was going to use for a different machine. When I get my courage back, I think I'll try formatting that and cloning this last working drive onto it.

Meanwhile, diskeeper version 9 (we're back to that) says I'm using 92% of my MFT and this is bad. But I'm afraid to touch it.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 10 Comments

Simple Logic

Posted on October 19, 2008 by Michael Froomkin

Pat Buchanan says Colin Powell endorsed Obama because he's black (via Crooks and Liars).

Does this mean that Buchanan — and tens of thousands of other Irish-Americans, not to mention other hyphens — endorsed McCain because he's white?

Posted in Politics: US: 2008 Elections | 3 Comments

Ratcheting Up the Ugly

Posted on October 18, 2008 by Michael Froomkin

Here's a pretty scary video of a US Congressperson playing the role of Joe McCarthy with a nicer face: Rep. Michele Bachmann: Obama is anti-American

For a mental cleansing, try Katrina Vanden Heuvel Responds to Bachman's Call for McCarthy like Investigation of Members of Congress

It comes complete with Patrick Buchanan (!) being less McCarthyite than Rep. Bachmann. Ol' Pat understands where the wind blows….

The worse the polls for the GOP (and I mean the party, not just McCain), the more were going to see that political phenomenon known as “the cornered rat”. There are already reports of a reporter being stomped on at a Palin rally, of racists mailers around the country, and of GOP robo-calls suggesting Sen. Obama is terrorist. And we still have two and half weeks to the election.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 1 Comment