"Your request to URL "http://66.78.6.237/~cleardar/c/ElRtObNMkey.html" has been blocked by the WebWasher DynaBLocator module. The URL is listed in categories (Erotic/Sex, Online Shopping, Cities/Regions/Countries, Education, Art/Museums, Music, Literature/Specialized Books, Search Engines/Web Catalogs/Portals, Software and Hardware Vendors/Distributors, Dating/Relationships, Travel, Sports, Personal Homepages, Weapons, Health/Recreation/Nutrition) which are not allowed by your administrator at this time."

Are they serious?? The URL, btw, should be a link to a page showing information about when the sky in nearby El Rito is dark for astronomical observing.

BTW: welcome to entry #600 in this journal.

UPDATE: So it turns out the URL is a 404, which only makes it funnier. I wrote an email to the fine citizens who run the webcensortron here at the lab and I got this curt reply from Ed:

"Education" is not on our blocked categories list. This is a generic error message, listing all possible categories, caused by a failure to resolve a URL containing an ip address instead of a hostname. Most legitimate websites contain hostnames, or a resolveable ip address. If you have a business need to have a site reachable only by an unresolveable ip address unblocked, please let us know.

Got some new toys for astrophotography in the mail yesterday, and so did Bob. There were some technical issues with the ballhead and the camera mount, but we got them worked out. I'm going to be separating my astrophotography posts from this journal as they tend to be quite long winded. You can access my astrophotography hobby page here and read all about it in depth if you're interested. When I actually get around to images that I like, then I'll post them here otherwise it'll just be quick links to the hobby page.

OK, bear with me here...

So in the beginning there was just Chaos. It wasn't well defined, but whatever it was it managed to give birth to Gaia, which was a personification of the Earth. Hermaphroditic entities are nothing new to the Jerry Springer crowd, so this isn't a real money maker. Moving on, it turns out that Gaia is also hermaphroditic and manages several offspring on her own, one of which is Uranus, a personification of the sky.

Now here's where it gets wacky and the Springer Ratings start to climb. Stay with me here... Gaia marries her son, Uranus. They pop out units like rabbits and end up with 12 kids, the Titans.

But wait, there's more. Each of the titans either marries or has children with one of their siblings. It's an inbreeding fiesta! Their grandmother and mother are the same person!

Oh, and Uranus has a bunch of mutant kids to boot. Some of them only had one eye, and some of them were so hideous that their dad locked them up in the basement of hell for ever.

And it gets weirder. It turns out that the basement of hell, Tartarus, is also personidifed as a guy and he also got it on with Gaia and had a kid called Typhus.

Springer says: The Greek Pantheon is fucked up! I LOVE IT!!

When I left the house at 6:00 this morning, there was half an inch of new snow on the ground and it was coming down lightly. Now it is 9:00am and the snow is apparently 6" deep in town and looks like its about 3-4" here. They may close the lab early if it keeps coming down, but it won't make a difference for me because my eight hours are technically up at 2pm anyway...

"Cool! Personalized plates! Barclay, Barry, Barry, Bert, Bort...come on...Bort?"

"Mommy mommy! Buy me a license plate!"

"No! Come along Bort!"

"Are you talking to me?"

"No, my son's name is also Bort"

I went over to Christina and Mike's place to have Thanksgiving with them, their friend Karin, Christina's parents, their friends, and the entire population of Bolivia. Watching Christina deal with the fact that her dad was cooking in her kitchen was hillarious. Watching her dad freak out about it was even better.

Anyway, the food was great and the presentation was over-the-top (we had assigned seating with name placards ??). I got to play some MechAssault on Mike's Xbox and watch him do some work on one of his motorcycles (the one that isn't a Ducati). We all watched "Elf" which I thought wasn't Will Ferrell's funniest movie.

When I left I came back home and played GTA3 until Dan and Ben showed up, shortly followed by a rare Broxton sighting. We sat around playing video games, failing to go to sonic, and being huge nerds until the wee hours.

Yeah well the weather forecast said it was going to be clear tonight starting just after nightfall. I had a hard time believing this since the cloud ceiling was about 100' AGL all day. But, like clockwork, the clouds just magically shuffled off at about 5pm. However, they left behind a high thin layer that was semi-transparent but ubiquitous. Unfortunately, tonight's basically full moon made the entire layer of cirrus clouds glow brightly. We could see a few bright stars (enough to get an alignment) but there wasn't anything to look at other than the moon, so we were only out there for about an hour. No chance to calibrate the camera.

Me: "Hello?"

John: "Hey, Rich?"

Me: "Yeah?"

John: "Hey its John. You still there Scott?"

Scott: "Yeah, but I just died."

John: "Yeah I just died too, in one of those green lakes. Where are you guys?"

Scott: "I'm not sure, I'm inside looking out a window and I can't see you."

John: "Rich you still there?"

Me: "Uh, yeah, but I think you're looking for the other Rich. You looking for Rich Strong?"

John: "Uh yeah."

Me: "He doesn't live here anymore. I don't know his new number."

John: "Oh, sorry Mouser." *click*

---

Backstory: My old roommate Rich and his brothers would often play multiplayer online games while using headset phones on conference call so that they could coordinate their movements. Being suddenly thrust into that world was quite unexpected and odd, even though it only lasted a few seconds.

"In the begining there was a naked man standing in the bed room talking to an invisible guy on the ceiling who was stuck there.

"This was VERY early on in our relationship. As in like the first week or so. I wake up to find him standing near the far side of the room whispering. I say, "What are you doing?" He says, "I'm trying to get this guy to come down." I get up and join him ... he is looking up towards the sky. And saying in a really quiet voice, 'It's ok. I'll take care of you. Come down. Really.' I start lauging and finally coax him back to bed. He leaves the poor bastard stuck up there."

My 50mm f/1.4 lens for my camera showed up this evening! It is awesome. Very fast. The aperature on this thing is huge (50/1.4 = 35.7mm = 1.4 inches). On my 300-D it will have an effective focal length of 80mm which makes it a great portraiture lens and will function quite well for "close-ups" of large planetary nebulae and constellation shots in astrophotography.

Speaking of which, Bob and I spent a couple hours driving around tonight looking for possible observing locations. One of the pull-outs along the Valle Caldera looks good, although the proximity of NM 4 is troublesome. St. Peter's Dome is also nice, though it might be tough to get to in the winter and the rough road might jostle the scope a bit much...

In unrelated news, Mikki and I drove all the way to Espanola tonight to go bowling and it was league night. We would have had to wait an hour and a half to get a lane. We each played one quarter worth of quarter slots and won nothing. An hour wasted. :(

So on Friday night Bob and I did some testing combining his LX200 with my camera. Nothing too exciting yet, but we're on our way to some serious astrophotography. I made a new hobbies directory for this endeavor and did a detailed writeup of everything we did on friday here.

So for the last month or so I've been getting hammered with spam in my journal comments. 99% of it is for some Propecia reseller website. Initially, it was all coming from a small number of IP addresses so I used MT's built-in IP blocking capability and all was well, but then it started coming from a different IP every time and it was taking a lot of time for me every day to remove all the comments.

So with Jason and Mark's help, I found a great MT plugin called MT-blacklist that borks any attempt to post a comment to my journal that includes a link to a URL that is on a very large blacklist. I tested it against some of the Propecia spam comments and it nuked them immediately. Now I'm golden.

OK, so there's a woman I work with who's husband has some sort of odd psychological disorder that I don't understand. Ever since he was a kid, he has had a serious problem with sleepwalking on nights where there's a full moon. It doesn't make any sense, but she says she has to deal with it every month. Anyway, she tells me stories about his bizzare antics and I feel I must retell them. I'm changing the names here, so we'll just call him Cornelius. And we'll call her Jerry.

It's not just sleepwalking as you might imagine... he is, to all appearances, wide awake. Eyes open, talking, manipulating tools, etc. However, he's living out some dream and it sorta creeps Jerry out sometimes. Anyway, last night wasn't a full moon but Cornelius was having trouble sleeping so he took some Nyquil and apparently this has the same effects as a full moon. So here's our first installment of the Tales of Cornelius:

So Jerry wakes up and she's really cold. She looks over and Cornelius has his legs straight up in the air and the blankets are all hanging down from his feet. And... he's poking her constantly saying, "Are you OK??"

After some discussion, it turns out that the building is collapsing and Cornelius is trying to save Jerry by holding up the ceiling. He is totally serious about it. Meanwhile, the cats are running around the bed in circles meowing because it drives them nuts.

So I went over to Bob's place after work today and we hauled out his 14" LX200GPS SC telescope. That thing is a behemoth. And the new features for auto-alignment are amazing. It uses a digital level, a digital compass, and a GPS to figure out where on the planet it is and how it is oriented, then takes that information into account when pointing towards a known celesital object.

We set it up, turned it on, and let it do its thing. We didn't have to level the tripod or point it north or anything. We came back in 10 minutes and it was ready to go. It pointed towards Vega and asked us to adjust the view to center the star, then another guide star, and after that, it could slew to any object in its database automatically and would more or less perfectly center it. It takes all the annoyance out of telescope use.

Because we were using it in his small backyard, we didn't have a great view of the sky and other than Andromeda, I couldn't identify anything that we could see. So we set the scope to give us a tour of "Tonight's Highlights" and it picked things that were out right at that moment and relatively high in the sky and gave us a tour. We saw the dumbell nebula, the ring nebula, some open and globular clusters, Uranus and Neptune, and a host of other stuff. And it only took a few seconds to go from one to the next. This telescope is awesome.

However, even with a top-end "prosumer" telescope like the LX200GPS, I still feel a little let down by the fact that pretty much everything you look at aside from planets and bright stars in a telescope is black and white on account of your eye's bad sensitivity to low-luminance color information. So I really want to get my camera hooked up to this thing and try some tracking long-exposure stuff.

Bob bought a piggyback camera mount for the scope that should show up sometime this week. I have a 28mm (45mm equiv.) f/1.8 lens that has superb optical quality with which I can do relatively wide shots (e.g. entire constellations) and today I bought a 50mm (80mm equiv.) f/1.4 lens that will let me do closer-in piggyback shots. For doing prime focus and eyepiece-projection work for really long-focal length shots, I'll need to buy some more adapters and that comes later. First order of business is wide shots of large nebulae and constellations.

Early on the morning of December 7th, Jupiter will pass behind the moon. We won't see it disappear here, but shortly after the moon rises we'll see Jupiter pop out from behind the dark edge. I'm considering renting a bigass lens from a camera store in Santa Fe to capture the event.

I was happy to see the second successful flight of the X-43a technology demonstrator aircraft yesterday. SCRAMJETs are inherently cool and I hope the technology becomes useful someday. It is a shame that the massive restructuring at NASA has basically killed the budget for any additional flights. But I feel that there is something odd about their hanging on to this notion of having set a speed record at Mach 10.

Yes, it is the fastest air-breathing aircraft ever. And it is certainly the fastest any vehicle with no moving engine parts has ever traveled. But... does that really mean much? It's still less than half the escape velocity of the earth, so we've certainly done better in the overall competition with other spacecraft...

I think this is analogous to Chuck Yeager and pals during the 1960s when they were still trying to push the airspeed record in jet aircraft while the Mercury astronauts were busy orbiting the Earth with about 18 times the speed. After awhile, the glamour of pushing the envelope for a particular technology paled when competing technologies could achieve so much more.

In the case of the SCRAMJET, we've introduced a new technology and set a record for that technology... but it's not really all that much of a speed record. They should focus their PR on the elegant aspects of the technology, not on the speed.

Robin and I went to the Blue Window for dinner, one of the nicer resturaunts in town. When we got there, it was late and there were only two other tables filled, both in one corner of the resturaunt. Oddly, the hostess chose to seat us right next to the other two tables. Perhaps she was looking for an optimal packing ratio or something.

Next, our waiter turned out to be this guy who had up until very recently worked at Quiznos as a cashier. And despite the fact that he was now working at a pretty classy place, he had all the mannerisms and intelligence you'd expect from a cashier at Quiznos. Every time he spoke to us, we were trying really hard to keep a straight face. I think because we were young compared to the average Blue Window fare, we were his best friends.

For the final act, two older gentlemen came in just before we left, one of which proceeded to fall right off his chair and onto his face. It was unclear whether the man was heavily drunk or was partaking in some sort of mental challenge. Either way, as we left (and his friend was busy wiping the guy's face off), we felt that we had just experienced something.... not normal.

What the hell was that??

Earlier this year I theorized that I had damaged my PS2 controllers with ESD. Today's frustration over Gimp Theft Auto III led me to take apart the controller (nothing obviously wrong), then call the only other person I know in town who has a PS2, Steve, and go over there to do some experiments. My controller and game on his PS2 led to the same inverted controls. My game and his controller worked just fine. So it was my controller that was causing the problem.

Lucky for me, Steve is a bigger game nerd than I am and he had several spare PS2 controllers. I'm borrowing a working one from him and he's going to gut my busted one and put the guts of a controller his dog chewed up inside.

While I was over there, I played a bunch of 3-person versus Halo 2. The multiplayer versus mode is basically identical to the original Halo, but with more maps. I haven't seen the story-based game for either one.

Anyway, now I have another working controller... and I have to be extra careful about static. So I put electrical tape over all six of the screws... Hopefully that'll work.

OK, so my package finaly shows up, and its my GTA:3 / GTA:VC two-pack of games for my playstation. Sweet. So I hunker down for an evening of driving around and shooting people... when I discover that, in both games, when I am on foot, the movement controls are inverted. The guy is always looking over his shoulder, and I can't see where I'm going since the camera is in the wrong place.

Now, if I change the camera mode so that I have the top-down view, everything works fine. Also, if I get into a vehicle, everything works fine. Only when I'm on foot with the regular view. What the hell is that?? It is totally unplayable! Both of them! Gah!!

UPS's high tech tracking system indicates that my package was put on a truck in Santa Fe this morning and furthermore that the truck left the depot at 4:45am. "Out for Delivery," it says.

The time is now 5:45pm, approximately 13 hours later.

By my watch, it takes about 45 minutes to drive from my house to Santa Fe. Has the same guy seriously been out delivering packages for twelve hours? Was there a wreck? Did my package end up on a desert island with Tom Hanks some how?

UPDATE: Finally showed up at 7. wtf??

The final race of the season for the New Mexico Orienteers was this afternoon and I went and gave it a whirl. For the race I ran, I came in first place. However, my camelback was leaking on me and I ended up with about a liter of water spilled down my ass.

Every time I stopped to punch my card or look at my map, the pants would freeze. By the time I finished my ass was a huge block of ice. Well ok, not that huge... but very cold.

Give this a try - and no cheating. :)

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

Visit this link. Watch it once. There are people in white shirts and
people in black shirts throwing basketballs. Try to count the number of
times the people in the white shirts pass the basketball. Again, no
cheating--only watch it once.

Then, hit this link.

http://free.mailinfo.com/web/reality/step2.htm

When I woke up, I was thinking that I really wanted to go for a bike ride this morning. I was on my way downstairs to ask Robin if he wanted to go, when I walked past Mikki's open door and saw... tons of snow outside.

Overnight it snowed about 3". It hasn't stopped all day, though it was basically just non-accumulating flurries.

I drove down to Santa Fe and bought a down jacket, the Mountain Hardware Sub-Zero SL Jacket in Charcoal. A fine piece of gear. Also got a few books at borders: George Carlin's new one, John Stewart's new one, and a cookbook full of salsa recipies. Yum.

Gunga Din, their 1992 EP "Grip."

Have I even ever listened to this disc?? Aaron, didn't I get this from you? Or at your suggestion? I have no idea what this is.

Also not in CDDB: the "Go Big" compilation of what are apparently songs for snowboarding. I dunno. Nothing of great merit here, some 311 and the like. Does have a data track with videos of wacky extremeness, though...

I've added all of this to the CDDB now. The world can thank me later for my great contribution...

I feel so dirty.

I'm just now making my way through the last of my CDs, ripping the entire colleciton to MP3 for safe keeping. I decided that hard drive space was cheap and that I would encode all of my music, even stuff I don't listen to anymore, and all at high bitrate. I still stand by that decision...

But I just ripped an MC Hammer disc and somehow I feel like I have comitted some kind of crime against taste and decency.

I remember in high school making fun of my friend Mimi Hua because she was really into the New Kids and I told her that in five years she would be embarrassed by that. Well, I was right. But this is so much worse. I own an MC Hammer CD.

To my credit... I tried to sell it, along with my mom's Kenny G CDs which I inexplicably have in my CD wallet, to a used CD place in Iowa City. Repeatedly. No one there was dumb enough to take it.

Why haven't I thrown it away yet?

Well you never know when "You Can't Touch This" is going to come back into style.

Most of the major problems I identified with the Treo 650 smartphone appear to be solved. One, the lack of WiFi, is ameliorated by the release of PalmOne's WiFi SD card. Drivers for the 650 are planned to be released shortly after the American release of the phone itself. The glaring problem with this solution is that If I have the WiFi card in the phone, then I can't have my SD storage card in. So I only have the built-in 24MB of storage when I'm using 802.11b - and the drivers take up 4M of that! I can probably work around this shortcoming, but it would be nice to have WiFi built into the phone...

Another solved problem is the lack of a voice memo record/playback application. There is a third-party solution for this that looks pretty capable.

The storage problem isn't as bad as I thought, as I can get a 1GB SD card for the phone. This still isn't a 40GB microdrive... but it's probably more than enough.

The vibrate-mode problem I mentioned turned out to be vapor - that option does come standard.

The only remaining problem from my original list is the lousy camera resolution and I guess there's nothing to be done about that. But, then again, I have a great camera for when I want great pictures. When I just want on-the-go convenience VGA will probably do. Would be nice... but not really a show-stopper.

Now, enter the competition: The HP iPAQ h6315 Pocket PC series. Similar device, here are some of the pros and cons relative to the Treo 650:

PROs

So we had a pest problem here at work, and I caught a rat in a trashcan. And my name is Mouser. ...Get it? Because everyone else is getting it over and over and making sure to let me know that they got it.

Some email traffic on the group list today:

"If you need to report mice, rats or baby cubs in the pod, please call Pest Control @ 667-xxxx. If it is after hours or the weekend, please call mouser @ 662 ......."

"I agree, except for the case of a baby cub. Then I suggest we adopt it as a group mascot. Mouser can take care of it."

"We should adopt Mouser as our group mascot. He doesn't smell nearly as bad as any baby cub...that I've noticed anyway!!"

I never got around to writing a post-election political post and I suppose I should say something. For a long time after the election I was really upset, disheartened, and ashamed. A lot of those emotions have simmered down now, and I've come to the simple conclusion that I am significantly removed from the mainstream on many (if not most) levels. I am a fringe case, and therefore cannot expect to see popular-vote decisions go my way with any reasonable probability. Mark sums up my feelings on this election perfectly:

I assumed that Americans were as unhappy and scared about the direction this country was heading as I was. I thought that the legacy left by the past four years, a presidency that I felt had divided and hurt this country more that I have seen in my lifetime, would outweigh the messages of fear and morality. I hoped that humanity would win out over fear. I was wrong.

WARNING: If severe lameness and geekitude bothers you, skip this post.

So I found myself with a free day yesterday and I decided to do an impromptu highpointing trip to northeast New Mexico. There are three counties in the corner of the state that I hadn't done, and I decided to get two of them in one day. I succeeded on both counts, and the detailed trip report is here. There are also photos here.

These highpoints bring my county total to 79, with 22 of them in New Mexico. This accounts for 2/3 of the New Mexico counties. Also, my contiguous glob of counties starting in my home county has now been connected to Cimarron County, Oklahoma. The glob reaches into three states and borders two more. The longest span between two points in the glob is now 753.41 km. You can see the new county map here.

So when Carl Macek brought anime to the american audience in 1985 in the form of the TV show Robotech, I was in grade school - which just happens to be the perfect age for that show. It was so utterly different from anything else that was on TV at the time (and somehow I managed to miss the banal second act, the Southern Cross bit) that it completely blew me away. I loved that show, and even though it is written for kids, I still love it. Sentimental attachment or something, I guess.

Anyway, someone made a PS2 game for it a few years ago and I found a third-party seller on Amazon selling it for only $7, so I went for it. They shipped it to me in a day! I played a lot of it today.

I actually really like it. It was clearly made for me - that is to say that it was made for an older audience than the TV show, but specifically for people that were into the show as kids. The feature unlocking is well done and some of the extra things you unlock as you play are video interviews with cast and crew from the TV show (many of whom return to do voice work for the game).

Also, the game is actually difficult. I made it through the first two chapters without much trouble (except the boss of chapter 2), but I'm totally stumped on chapter 3 - I have unlocked three different missions and can't finish any of them.

Technically, the game is pretty simple. The landscape and cityscape rendering are pretty dated, but the texture maps for the mecha are taken right out of the cartoon, so it looks like a 3D rendered cartoon and not some sort of ham-handed attempt to make the game look more "realistic" than the cartoon did. The visual feel of the non-background objects in the game is great. I wish they would have used a better graphics engine to do the backgrounds... but oh well, this is probably not a major title for them and I suspect it was done on the cheap. But the game structure, interesting bonus features, and the chance to re-live my favorite TV show as a kid make it well worth the $7 I paid for it.

Beastie Boys, Intergalactic Import Single, from their 1998 albumn "Hello Nasty."

NASA is retiring the last of their two KC-135 "vomit comet" aircraft. And I never got to fly in one. Oh well.

In order to continue the research opportunities, they are bringing a single C-9B in next year. The C-9 is not nearly as large and has significantly less aero-nerd coolness value when compared with the KC-135. It's really just a modified DC-9 commercial airliner.

Now what I think they should do is get a modified C-5 Galaxy ("The Aluminum Overcast") and put the padded walls in that mo-fo. They could call it the C-5 MegaVomit ChunderStorminator! And it would have bitchin' flame decals.

The third- and fourth-brightest objects in the sky, Venus and Jupiter, are currently at conjunction and are within one degree of each other in the sky. This is a relatively rare event - it won't happen again for a decade. I went out this morning at 4:30 and took some pictures of the planets through a light haze of cirrus clouds. The result is here.

CNN's current headline is "Poll: Most in U.S. Hopeful."

But reading into the body copy, we see that this is supported by the statement that "A post-election poll indicates most of those surveyed are hopeful... Just over half -- 51 percent -- said they were pleased with the outcome of the election..."

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't 51% of the voters vote for Bush?? So this article boils down to "people who got what they asked for are pleased?" Come on... how is this news?

Maybe I'm just odd, but to me the word "most" implies a significant majority - not the smallest possible majority. Contrary to statements made by the Bush camp yesterday, I do not consider 51% to be a clear mandate, especially considering the division in our country brought on by the last four years.

Another CD missing from CDDB:

Freeze Club Mixer Volume 1. This is a house mix CD and its unclear who its by. The liner notes say that it is "a New York style Todd Terry Megamix," but under that it says the mix is by Jeff Roamnowski and "Dave the Wave." So what exactly did Todd Terry have to do with it? Anyway, it's so bad. SO BAD.

I figured that waiting around for election returns to roll in over the course of four or five hours could get rather dull, so I decided to print up some election lingo bingo cards at the last minute. I sold Robin on the idea and we combined our nerd resources to make it happen. He took the hardware end of things, managing to cobble together the cables, ink, and notebook paper necessary to get his ancient printer working. I was on software duty, finding a list of applicable election phrases and then writing a script to randomly pick 25 of them at a time and output them as a 5x5 HTML table.

The entire procedure, from concept to printed bingo cards took about seven minutes. We were proud of our implied nerdosity. However, it turns out that the word list I found wasn't really tailored for election night TV coverage and no one got very many hits at all. "President Pro Tempore" kept me from any meaningful result.

Mike & Christina dumped me from their election night plans, so I went over to Erin & Mike's place instead, which was a lot of fun. Someone brought a GWBush squeeky toy, which the dogs chewed the face off of by the end of the night, much to everyone's enjoyment.

One of the (few) positive moments of the election night was the return on the Idaho Senate race, where "Crapo" finished with 99% of the vote. This joke writes itself.

It's still going on? It's almost 6:00am, and there are still three states that CNN hasn't called. Of course NM is one of them, but it is inconsequential since whoever takes Ohio at this point wins. It was nice to be in a swing state, where the feeling of my vote counting was comforting, but in the end NM has no effect.

Interesting that in the end it comes down to those provisional ballots that the Ohio Supreme Court decided to allow only yesterday, while the polls were open. However, CNN's current numbers show Kerry down by 136,000 votes and there are some 250,000 provisional and absentee ballots yet to be considered. That means that Kerry would have to take > 77% of the remaining vote. His numbers in the rest of Ohio were not that good, so I'm not holding out a lot of hope - though there is still a nightlight on in my hope department.

Republican Calvin Coolidge, Former Massachusetts Governor and Vice President under president Harding, wins an easy victory over democrat John Davis.

Davis' base was split heavily by progressive candidate La Follette, though he did manage to carry the strongly democratic deep south.

I was at work until 11:00pm on Friday. Actually I left work at about 3:30pm, but then I came back after dinner and kept working. Anyway, as I was leaving I noticed a large rat sitting in the corner of the break room. We've been having some problems with rats in our building. Someone had recently layed out a bunch of mouse traps, but they obviously weren't working. I could see that all four of the mouse traps in the break room were triggered and he was sitting next to one of them, probably scared. I wasn't sure if it was dead so I threw a plastic spoon at it. It shuffled over a bit but didn't run away.

I took Mike's garbage can from in front of his office and dropped it over the rat, then placed a heavier garbage can on top of that to weigh it down. I went down to the lobby and informed the guards that there was a big rat trapped under a garbage can in my break room and could they call someone to come remove it.

Of course, this was at 11pm on a Friday night... but I was impressed that they actually got someone on the phone to come and deal with it. Once they said he was coming, I left and went home for the night.

Now, fast forward two days to this morning and what do I see when I come in to work? The garbage cans haven't moved. I wasn't sure if nothing had happened, or had the rat removal guys come and dealt with it and then (inexplicably) replaced the tower of garbage cans? Before calling the building manager to get something done I first had to ensure that the rat was still under the can.

I had two colleagues look under the can from across the room as I lifted it while standing behind a half-wall. The rat was decidedly still there. What's more, it had done a lot of urinating and defecating inside the garbage can and lifting it up a bit released quite a smell. Yish.

Even more disturbing is the fact that there is fresh poop outside of the can, indicating that he has a buddy somewhere.

Anyway, we called the building manager and hung a sign on the can so that no one would remove it. How nasty. And this is a brand-new building! And what the hell happened Friday night with the people the guards talked to??

UPDATE: The exterminator guy showed up at 9:30am today and removed the rat. Apparently it had died. :( (I say :(, but they would only have killed it anyway...) No sign of his accomplice, though.