There are still nearly eight months to go before we get to vote for our next President, and there’s a lot of campaigning to be done until then. During that time, we can count on wall to wall coverage of the horse race — not who would make a better President and what the candidates believe, but rather how the candidates are doing at campaigning against one another and how likely they are to win. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that personally, I’m riveted by the horse race, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how the things President Bush and John Kerry do will affect their likelihood of winning. That said, I’m going to refrain from commenting on them here, for the most part.

The main reason, of course, is that you can get that stuff anywhere. I could tell you what I think about Kerry’s off mike moment, or Bush’s decision to start running negative ads already, but so can Chris Matthews, or Josh Marshall, or the Daily Kos, or any number of other people. I’ll leave that to them.

The other thing I’m going to try hard to fight is to talk about or link to people talking about how the candidates are misrepresenting their opponents. These guys have millions of dollars and legions of people looking out for them on the Internet. John Kerry has a new weblog on his site devoted to debunking attacks on his record.

It’s not that I’m not going to talk about the campaign, or politics, I’m just going to try to stick to actual issues. And I’m going to try to enjoy baseball season instead of campaign season.

Update: One thing I am going to try to do this weekend is get the current subscription list from my server based RSS reader posted somewhere on this site. So that you can see how I’m keeping track of the horse race — and baseball.

It looks like a couple of Senators aren’t ready to give up on the Hubble Space Telescope just yet.

I’ve been meaning to post something about the bombings today in Spain, but I honestly don’t know what to say. My heart goes out to everyone affected. I read that the bombings were not suicide bombings, I hope the Spanish government tracks down the bombers and the people who sent them.

The ugly (or wonderful, depending upon your perspective) truth: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. These days I think back on applications I worked on just two or three years ago and marvel at how crappy the code I wrote was. I hope that ten years from now, I’m still scoffing at code I wrote not long before, as it’s an indicator of improvement.

Update: Bruce Eckel’s post on generics in Java is a concrete illustration of why it’s better to know many programming languages. Oddly, I was just talking about generics with someone this morning, and thought of them mainly as a way to create type-safe collections. It’s interesting to see that their real use lies elsewhere.

My current job involves reviewing code other people wrote, finding potential security holes, and producing reports describing those holes. I therefore find this post from Ed Felten somewhat disspirting. In it he describes a study that found that once a software product is released, security holes are found at a certain rate and that rate doesn’t seem to fall regardless of how many flaws are found. That sounds counterintuitive, but the numbers bear it out. What that says to me is that it’s impossible to overvalue simplicity. It seems like no matter how much work they do on Sendmail, Postfix will always be the more secure option. Even then, Postfix has its own problems.

I’m having a very angst-ridden day. This article, which articulates well how the Republicans are ruining America, didn’t help. To be fair, Republicans are hardly solely to blame, but they’re riding a wave of sentiment that does not serve this country’s future well. The article is kind of old, but I missed it when it was initially published.

I have a good friend named Reece Rondon in Houston who was appointed late last year as the judge in a state district court by Texas governor Rick Perry. The catch was that he’d have to defend his appointment in an election this year, and he’d have to win a contested primary and the general election to keep his job. Unfortunately, last night he was beaten by his opponent in the Republican primary. That’s a real shame because Reece is a good man and was certainly a good judge. He really enjoyed the being a judge part of the job, and it seemed like he was less into the being a politician part of the job. Anyway, the fact that he was defeated in the primary really has me wondering about about how these sorts of elections work.

Obviously, Reece’s ability to serve as a judge was not the issue in the election. His court is a civil court, and I can’t imagine that more than a small handful of the people who voted will ever have any reason to even think about what kind of a job the judge in that court is doing. So the voters must be basing their votes on some other kind of criteria, and I can’t imagine it boils down to anything more than name recognition. The Houston Chronicle endorsed Reece in the primary, but he said that his opponent outspent him. What does that boil down to? His opponent having more yard signs than he did?

Needless to say, one of the main things I thought about was how I vote in those sorts of races, and honestly, I can’t say that I’m ever an informed voter when it comes to most of the questions on the ballot. That leads me to wonder whether it makes more sense to make state judges appointed just as federal judges are. Voters may recognize a judge’s name if they get busted for driving while intoxicated or make some other career damaging mistake, but if a judge does their job well, then chances are their name will never even appear in the paper. It’s not as though we have debates in these races, and in fact, I don’t believe the newspaper even interviewed the candidates. What’s the point in having an election when that’s the case? Maybe my friend’s opponent will do a great job, and deserves to have won, but I really doubt whether the vast majority of people who voted for her (or Reece) are qualified to assess whether that’s the case.

Mark Schmitt’s description of the lengths companies are going to to avoid hiring new permanent employees jibes with my recent experience.

When talking about global warming today, I mentioned fuel efficiency. Good news arrived today — Ford is going to license Toyota’s hybrid powertrain for use in its own hybrid vehicles. It should enable Ford to get to market faster with its hybrids, and should begin to make hybrids cheaper all the way around as volume goes up on parts that are shared between the two companies.

I guess you can file this story in the “closest resemblance to a Sopranos plotline” category. A clueless concerned citizen decided to run for Congress as a Republican in Texas, and was rewarded with a full fledged shakedown from party officials. Naturally, when he spoke to the media about it, the extortionists denied their name dropping and threats only to be completely burned with the candidate, Mike Murphy, busted out the tapes of their convesations. Texas Republicans are totally nuts.