Theodicius
Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

Wisconsin’s a “battleground state” so everyone with a political axe to grind is swinging it my way. In the last 24 hours I’ve been called 15 times by political phone banks, from the Sierra Club to Right to Life. Along the way I’ve developed a few techniques for maintaining my sanity I’d like to share.

1) Keep a list of candidates near the phone. As pollsters call to ask you who you’ll vote for, go down the list, ticking off each candidate you say you’re voting for in turn. See how many complete cycles of the list you can make before the election comes.

2) Claim to be a relative of one of the candidates. Doesn’t matter which, just pick one.

3) Second use for the list: Every time someone calls with a push poll or other means of urging you to vote against a candidate, place an “X” beside the name. Before voting, total up the “X”’s. The candidate with the most X’s has certainly offended more people with money (otherwise how could they afford so many phone banks) so that makes one more reason to vote for that candidate.

Currently I answer the phone with “Walker’s Political Research. And which candidate do you want me to vote against?” This throws them off long enough for to speak without interrupting them, and tell them politely I have no interest whatsoever in anything they have to say, and hang up. (I wonder how many divergent political opinions the callers have of me, now that I’ve told both sides of the health care issue, tort reform issue, environmental issues, and the abortion issue to go take a long walk off a short pier? About the only lobbies I haven’t told off are the NRA and the NAB, but that’s only because they haven’t called — yet!)

For those keeping score, I was called three times by phone banks while typing this entry.

Over on Electrolite, there’s a storm of outrage a-brewing. I have to admit, opening the blog up and seeing the address of my old high school rival was a bit of a gigglesnort, but the misinformation that was abounding within it and the comment thread started out by offending me, then left me laughing helplessly. I really needed that laugh, but I wish you weren’t so quick to judge us uncivilized bumpkins.

OK, just what is going on? George W Bush had a rally there on the high school campus, and students were supposedly threatened with expulsion if they dared to wear Kerry props. Part one is true, part two isn’t. Book both of those as fact, children.

How do I know? Richland Center is the county seat of Richland County. I grew up (and still spend a lot of time in) Lone Rock, which, as of the 1990 census anyway, is the second largest town in Richland County, with a population of less than 1000 (I’m being charitable, it was more like 600 but it’s grown lately). I spend more time annually in Richland Center than the entire thread of commenters have in their lifetime. I’ve worked there; I went to college there. I know those people. I spoke to my mother this morning, who still lives (and holds office) in Lone Rock and she was as bemused at the “controversy” being manufactured out on the ‘net as I was.

Have I a political axe to grind? Well, I’m considering voting for Kerry this year, and the only reason I could possibly bring myself to that position is that to do otherwise would risk letting Bush back in for another four. I think Kerry’s definitely not the right man for the times, but compared to the alternative, I’ll probably hold my nose and “take one for the country,” and pray that next time out one of the parties decides to send a real candidate for a change.

So I’m no Bushie. I just know the place and the people for the last half-century. RC is a firm republican town. Most folks there are what you’d call “yellow dog” republicans, meaning they’d vote for a yellow dog if it ran as a republican. I’d be willing to bet that well over half, possibly as many as 90% of the students that might have considered wearing Kerry badges (a total itself that wouldn’t be very large) would have done so primarily as an act of rebellion against their parents, not out of any real affinity for his cause.

The princpal’s own words are that he “asked” the students not wear Kerry stuff. I’m sure he thinks so, but I’m equally sure the students heard that as a command. And (now I’m specualting, based on experience) one or two from that point said they’d be expelled if they dared disobey, and so the stone started rolling downhill. They’re probaby getting a bigger chuckle out of the gullibility of ‘netheads than I am right now.

Let’s get to facts:
1) The HS Gym is the standard meeting place in the town. There’s a couple of dance halls that will be close in size, and maybe one spot on the college campus, but if you’re doing something big, you need to talk to the HS. And the HS knows you’ll need to, so they’ll always be willing to rent, regardless of political view.

2) Yes, the demographics are mainly white. The commenter with this bright idea obviously thinks this means something more than just that there are few industries in town that would attract minorities. If you weren’t born in the area, the odds are real high you aren’t working there, either. It’s opportunity, not bigotry, that drives the demographics.

3) The principal knows the law. He isn’t going to threaten to expel students over something that trivial, and he wouldn’t, even if the law permitted it. I know you folks like to think of us as bumpkins, but spend some time reading history, for pete’s sake. Wisconsin came up with both “Fightin’ Bob” Lafollette and Joe McCarthy. the posse comitatus and Progressive magazine. You want more recent examples, OK, how about Tommy Thompson and Russ Feingold? How do you think that happens if we’re so eager to stifle free speech?

My stepfather was Richland county chairman of the Democratic party. What went on in that thread makes me ashamed of my family’s connection with the Democrats. Patrick, you oughta know better than to spread crap like that.

Addition: Now I find in the comments to the original post, that the one who first started to spread this male bovine excrement couldn’t be bothered to fact check himself. “At least my motivation was to protect kids from the poor decisions of the adults in charge of their education,” was the exact phrasing he used (comment from him datestamped Thu Oct 28th, 2004 at 22:56:46 GMT). More interested in protecting the kids from the poor decisions than he was in finding out if poor decisions were, in fact, actually being made in the first place? Meow.

<Deep Sigh> Ran in to an old familiar-but-forgotten bug today. Caused by tables, currently inserted into the design unnecessarily by the OSCMS I was using. It has been so long since I’d worked with table-based designs I’d completely forgotten that when you style a table as width: 100% IE/Win decides that you mean more than just 100% of the available content area if you have a floated box. (Technical description for the curious: within a screen-width box a box 275px wide is floated left. The screen-width box also contains another box with a left margin set at 300px. A table within this second box, styled at width:100%, will wait until the floated box has ended before displaying, even though there is no overlap between the display areas of the floated box and the table and even though other content in the box before the table will display correctly.)

So I wasted time trying to figure out what was happening. It wasn’t until I stopped looking at the code I was writing and started looking at the code the CMS was writing that I realized what was happening.

The default in IE for a table is to take all the room it needs, up to the limit prescribed by the bounds of the box it’s in. Dropping the width attribute and settling for the default fixed the problem.

That’s the problem with the argument that claims table-based design is simpler. It’s simpler only because we already know the bugs and workarounds for it. When we don’t know (or when we’ve forgotten) it’s at least as difficult as standards-compliant design.

My favorite oversimplifier, Jakob Nielsen is At It Again. This time it’s computer security.

As usual, there’s some meat in the soup. Computer security should be easier for normal people to set up. He uses the analogy of locking a car. That level of security for a computer should be trivially easy for a user to set up. And while it’s not enough to keep out a crack team of agents, neither is locking your car. He should carry the analogy further.

Why is it that simply locking the car door is considered sufficient security, when any determined thief can still steal the car if it’s locked? Because insurance will replace what’s lost, and because your loss is limited to the car itself and what was in it.

So, following the analogy through to the end, if we want lock-the-car-door security on our computers, we should so arrange our computers that anyone breaking in to them will only be able to damage the computer itself, and we should be insured against the loss of whatever can be gained by breaking in. If those two factors hold, then computer security on the level of a locked car door is a realistic step to take.

On the other hand, if what you’re wanting to do is store the minutia of your life in the box, you should treat the box as if that is indeed what it’s holding. If you’re the type who would leave every dolloar you possess in an open shopping bag sitting on the seat of the car in plain sight, then yes, I suppose once again you should use the locked car door level of security. If you wouldn’t, then why are you doing even less than that to protect it simply because it’s on your computer?

And user education does factor into the equation. If a man walked up to you on the street and said he needed your banking information in order to transfer 85 gazillion dollars from point A to point B, how many of you would instantly hand over the information? I thought not. Yet a surprising number of people do so in the computer equivalent; they have this knee-jerk reaction to believe every single thing that floats into their mailbox.

If you received a letter that had the return address of someone you knew, yet contained an ad for viagra and breast enhancing pills, would you automatically assume your friend had sent the information to you? Or would you check the postmark to see if it came from a place your friend would be sending from? Yet how many people always believe the “From” field on an email, which is no harder to fake than the return address on a letter?

Ordinary people with loads of common sense suddenly lose touch with all that sense when reading an email or a web page. They wouldn’t believe it if someone said it to their face, but This Is On A Computer, So It Must Be True?

Computer security should be easier, at least for moderate levels of security. It can’t be made simple to lock a computer down to the point of impenetrability; the only computer impossible to break into is turned off, unplugged, encased in concrete and buried at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. And even then I’m not 100% sure it’s safe.

Following all of Nielsen’s suggestions doesn’t get you to safe, either. Encryption can be broken, and is being broken every day. Digital signatures can be faked or fooled (remember the company that obtained a specious MS signature?) so are not foolproof. It’s not possible to open a hole to get trusted things done without at the same time opening a hole for exploits. If you let one kind of traffic through, anyone who successfully pretends to be that sort of traffic can also come through. And let’s face it, fooling computers really isn’t hard; fooling people is much harder. A human shop clerk would never accept that this 6′8″ 300-lb body building he-man in front of her is actually Hermoine Havealot; a computer would, and does every day.

And automatic updating? Yep, that’s really a foolproof system. All an attacker needs to do is compromise one domain resolver, and you’re automatically downloading and installing a fake update. A simple redirection of your access. Oh, you thought the Internet’s domain system was foolproof?

Sure I’m paranoid. But am I paranoid enough?

Bottom line: you, not Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs, not even Linus Torvalds, are responsible for what is happening in your own computer. Act like it. Stop believing that everything you see on a computer is true. No computer ever created is better at knowing how much you want to risk, and what you want to protect, than the one between your ears. Turn it on, feed it good information, and use it. Those silicon counterfeits laying around on desks can’t hold a candle to it.

…when you have a child. Jeff Zeldman is finding that out.

I remember well the first day I met my oldest child. I was prepared, I’d had more than 9 months to think about the idea, get used to it, plan for it — but it didn’t matter. The man who picked up those seven pounds 12 ounces of wiggle disappeared never to be heard from again after one look into her wondrous clear eyes. I am not him. That man could not do, and would not have done, what I have done voluntarily, even cheerfully, in the last 26 years.

And I would not have missed it for the world. Welcome to the club, Mr Z. You may have your doubts now, especially in the dead of night, at the Hour Of The Wolf, but you’ll do. It’s the men who don’t change we have to worry about.