It's time for the people of Tampa to vote, among other things, for who their next mayor will be. To commemorate this event, the streetcorners were full of people holding signs for candidates this morning.

What exactly does this accomplish? Do they actually think people will get into the voting booth and go, "Hey, I saw someone holding a sign with this guy's name, so I'll vote for him"?

I don't understand politics, or politicians. I especially don't understand the need to demonize and hate people who have different socioeconomic priorities. Then again, politics was rarely a topic of discussion when I was growing up; my mother was (and is) a Republican, and my father was (and is) a Democrat. They argued about plenty of things, but politics was never one of them. I was pretty much left to my own devices to develop views on the issues.

Perhaps that's why my own politics aren't easily categorized into "liberal" or "conservative". There are some points of view in each camp that I agree with, but quite a bit in each that I disagree with. Both the major American parties are plagued by corruption, hypocrisy and outright stupidity — unfortunately, they conspire between them to keep any truly alternative parties marginalized.

I had a good friend in high school — highly intelligent in all respects — whose last political decision was to join a particular party. At that point, he stopped thinking about anything political. He accepted the party line without question (sometimes even reversing his own long-held positions in order to toe the line), voted only by party affiliation, and refused to even listen to other points of view. Failings in his own party's leaders were ignored, while failings in the opposition (sometimes even the exact same failings that he was accustomed to ignoring in his own party) were gleefully seized upon as proof of how horrible their party was.

What is it about politics that turns normally intelligent people into mindless automatons?

I feel like such a schlub because I haven't really added any new content to my Web site in a very long time (well, apart from blog entries).

So, without any further ado, here's the nuptial ceremony upon which Karen and I based our own wedding.

Actually, we used an earlier (though nearly identical) version of the ceremony, from 1489, but I think this version would be of more interest to anyone looking for Renaissance wedding ceremonies, since it uses type weights and styles to differentiate between spoken text, commentary and "stage directions".

Got home from a week's vacation this morning around 2 AM. It was cold, wet and muddy, but at least it was a vacation.

We got some bad news during the trip home. Well, at least our house was still standing, we hadn't been burgled, and our pets were still alive.

But still, what a way to end a vacation.

Addendum: 1,062 email messages to slog through.

Warning: dull programmer's rant.

I've just spent the better part of two days bashing my head against a program that insisted on crashing when I allocated memory. Not when I wrote to the allocated memory, but the actual act of allocating memory caused the program to crash, despite having 38 physical megabytes of memory free.

I put all sorts of temporary lines in there to spit values into a debugging file, saw no problems. I went through it line by line with the debugger, over and over again, saw no problems except that malloc() caused a GPF. I replaced the native C malloc() calls with Windows-specific GlobalAlloc() calls. It continued to crash. I moved the memory allocation from the DLL segment of my application into the main executable, just in case that was causing problems. It continued to crash.

Finally, I found the problem, in a different section than the one that appeared to be causing the crash:

t = malloc(sizeof(s)+1);

... is not the same as:

t = malloc(strlen(s)+1);

Bah! That's the stupid crappy sort of mistake I used to make when I was first learning C. Now I can barely remember what the hell I was trying to do in the first place, since this problem had consumed me to the point of wanting to throw my computer out the window.

Oui, c'est moi, l'idiot.

This post was going to be about the experience of buying a new car, but I did something really idiotic and closed the posting window before I was finished. The ordeal was exhausting; writing about it once was tiring enough, so I'm not going to re-write it. At least not now.

Giving up my old car was like saying goodbye to a part of myself. This past January, I'd had her for thirteen years, slightly over one-third my own total age. She was a 1990 Honda Civic DX, and she ran astonishingly well for how poorly I treated her. In thirteen years, I could probably count the number of oil changes on both hands — and Django Reinhardt could have counted the number of tuneups on his left hand. She had squeaks, rattles, and only one working external lock (a rear-end collision and a thief interested in appropriating my stereo had demolished the other two). But she still ran, which was a testament to either Honda's reliability or my own stupid luck.

Nevertheless, I traded her in for a Toyota Corolla. (I hope the universe doesn't believe in symmetry, for my first car was also a Corolla.) I've moved up in the automobile world; for the first time in my life, I own a car with air conditioning. It wasn't that important in Connecticut, where I bought my first two cars — but I cursed my short-sightedness (and stinginess) when I moved to Florida.

Anyway, there are some interesting things in the owner's manual. Two graphics particularly stand out:

MEANING: You are attempting to escape from The Village. Rover has been dispatched. Be seeing you.


MEANING: This vehicle is equipped with a high-voltage anti-theft device.

I'm still not finished with the purchase experience; I have to take it in tomorrow to have the dealership install some of the features I requested. Which means I'll once again have to run the gauntlet of vultures clustered at the door.

But that's a story for another time.

Two buildings in downtown Tampa are connected by a "skybridge" tunnel, which runs over the busy street between them. When I'm going to the building on the far side of the street, I'll usually enter the nearer building, zip up to the third floor and take the tunnel over the street. It beats waiting for the walk signal, especially if it's raining.

Today, when I went in to do this, I was required to sign in and show ID. The guard asked what suite I was going to. "One thousand," I said.

"Oh, <law firm name>?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said, though I actually have no idea who's on the tenth floor. As I finished signing in, I asked, "So what's all this about, then?"

"There's a war on," he grunted, as though it was the stupidest question he'd ever heard.

"Ah, this'll really help win it, then," I said, and went about my business, which had nothing to do with the tenth floor, or in fact any floor in that building.

Afterwards, I wondered exactly what purpose it did serve. If I were a terrorist bringing a briefcase bomb into the building, how would signing my name prevent me from doing so? There were no metal detectors, the guard wasn't searching anyone's bags, and I was able to give false information and go right on in. Since he just glanced at my driver's license to make sure it had the same name that I wrote in the log book — I didn't even take it out of my wallet — it could very well have been a fake printed up on a BubbleJet.

The skybridge was completely unguarded. Anyone entering the building that way would have complete, unfettered access to the first ten floors. Anyone coming down to the first floor from the skybridge could easily go the back way to the second bank of elevators, and avoid the guard in the lobby.

So I'm not sure exactly how signing my name, when entering a building containing a bank and a bunch of law firms, will help in The War Against Terror. But you've got to do these things, you know. There's a war on.

Ihre Papieren, bitte?

Last night, I dropped my car off at the auto dealership, in order to have the security system installed. I turned in my paperwork to one of the guys behind the service counter, put my car in the indicated parking spot, gave the guy my car key, and got my complimentary rental car (same model as mine, but it smells musty and the steering wheel is sticky).

This morning, I got a call from the service manager, who wasn't there when I dropped it off. He was calling to ask why I hadn't dropped off my car like I was supposed to.

Apparently, my paperwork isn't there, my car isn't there, and nobody knows anything.

I am going to be extremely pissed if this doesn't turn out to be just a mistake.

Update: They found my car and the paperwork. No explanation as to why they had gone missing, or where they found them, but at least they have them...