2010 November minutiae

• I wonder how many people end up voting Republican purely out of rage at the incompetence and/or illiteracy of polling place workers. I was held up for several minutes because the one I was dealing with didn't know the alphabet! She seriously didn't know which order the letters went in and therefore couldn't locate my name — I had to find it for her. And then after reading "CADRE, ADAM" on the list, she went on to refer to me repeatedly as "Mr. Adams." Not a strong case for putting faith in public institutions!

• You know what I want from an audio player? When I double-click on an MP3, it should make sound come out. I don't need it to double as a frickin' life coach.

• I'm also fed up with programs that feel the need to install new versions of themselves every couple of days. As I've been loading software onto my new computer I've been turning off the auto-updaters whenever possible. Sorry, programs — you'll update when I tell you to update and not a moment before. (And someday I will tell my children the same thing.)

• One of my heroes for this month is Pratik Poddar, whose Firefox extension to show passwords as they're typed is something I've been trying to find for ages.

• When I add text to a document I always begin by adding a bunch of blank lines, which is something I didn't realize until I started using a program (Final Draft) that doesn't let you do that and it drives me nuts. I almost broke my keyboard pounding the Enter key in frustration as Final Draft popped up an Elements menu and refused to add the blank lines.

• So apparently Meg Whitman's husband is named, no joke, "Dr. Griffith Harsh IV." I can only assume he spends a lot of time hanging out with Victor Von Doom and Grima Wormtongue wondering aloud how people caught on to the fact that they're evil.

• Maybe this is universal now, but I was amused to go to the local post office and discover that, rather than separating mail into "Local" and "Out of Town" the way I remember post offices doing when I was a kid, it has a number of different bins — "express parcels," "metered flats," "loose letters," etc. — including one reserved exclusively for Netflix.

• Having moved to a town designed for walking, I often see groups of young people out and about. The middle schoolers are strange to observe: decidedly postpubescent chicks hanging out with, and treating as peers, these little boys a foot shorter than they are.

• Comment on espn.go.com: I so should have went to Cal. I think I have a guess why you didn't.

• I developed a sudden craving for orange juice, so I got some. It had been so long since I'd had orange juice that in the interim the term "orange juice" dropped off my mental map. On my way home from the store I kept thinking, "Oh boy, now I have ice cream."

• talkingpointsmemo.com: Netanyahu Hopes ME Leaders Will Publicly Discuss Threat Of Iran. Not sure why he thinks Olympia Snowe's advocacy will be the magic bullet, but then I didn't read the article.

• abcnews.go.com: Positive Outcome Unlikely. Pretty much sez it all, don't it?

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