Diacritiques

We’re way behind schedule as indicated on various election guides/cheat sheets. Not that I feel like going to bed. Still, why is it that the US with all their high-brow electoral technology (optical scanners at least, voting computers in many cases), which ought to give instant readouts as soon as the polls close, take at as long to report results as those of us that use pen and paper, or even pen-less paper-only ballots?

The big US election day is, where I live, technically over, and the first states are about to close their polling stations. This is about the worst day it could have happened: my ADSL connection is down and has been for over ten hours now. DSLAM non joignable (unreachable) says my ISP’s network status page. So I languish on a lame 33K dialup connection; at least it’s supposedly free of charge, since it’s the ISP’s emercency connection for their ADSL customers. Worse, I had to boot into the Win98 partition, because I never bothered to set up and configure the modem on Linux, not to mention the fact that I don’t remember the dialup password. Of course, by now I could easily have fixed this, but I’ve never experienced a connection downtime that prolonged before. It is analogous to the old problem of whether to walk or to wait for the bus: if the wait takes too long you would been faster on foot; but once you realize this, it’s too late and you had better wait it out till the bus finally arrives.

The logs for this blog tell me that the greater part of its readers — not an absolute or overwhelming majority, but a majority none the less — are located in the USA. So you know whom I’m addressing when I say that I hope you did, in fact, vote (or will, for those living nearer to the west coast).  read the post »