Voting was actually anticlimactic.

I armed myself well: an MP3 player and a book to help make the wait more pleasant. Multiple forms of ID, plus bills addressed to me at my current address (since the State of Florida still hasn't sent me my new license with the proper address on it). Title IX, Chapter 104 of the 2004 Florida Statutes, just in case someone tried to interfere with my right to vote (a felony in the third degree).

No lines. No would-be troublemakers from either party. The poll worker waved away my driver's license, saying she only needed my voter registration card. It was even a paper Scantron ballot, laying to rest my apprehension about the lack of a paper trail.

The only tough thing was forcing myself fill in the bubble next to the name of a candidate I absolutely despise. But I wasn't voting for him. I was voting against his opponent.

The November B-Days just keep rolling in. Happy birthday as well to The Lunchbox!

One of my co-workers is going away on his honeymoon in less than a month, so my new boss "strongly urged" me to spend the next two weekends on a QA team to make sure I'm up to speed on the system by the time he leaves. This means I'll miss Coronation.

Normally this wouldn't bother me, but I was expecting to have the time to rehearse with the Calais Consort for our upcoming gig. And to share some vin blanc cassis. (I wonder if that stuff goes bad.)

Florida has a new system for making drivers' licenses and ID cards. For now, you can only get the new ones if you renew (or change your address, or replace a lost card) over the Internet.

I renewed both my license and my auto registration on October 1. I got the registration almost immediately. But my birthday (and thus my license's expiration date) came and went, and no card.

Monday, I tried again to renew my license over the Internet (because I really wanted one of the snazzy new cards). It told me I couldn't do so because I wasn't within 18 months of the expiration date. Arrrgh.

Conveniently, I work in the DHSMV building, so as I was getting my photo taken for my access card yesterday, I asked if I could renew my license there. "No problem!" the guy said. And then, thirty seconds later, "That's weird." And he took my license and disappeared for fifteen minutes.

According to their system, they'd mailed my new license on October 20th. So his supervisor came out and authorized a free replacement. Unfortunately, it's the boring old license style.

But at least now I've got a new picture in the DHSMV computer, so if I should happen to accidentally misplace my license, I can get the new style with the new picture.

Hey, where's my wallet?

Oh. My. GAWD.

Over the years, I've been collecting the best instrument sounds I've found on the 'Net, and compiling them into a soundfont for when I want to compose music without actually having (or renting) the genuine instruments. And it sounds fairly decent, for coming primarily from freeware sounds (plus a few that came with Finale).

But after having seen it recommended frequently on the SONAR forum, I finally gave a listen to some of the demo samples for the Garritan Personal Orchestra.

Insert your favorite obscenity-laden expression of astonishment here! This thing sounds better than some of the instrument libraries that cost thousands of dollars. I mean, listen to this clarinet! Sampled clarinets never sound quite real. Or so I used to think.

I must have it.

Looks like I started work right in time for the deadline crunch. Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I volunteered for some overtime, working until around midnight both times, and I also signed up to work Saturday and Sunday. Haven't had much downtime, but if I put in no more overtime this week, I'll take home quite a chunk of change. And that certainly doesn't suck.

Besides, the overtime work isn't anything challenging — just sitting there making fake drivers' licenses over and over again, to see if I can break anything. Every time I've had an ID picture taken, I've had to fight the urge to make faces (my usual response to seeing a camera). Now I can give in to it. I just wish I could keep some of them as souvenirs, since I've made some really good ones...

I've also started cracking the Florida license number code. I already knew that the two-digit grouping indicates the year of birth, and that the "number" begins with the first letter of the person's last name. To that knowledge, I've added the fact that the first three numbers following the letter are also derived from the last name, and never contain the numerals 7, 8 or 9. For example, reading this very post are people whose licenses almost certainly begin with P510, S512, C425 and P456 (assuming I've figured out the algorithm correctly). But not W425, because he never deigns to read blogs.

More overtime in the QA lab today. My fellow engineers seem to chafe at doing this kind of mindless work, but I'm having loads of fun.

Here's what the new Florida licenses look like:

The non-driver ID cards are similar in style:

Under-21 licenses and ID cards are similar, but are presented in a vertical format. And they're all so much nicer looking than the old ones.

"Hey, who wrote the piano concerto that goes like (hums a few bars)? I want to say Rachmaninoff, but I'm not sure."^*

"Could be Schumann, they're pretty similar."

"Are you kidding? Not if you've actually played the piano parts!"

"Okay, but they sound pretty much the same."

(sotto voce) "Maybe to a cellist..."

* Turned out to be Grieg's A Minor concerto. Boy, was I off!

The day the Calais Consort has a gig in Ybor City, there's a toilet malfunction and I have to reach into the tank to free the water cutoff, which has somehow become stuck... which wouldn't have been so bad if the tank hadn't been full of blue dye.

So now I'm going to be playing the guitar with blue fingers. Wonderful.

It's that time of year again. Christmas carols in all the malls, on the radio, on telephone hold music. And it's always the most insipid ones that seem to get the most play.

Like Do You Hear What I Hear? The saccharine melody, the stilted lyrics... Nothing against Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne¹, but the carols of the 1960s just don't hold a candle to those from earlier times.

Or The Little Drummer Boy. My beef against this one is quite specific: I sang bass in high school. For a bass, this song is worse than Pachelbel's Canon in D is to a cellist: the entire song is "Pum... pum pum pum... pum pum pum..." on the same two notes all the way through. Also, the "Rum-pa-pum-pum" in the melody always makes me think of the phrase "rumpy-pumpy". Not that that has anything to do with me hating it, I just thought I'd mention it while I was on the subject.

I think my least favorite has to be I Saw Three Ships, the Christmas equivalent of There Were Three Ravens, which is so boring that it's almost never performed in its original form, to wit:

Repeat this phrase ad nauseam, down a down, hey down hey down,
Repeat this phrase ad nauseam, with a down,
Repeat this phrase ad nauseam,
Then one more phrase that's not the same,²
With a down, derry derry derry derry down down.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of carols I do enjoy. In fact, some of them have actually moved out of the Hate column. I used to find Es ist ein Ros' entsprungen boring, for example, but as my tastes matured I was able to appreciate how beautiful it can be. I've always liked God rest ye merry, Gentlemen, which manages to be surprisingly cheerful for a tune in a minor key.

Silent Night I'm kind of ambivalent on, but I do like the story about the Germans and the English sharing a moment of fellowship across the trenches as they sang it in their respective tongues before going back to killing each other the next day. Somehow I doubt things would have gone so well had the Tommies sung the Dreidle Song instead.³

1. Great names for composers of Christmas songs, though.

2. Yes, that rhymes. Or at least it did back when There Were Three Ravens was on the charts.

3. Yeah, I know that was World War I. That was a joke, son.