Should I be concerned that no one at the early voting place asked to see my ID? Or my voter registration card? They asked me to write down my name and address on a little form, sign it, and handed me a ballot.

Photos from Dresden.

I'm testing out flickr's "blog this" functionality... I'm not sure what this is going to look like. Hopefully, the above link will get you to the Dresden photoset. :)

I've been somewhat of a Flickr grinch for various esoteric reasons but I finally gave in and set up an account there. I sifted through my gallery and picked out the better/more interesting/funniest photos and added them to my flickr stream. If you have an account there, let me know and I'll add you.

My lame lab travel pool laptop doesn't have an SD card reader. I'm so used to having my regular lab travel laptop (the one I own, that has an SD card reader, and that I am no longer allowed to use for travel) that I didn't think about bringing a card reader. So you don't get to see pictures of the Frauenkirche or the transparent factory or the Dresden Marathon or anything. Until later.

He was right behind me in the line to get on board the flight to Frankfurt...

After failing to find him coming off the plane in Frankfurt, I sent him an email from the cafe and he immediately wrote back, saying he was in Munich. It was very confusing.

Sign-on note last night indicated that 3.02 would go live at 3pm MST today. When I got home at 5pm, the sign-on note indicated 5:30. At 5:30 it said 7. At 7, it let me log on, but took 10 minutes to do so. When I finally got in, everything was frozen. Figured it might be my outdated addons, so I logged out and disabled everything. Tried to log back in and the authentication server was unreachable. Around this point, the launcher indicated that the news server had failed as well. Checked the realm status website and got a 404 (wtf?). Tried to log in again about 15 minutes later and got a message saying that the connection wasn't possible, with a tech support URL to click "if the problem persists." I clicked that link and Firefox told me that blizzard.com was unreachable.

Sorta fun watching the entire Blizzard network buckle and fail under the strain. But was it the massive demands of 11 million users trying to download a 1.2Gb patch, or some horrible configuration problem? Locusts?

I'm about to take my freshly-platinumized eliteness on another flight. This time, to Dresden, for the IEEE's 2008 Nuclear Science Symposium. There, I'll be presenting a poster on in-the-flash pulse shape discrimination for liquid scintillators in active interrogation. Cue jokes, Dan.

Also taking a short course in analog front-end electronics for radiation detector systems, which is really the main point of me going. But there's no money available for training... <grumble>

The bank no longer holds my Tacoma title; I paid the remaining $5.77 of the loan off on Friday. It's all mine! First, the tacoma—then the world! MOOHAHAH