Evil Brain Jono's Natural Log

I have a really, really hard time getting the Indiana/Ohio/Kentucky border region to look right. Kentucky is kind of a shapeless mass on the map above.

Last month, I took the afternoon off from work to take the train down to San Jose and go to the DMV in order to exchange my Illinois driver's license for a California one. I bet you can already guess, since I mentioned the DMV, that this isn't going to end well.

The short version is that California won't give me a license unless I change my name. No, seriously! My last name is "DiCarlo". Lower-case i, capital C. On my birth certificate, which is typed in all capital letters, it is written as "DI CARLO", with a space. The space is a typographical convention used when typing in a monocase font in order to indicate where the mid-word capital letter occurs.

On my passport, it is also "DI CARLO", because they copied it from my birth certificate.

But in the Social Security database, apparently, it's spelled as "DICARLO", all caps and no space.

Nobody has ever given me a hard time about this before. It didn't come up when I was getting my Illinois license. In a lifetime of interacting with bureaucracies foreign and domestic, nobody has ever even mentioned it.

But in the Californa DMV's version of reality, my name is legally "DI CARLO" because that's what it says on my birth certificate and passport, and the Social Security database doesn't have anybody by that name, so either Social Security is in error or else I don't exist, and either way they can't issue me a license.

In other words, the California DMV is whitespace-sensitive, so my input makes it fail an assertion and throw a fatal exception. Oh, how I wish I was kidding. If it was really a computer program, I would know exactly how to debug it. If it was a normal human being making the decision, he/she would be able to apply some common sense to overcome the problem. But a bureaucracy is neither: it's an unholy fusion of man and machine, combining the worst aspects of each! Epic failure is virtually guaranteed.

The only solution that the DMV could think of was for me to go to the Social Security administration and have them change my name in their database to "DI CARLO" so that it matches my passport and birth certificate.

I don't want to do that. Who knows what side-effects that might have with, say, the IRS? But it seems my only other options are:

A. Never drive in California. (But I want to go to Yosemite!)
B. Drive with an Illinois license, hope I don't get in trouble for it.
C. Go to a different office of the DMV, try again, and hope I get someone less literal-minded.
D. Change my last name to something else entirely.

This isn't the first time I've raised the possibility of changing my last name. "DiCarlo" has absolutely no sentimental value to me. I share it with nobody in my family except my maternal grandmother (it's a long story), and it didn't even come from a blood relation -- DiCarlo was my grandmother's second husband. And by all accounts he was a pretty lousy excuse for a human being. So I've been looking for an excuse to get rid of it. What with the DMV, now I have one.

I just have to find a sufficiently cool-sounding last name, and then I'll change it. While I'm at it, I'll make my first name officially "Jono". That's what everybody calls me already.

My favorite suggestion so far is "Prime". "Jono Prime". It's mathematical, it's a Tranformer name, and it implies "first and only of his lineage". My second favorite is "Evilbrain". But I'm open to more suggestions! I especially like things that could be related to math, science, and/or mythology.

Think of me as the Childlike Empress in the Neverending Story, OK? You need to give me a new name* to save Fantasia from The Nothing. Or, the DMV, which is kind of like The Nothing.

P.S. any comment suggesting "o'noj" will be unceremoniously deleted.

Yesterday an idea for a role-playing game jumped into my brain, almost fully-formed.

I'm going to be spending a lot of time on an airplane over the weekend (I'm going to Chicago for Aleksa's 8th birthday party! Yay!) so I might have a full write-up by the time I get back on Monday.

There are some details of the rules that I still need to nail down before I can playtest this, but I'm really excited. At the moment, I'm looking for some brainstorming help. You can post your ideas in the comments.

But first, here's a summary of how character creation is going to go, to give you the flavor of the game:

1. Write down the following categories: Math, Science, Social studies, Grammar/composition, Foreign language, Art, Music, Gym.
2. Roll a die for each one in order to determine a grade from A to F. No rearranging, no re-rolls: you have no control over this whatsoever. This is your report card.
3. Decide as a group whether the school that you all go to is A. an oppressive Japanese public high school or B. an oppressive British boarding school. Yes, those are the only choices. Give your character an appropriately Japanese or appropriately British name.
4. Pick an after-school club or activity that your character does. Archery, swimming, chess club, whatever you want.
5. Pick your character's unfulfilled desire: you want a girlfriend, you want parental approval, you want to be popular at school, you want a car, you want to get into a good college, you want your family not to be poor, etc. Write this down.
6. Whatever your desire is, you are currently a million miles away from achieving it. Your position in life is defined as the polar opposite of whatever desire you wrote down. Figure out what that means.

Characters done.

In the first adventure, after playing out some introductory scenes, some kind of crazy thing happens and you all stumble through some kind of portal (wardrobe, magical history book, pillar of light, etc.) into a magical fantasy world.

There's some kind of table you can roll on a couple of times to generate the important features of your fantasy world. The table might include things like "talking animals", "giant mecha", "culture suspiciously similar to ancient China", and "geography like the cover painting on a Yes album." After each roll on this table, you hold a yes-or-no vote among all players. If it gets the approval of more than half of the players, it's in. If not, discard it and roll again. Keep going till you have two or three.

But whatever else it has, your fantasy world definitely has these things:

1. Swords
2. Magic
3. An evil empire bent on conquering the peaceful native creatures
4. An absolute moral compass with mythical significance

So, the moral compass. There are six heroic virtues. Each one has an opposite. You start at zero in all virtues. You must earn points in them by demonstrating them in play. Don't tell me that your character is Brave or Compassionate or whatever; show me that she is by acting that way. Only then can you write it on your sheet.

You can also go down in the virtues by behaving in an evil way, contrary to the virtue. If you do so, you get a spectacular one-time die bonus on whatever it is you're trying to accomplish, but then you lose a virtue point. This can take you negative. The idea is to have an ever-present mechanical temptation to do evil, so that the choice is always a real choice.

Leading a virtuous life gives you mystical power in this world. Leading an evil life gives you equal, but opposite, mystical power. In game terms, the way it's going to work is that there's a list of Heroic character classes, and each one has some minimum virtue scores required for entry. (Say, to be a knight you need +1 on Bravery and +1 on Leadership). Also a list of Villianous character classes, and each one has some minimum negative scores. (Say, to be a witch or warlock you need -1 Wisdom and -1 Compassion. Negative Wisdom is called Madness and negative Compassion is called Cruelty. So a witch needs one Madness and one Cruelty.)

So the idea is that you enter the fantasy world with no character class. You're just a high-schooler with a mediocre report card, a club activity that potentially gives you one semi-useful skill, and whatever items you think a high-schooler would happen to be carrying in his or her backpack. You are a blank slate. You will discover your true self through the choices you make in your adventures. Depending on how you interact with the other students, the innocent native creatures, and the servants of the evil empire, you'll gain and lose virtues and thereby earn your way into various character classes. Which you want to do, because character classes have Cool Powers. Without one you have only your meager academic skills to fall back on. ("Um, I've got a A in Music... I'll try to impress the queen by singing that John Lenon song we were practicing for the graduation ceremony.")

So here's what I need help with brainstorming. Mostly, I need that list of six virtues. I've implied above that they include Bravery, Leadership, Wisdom, and Compassion, but I'm not married to any of those ideas. The important thing is that they should all be based on things that a character makes a choice to do or not to do; they're not inborn abilities like Strength or Intelligence or whatever. It should be fairly clear what I can do as a player of this game to have my character exhibit or fail to exhibit each of these qualities. And the virtues should have obvious links to traditional fantasy archetypes a.k.a. character classes.

The reason I said six virtues is because six things gives you fifteen unique pairs, so if each class requires a different pair of two virtues then there is room for, say, eight heroic classes and seven villianous classes, which sounds about right. I need help brainstorming these, too. I've implied that there are Knights and Witches; maybe also Sages and Healers on the good side, Assassins and Blackguards on the evil side. (Of course, depending on the flavor of your fantasy world, maybe you call the Knights Samurai and call the Assassins Ninjas; same difference.)

Finally, you can help me brainstorm some cool and crazy geological/biological/technological/socioeconomic/mythocultural ways that the Other World can be different from Earth. "World is flat" isn't very exciting because it's not the sort of thing that would ever come up in play unless your main kingdom is very, very Close to the Edge (speaking of Yes album covers). On the other hand, "World is vaguely Greek-mythology flavored" is great because it gives you a lot of common ground to work from, while that "vaguely" still leaves room for creative contributions.

OK, that's it from me for now. Let a hundred flowers bloom!

The Obama campaign is doing a national voter registration drive. On Saturday morning I went up to a farmer's market in Redwood City with a couple of other volunteers (including Ben, who was just sleeping over at my house, but I poked him with my toe at 7am and made him get up and come with us).

We spent a couple hours at a table on the sidewalk hollering at people ("Good morning! Are you registered to vote? Do you wanna be?"). Over the course of a couple of hours, we registered seven people on the spot, and gave out about fifteen forms for people to fill out and mail in. Not bad, not bad. Most people were already registered, but we picked up some young people, some recent immigrants, and some people who had just moved from another part of California.

Altogether, the volunteers from the Palo Alto for Obama office registered 150 people on Saturday, and gave out a lot more mail-in forms.

Registering people is a lot less stressful than calling people up or knocking on doors for the campaign, because we're not trying to change anybody's mind or tell them who to vote for. That's a core value of the campaign: just get people involved again and make them feel like they have a voice. If they disagree with us, that's fine. We're happy to register people even if they want to register as Republicans. (None of the people we met on Saturday did.)

Also, the farmer's market was awesome. Got some fresh strawberries, cherries, peaches, and almonds from local farmers. (The area that is now known as Silicon Valley was all fruit orchards before the high-tech companies started moving in. It's still the perfect climate for growing fruit.) Also got some kettle corn, made fresh in a huge iron kettle, stirred with an oar. It made a great breakfast. I ought to go to farmer's markets more often!

Here's a video about the national voter reg drive. You might think it's kinda corny, but I find it inspiring.

Yesterday was bike to work day at Mozilla. Encourage people to exercise, get some fresh air, pollute less, etc. Some people who live in San Francisco left at 6 am and spent three hours biking all the way down the peninsula.

Of course, I bike to work every day, so I got rewarded with a special breakfast for doing nothing out of the ordinary.

Then again, it was still special because we all got these incredibly gaudy and awesome Mozilla bike jerseys. It's my new favorite article of clothing that I own.

I finished reading V for Vendetta, a 1980s graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, last night. I had high hopes going in since, for one thing, Alan Moore's Watchmen is the awesomest comic EVAR! OMG! and also I know a lot of people were excited about that V movie that came out a couple years ago.

I was disappointed. It's... well, it's not very good.

Supposedly a look at a grim totalitarian society that forms in England after a nuclear winter, V for Vendetta is basically 260 pages of a smug asshole in a mask running around killing people and blowing up buildings. While he quotes Shakespeare and bad poetry and gives longwinded, pompous lectures about how Fascism Is Bad.

Fascism is Bad, but killing random people is OK, apparently, if they work for a fascist government, or if they merely happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when V is blowing stuff up.

I wish I could say that the theme of "fascism vs. anarchy" was meant to be morally ambiguous, but given how much verbiage is spent lionizing V, justifying his actions, and villifying his enemies, I don't think it is moral ambiguity. I think it's a clumsy rendering of a black-and-white moral universe where terrorism against the state is always justified, regardless of the consequences, because Fascism is Bad.

Fascism is Bad, but you'd never know it from watching Norsefire in action. Norsefire, the ruling party of the post-nuclear-winter one-party British police state, is the wimpiest bunch of fascists I've ever seen. ( First of all, their symbol is just a big letter N. How's that going to inspire fear in their enemies? They need to get themselves something with black and red in it, maybe some crossed hammers like in that Pink Floyd movie.) We're told that they have hidden surveillance cameras everywhere but rarely does this affect the plot in any significant way. We are told that they had concentration camps years before, but that's backstory, it's exposition. What do they do in the present-tense of the story that's scary or evil? Some run-of-the-mill police corruption that wouldn't be particularly shocking in present-day Chicago. Mostly they just muddle about, and come off as a bunch of dull, confused British career bureaucrats. I'd feel sorry for them if they weren't so boring. 1984 this ain't.

The "Show, don't tell" rule is especially important in comics. If V for Vendetta had spent more time showing us the fascists doing bad things to people, instead of showing us the fascists working at desk jobs while telling us about how bad they are, then the story would have been a lot stronger. It might even have given me a little sympathy for V. As things stand now, I don't like him at all. In chapter 4 of book 2, V hijacks a TV station and broadcasts a tape... of himself... giving the audience a lecture... about how we're all a bunch of SHEEPLE! SHEEEEEPLE! It goes on for seven pages. I started rooting for the police to kill him, just so he'd shut the hell up.

There are other characters besides V, but I can't keep them straight; all the men look the same, all the women look the same, and apart from Evey and the guy with the overdone Scottish accent, none of them have any distinctive voice or personality traits that would help me tell them apart or give me a reason to care if they live or die. They seem to be a bunch of cardboard cutouts for V to kill, or to rescue. Or lecture.

I'd probably have loved this book if I had read it when I was, say, 17 or so. It's a perfect expression of the revenge fantasies that affect the rebellious teenage mind. I've been there. The mindset is something like this:

1. Society is, like, totally corrupt, man! Everybody's oppressing me just because I'm different! Nobody understands what I'm going through!
2. I wish I was a mysterious bad-ass dude in a trenchcoat! Nobody would know my true identity. I would, like, strike from the shadows and chop people up with my kung-fu powers! and then disappear and nobody would be able to trace me because I'd be just that good! Yeah!
3. But it would be OK, because I'd only kill bad guys. There shouldn't be any moral consequences for it, because they're bad guys, and moral consequences are boring.
4. The bad guys are bad because they're part of the system, which is bad, and evil, for reasons I feel strongly about but can't express clearly. If they were good they'd be rebelling against the system, like me!
5. If people can't see how evil the system is, it's because they've been BRAINWASHED into accepting it! Oh noes! Everybody who disagrees with me is not just wrong, but part of the MINDLESS BRAINWASHED HERD! of SHEEPLE!

That's the rebellious teenage mindset, and that's V for Vendetta. I was hoping for something a little more grown-up. There's a lot more that could have been done with the premise.

(A final thought, if I can figure out how to say this without spoilers: On page 174, panel 5, Evey says to V, "Thank you. Thank you for what you've done for me". In the context of what he's "done for her" over the five chapters leading up to that point, I think this panel is the single most offensive thing I've read in recent memory.)

Mechaton is a mecha wargame invented by Vincent Baker, the creator of the Dogs in the Vineyard RPG. It's meant to be played with Lego mechs, on a Lego battlefield.

There's a lot of great things about using Lego for wargames. Scenery is easy to make; units are easy to customize; lots of us gamer types have Lego collections hanging aroundsomewhere. Another cool thing is that everything is destructable. When a missile hits a wall, you break bricks off the wall and scatter them. When a mech loses an arm, you rip the arm off. Etc.

On Sunday I finally got a chance to play Mechaton, three-way vs. Ben, who was visiting from Seattle, and his friend Chris from Oakland. We had two sets of mechs ready to go from a GenCon demo game. But what to do for the third player, and what to use for terrain, when my Lego collection is in my parents' attic in La Grange.

Well, I do have some Warhammer 40k minis here. The Mechaton rules are pretty abstract, so there's no problem using a squad of 4-6 guys to substitute for a mech. You just declare what attatchment each model represents, and remove them as you take damage.

And what's destructable and terrain-like aside from Lego? Styrofoam! I salvaged some large hunks of computer packaging from work last week, planning to . The biggest one had a cool shape, but had to be broken in half to fit in my bike basket. The two halves made a great ruined fortress/facility, and with the plastic terrain pieces from Battle for MacCragge strewn through the middle, it was pretty obvious what happened on this planet:

A spaceship crash-landed on this planet and plowed right through the middle of the facility. Two warring factions of lego mecha are fighting for control of both the facility itself and the precious databanks in the spaceship's cockpit (the flags as well as the clear pole thingys are objective markers). But the spaceship was carrying biological specimens of an unknown species, including a living hive mother, who has crawled from the wreckage and established a colony on the planet. Her children care nothing for the humans' civil war and are ready to feast on the flesh of any mecha pilots foolish enough to make planetfall.

Chris (the black and red mecha) played the defender, and set up his army in the "northern" half of the facility. I set up my Tyranids in the southwest, near the spaceship cockpit, and Ben put his beige/grey mecha in the southern half of the fortress.

A nice view down the "canyon" between the two halves of the facility.

The victory point rules in Mechaton are very clever. Each player has a "point multiplier", calculated once at the start of the game. Having the fewest mechs increases your multiplier, as does having the fewest total attatchments. Having the most mechs or the most attatchments , and decreased for the player with the most mechs and most attatchments. Your score is your multiplier times the total number of functional mecha and flag points you control.

If you tool your army up for maximum power, you'll be punished by this rule. It rewards the player who can do more with less. Since each army is constructed in private and then are all revealed at the same time, there's a psychological aspect to to army building. How low will you go to try to undercut the enemy?

Chris, with the fewest units and thus the highest point multiplier, started the game in the lead, so Ben and I ganged up on him right away.

Whenever you activate one of your units, you roll 2 white d6 for the all-purpose capabilities of a basic mech. Additional colored dice are granted by attatchments, such as weapons, armor, sensors, wings, etc. Out of the dice you've rolled, you can assign one die each to the categories of attack, defense, movement, and spotting. (If a category is left empty, you simply don't get to do that thing this turn.) White dice can be used for anything, but colored dice are restricted -- the blue die granted by an armor upgrade, for instance, can only be assigned to defense.

The choice of how to assign your dice can be quite tactically challenging. You never have enough good rolls to be able to do all the things you want. Frequently you'll have to change your plan once you see how the dice fall.

The d10s next to each unit show its initiative value for the round, while the blue d6s are defensive values. If you're attacking a unit that's already moved, it will already have assigned a die to its defense for the round, so you know exactly what you'll need to roll for attack to damage it.

When you attack a unit that hasn't already moved this round, it gets to activate in response. It can try to jump for cover, counterattack you, or it can hit a third unit, triggering a chain reaction of activations. Anybody activated this way doesn't get to go later in the round when their initiative number comes up -- they've already gone.

This system sounds a little confusing, but it works really well in practice. No player has to wait very long without getting a chance to do something; a mech is never destroyed without getting one last chance to do something cool; clustered-up three-way melee battles can be resolved smoothly and fairly.

The Tyranids, armed with lots of melee weapons and speed boosters, have climbed up the wall and started ripping into Chris' defending mechs.

The yellow d6s are spotting values. In Mechaton, any unit can use one of its dice to "spot" an enemy unit, though mechs with specialized spotting attatchments are better at it. Any player attacking the spotted unit later in the round can use the value of the spot die to boost its damage. So the way to overcome high defense is to use teamwork -- one mech spots and a second attacks.

The voracious Tyranid monsters climb over each other to get to the mech on top of the wall!

A mech with a movement attatchment gets an extra green d6 to boost its movement and can also ignore terrain while moving. The attatchment can be represented however you want: the mech at top has rocket boosters on its back, while I used an adrenaline-gland-enhanced Hormagaunt in each squad to indicate the same thing.

The battlefield mid-game. Ben has an artillery mech, with double artillery weapon attatchments represented by a back-mounted rocket pod, sitting way back on the facility at bottom, which is doing a lot of damage to me. Artillery weapons allow attacks on anything more than 9 inches away, with or without line of sight. I treated my Hive Tyrant, at bottom-left, as an artillery mech also, but with only one artillery weapon ( and two melee weapons -- what else would those Scything Talons be?) it wasn't nearly as effective.

Chris is holding up best he can under the onslaught. This was about the point where, having knocked him out of first place, Ben and I started turning on each other.

Ben's mech was holding the flag on the spaceship cockpit. I decided to rush him with my Hive Tyrant. Double melee attatchments means you can roll two red d8s, instead of d6s, when attacking an enemy within one inch. Since defense is only ever rolled on d6s, those d8s can be devastating.

Ben's mech had the legs ripped off it by my first attack, and rather than crawling to safety the pilot decided to fight to the last, defiantly facing the looming monstrosity with all guns blazing. It looked hopeless, but just before the Tyrant's plunging talon pierced its target, an incoming missile barrage from Ben's artillery blew the Tyrant up into tyranid-giblets. Ben described gory chunks splattering across the mech's windshield as the pilot hyperventilated and soiled himself.

The next turn, a few of my little bugs charged the spaceship and finished off the brave, but mortally wounded, beige mech. But he rolled really well with his counterattack and killed them right back. Mutual annihilation. Nobody left alive. Oh, the drama!

The turn after that, I finally got a unit of bugs in there to capture the spaceship cockpit, though they had to climb up a pile of their own dead to get to it

The northern facility was the site of the fiercest fighting in the early game, but in the last few turns Chris and Ben both retreated to focus on the skirmish in the canyon and on the eastern border. Then there was no more prey, so the Tyranids left too. By the end of the game the northern facility was abandoned, leaving this scene of desolation.

The battlefield at end game. Behold the horrors of war.

Ben has the flag at upper-left as well as those in the bottom half of the fortress, and although his mech at center is under fierce assault he still owns that flag too. Chris owns the flag at far right and the one under the ledge in the southeast. I've still got the hive node back at my base in the southwest, plus the flag in the spaceship cockpit and the one in the north half of the fortress. But I only have two units left alive.

The final score was extremely close, something like Ben 25, Chris 25, me 24.

A view down the central canyon. A relationship diagram from Bliss Stage is visible in the background. The orange thing in front of the camera is a broken-off "flamethrower" arm.

One of Chris's last functional mechs surveys the carnage.

Mechaton vs. 40k: Mechaton wins.

Psychologists have empirically determined that there are five dimensions which form the best basis for broadly describing peoples' personality traits. This isn't new, but I've only recently heard about it.

Agreeableness: the friendly person vs. the grouch
Conscientiousness: the messy roommate vs. the neat roommate
Extraversion: the social butterfly vs. the shy recluse
Neuroticism: the relaxed optimist vs. the paranoid worrier
Openness: the curious experimenter vs. the traditionalist

(Notice how every one of those distinctions applies to Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street! Hmmm...)

I'm interested in this because these five dimensions could be a good starting point when creating a fictional character, whether it's for a story or an RPG. One could even imagine making these five into numbers on a character sheet, in a game that focused mostly on social interaction.

Each axis of this system is useful not just as a way to describe a single character, but as a way of contrasting two characters. Thinking back to high-school English, the literary theory is that characters are defined by their foils. Not just "Alice is neurotic", but "Alice is more neurotic than Bob", and this defines the way they interact, and the contrast between them leads to humor and/or drama.

And if Alice is more neurotic than Bob and also more extraverted than Clarence, then you can start to see how putting your main character together with different foils in different scenes brings out different aspects of her personality in order to make her a more three-dimensional character. And the Big Five Personality Traits can give some inspiration for how to start doing this.

I think that's pretty neat.

I'm signing up to do a voter-registration drive tomorrow (Saturday) from about 9am to 2pm. This is gonna be fun! Most likely it means sitting at a table in front of a store and inviting passersby to register.

It's going to be a lot less stressful than canvassing, since I don't have to try to persuade anybody about who to vote for, just persuade them to register.

This is part of a national voter registration drive by the Obama campaign. Since young people are very likely to vote Democrat, registering lots of young people to vote for the first time is good strategy. But it's not just good strategy, it's also the right thing to do. Even if the people we register don't end up voting for Obama, by getting people registered we are embodying Obama's values, i.e. breaking down peoples' cynicism and getting them to participate in government again.

I know there are a lot of people who don't think their vote matters; I used to think the same way. But the fact is, the fewer people vote, the more the political process can be dominated by extremists, special interests, and insiders. One person voting or not voting might not seem like it makes a difference, but not voting is like littering -- one aluminum can on the side of the road isn't going to destroy the world, but that behavior in aggregate will.

And hey, if you're reading this and you're not registered, shame on you! The way to do it varies state by state, so there's no one single eas link I can post, but here's the links for the three states where I know I have readers:Connecticut California Illinois.

Also, by the way, any of my friends who live in Silicon Valley who are thinking about volunteering for the Obama campaign -- you can sign up here!

I can't believe I forgot to mention this in my previous post: the single most annoying UI design mistake in Firefox, my personal pet peeve, has been fixed.

Firefox 2: I put a username and password into a site and click "login". Firefox pops up a dialog box asking "Do you want Firefox to remember this password?"

Well gee, Firefox, I don't know whether I want you to remember it, because since the site hasn't responded to me yet, I don't know whether my login was correct! I don't want to tell you to remember the password I just typed, and then have the site tell me it's wrong. And I can't proceed with my login attempt until I answer this question. It's a catch-22.

Firefox 3: I put a username and password into a site and click "login". The same question as before appears, but instead of being in a dialog box it's in a status-line thingy that drops down from the top of the screen. It's not modal, so I can ignore it until after the site has let me in and then click "remember", or not.

Big improvement.

The Obama campaign asks that volunteers don't talk to the press about our experiences canvassing, and that includes blogging about it. If you want to know how it went, email me and I'll tell you about Indiana privately. But I don't see any reason I shouldn't post this picture of me enjoying the fresh air in the Indiana countryside:

Or link to this article about high turnout about Porter County, the county I visited. Go democracy!

Also, there was a spot on ABC this morning which showed (briefly) the Palo Alto campaign office where I've been volunteering. I'll post a YouTube link if I can find it.

Anyway, I'm happy with how tonight went. Sure, our guy lost in Indiana, but it was practically a tie (51%-49% with a difference of only 20,000 total votes out of a million cast) and much better than polling predicted. I'm satisfied! And he got a landslide in North Carolina. Even if this isn't enough to end the primary, it demonstrates that six weeks of Reverend Wright "dominating the news like a missing white girl" (John Stewart) did not fatally damage the Obama campaign. Despite the fact that the Clintons, the Republicans, and the TV news guys were all piling on to this crazy "God Damn America"-saying preacher nonstop, the voters shrugged and moved on to more substantive issues for a change. Maybe people are not so dumb this year. Hooray!

EDIT: here's that TV spot I mentioned.

If you don't mind using beta software, I highly recommend you download and try out Firefox 3 beta 5. Firefox 3 isn't coming out for another couple of months, but the beta is very high quality.

Obviously, I'm biased here, but I claim absolutely no credit for this -- I work on experimental stuff in Labs and didn't have anything to do with making Firefox 3. But it's an improvement in two really big ways (and lots of smaller ways).

First, it has the Awesome Bar. (That name was originally a joke, but it stuck.) When you type into the location bar in Firefox 3, it will autocomplete to sites in your history or bookmarks based on matches with any part of the URL or page title. This means that most of the time, even if you have only the vaguest memory of visiting a page, you can easily get back to it just by typing in whatever fragments you do remember. Once you get used to using this, it's really hard to go back.

The other big deal is the performance improvements. A major criticism of Firefox 2 is that in many cases it was slower and took up more memory than Firefox 1. People have said that it was bloated, that it had a lot of memory leaks, and that development seemed to be going backwards. Well, it seems like the guys who work on the low-level stuff have done a bang-up job with fixing those memory leaks and speeding up Javascript and page rendering. Complicated webapps that do a lot of processing in Javascript -- like Google Mail and Google Maps -- now work much, much faster. (I think most of the speedup was in Firefox 3 beta 4 -- I was amazed at how much faster AJAXy stuff was when I upgraded from b3 to b4.)