Needless to say, yesterday was a big day for the Democratic party. They won the House going away, and it looks like they may take the Senate as well. Democrats have their first majority among the nation’s governors since 1994. There are a few things that stood out to me that are probably worth noting:

• Despite high turnout in some states, overall turnout was average. That’s disappointing.
• Exit pools indicate that corruption was a big issue with voters. For all the talk about this election being about hatred of Bush, independents voted for Democrats because they were sick of Republicans running Congress as if they were Visigoths sacking Rome.
• I hope the first order of business for Democrats is restoring most of the rules that the Republicans did away with in order to suppress the minority party in Congress. The Democrats could keep those rules in place and abuse the Republicans the way they were abused, but that’s bad governance. Congress was a more effective and civil institution before the Republicans took over in 1994. Hopefully the Democrats can restore that to some extent.
• I worry about how President Bush will react. He did not accept that the President is accountable to Congress when Republicans ran the place. He couldn’t even be bothered to ask a friendly Congress for permission to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists more freely. Now he has to deal with the Democrats. How will that work out?
• Howard Dean deserves a ton of credit for insisting that Democrats run their party as though elections in every state are winnable. By recruiting the right candidates and spreading their funds around widely, Democrats picked up seats that seemed impossible only a few months ago. Being in the right place at the right time is as much a part of success as anything, and Dean deserves a lot of credit.
• Maybe this really was the year for the netroots. I read last night that 60% of Jim Webb’s campaign donations came in via the Internet.
• Hopefully this is the end of right wing bashing of the judicial branch. Their constant drumbeat of idiocy with regard to “activist judges” was bad for the country, and was mainly the result of their having to find something to gripe about given that Republicans held the Presidency and the legislative branch. Now that they can focus on hating Nancy Pelosi, maybe they’ll leave judges alone.

More than anything, yesterday’s election was a relief for me. I’ve been watching Republicans govern the nation poorly for the past six years, and I have been waiting for Americans to wake up and see that ideology aside, these guys were doing a rotten job. Hopefully the new Congress can do better.

Since everyone else seems to be blogging their voting experiences, I figured I’d do so as well. I voted at lunchtime today, and at my polling place there was no line. I asked the poll worker about turnout and she said it was pretty good. (I was the 169th person to vote in my precinct.) It’s rainy here, but there were still a couple of greeters outside urging us to vote for Democrats in local elections. The poll workers were, as usual, some older ladies and gentlemen, but there was one woman wandering around behind the tables. I suspect that she was a monitor of some kind, but have no idea.

In our precinct, we have optical scan ballots, but oddly enough, the machines are different than they were last time I voted (either 2005 or the Democratic primary, I can’t remember). Now we have an oval to fill in rather than an arrow to complete with a line. That was slightly confusing to one of the other voters. There was also an elderly woman there who had to get help voting the straight Democratic ticket and in favor of a big school bond issue that’s on the ballot.

It always feels good to vote, and hopefully I’ll feel better about the results tonight than I have for the past six years.

If you’re a developer, it’s a good idea to read blogs. OK, maybe not Perez Hilton or Talking Points Memo, but it’s a good idea to read blogs related to software development. Yesterday at work a bug was fixed that involved the dangers of using the HTP GET method for operations that are not safe or idempotent. Google had spidered the site, and made a bunch of chances to content by following links that made changes to the content on the server.

This is the kind of mistake that anyone can make (hopefully only once), but if the person who wrote that code regularly read the popular software development logs, they probably wouldn’t have made it at all. Last year there was a lengthy discussion of why using GET in an unsafe fashion is a very bad thing. It turns out that fixing the bug was no big deal and that the unintended changes could be reversed quickly, but why not let other people’s experience save you pain down the road? This is important especially if you work in a development shop that’s not necessarily open to new ideas (I have seen many such shops). Read some blogs, keep up with the state of your profession.

Jesse Helms’ black hands ad is one of the most infamous in US history. Running against an African American, Helms engaged in race baiting of the purest form. He won the race in the ugliest manner possible.

Here in North Carolina, we have a crazy person named Vernon Robinson running for Congress. Robinson is an African American, but is politically to the right of Jesse Helms. (He’s to the right of anyone you have ever known of.) Robinson has repurposed the ad (with the same script) to attack illegal immigrants. Robinson is a special kind of screwed up.

Today I’m here to tell you that there’s a third option that’s not often discussed in terms of elections in the United States, abstinence. I’m a liberal guy, and I vote for liberal candidates. I know lots of conservatives who vote for conservative candidates. Unfortunately for them, this year voting for conservatives means voting to continue the policies of the Bush administration, which have been a disaster for liberals and conservatives alike.

We’re mired in a never ending occupation in Iraq, which, due to the strategy pursued by the Bush administration has become a sectarian bloodbath. We have tax cuts on the book that were passed with expiration dates so that they wouldn’t look like the debt-increasing monsters that they are. The Republicans are now trying to make them permanent in spite of the fact that they’re going to break the bank. We’ve had two years where the biggest piece of domestic legislation that passed was a bankruptcy bill that screws individual consumers on behalf of banks. The biggest piece of legislation passed this year is a bill that trashes the Magna Carta.

I’m not going to be a hypocrite here. There’s almost no way I could ever vote for a Republican in anything other than a local race. But I can abstain from voting in a race. In fact, that’s what I plan to do in the Congressional race in my district this year. We have a conservative Democratic incumbent who voted for the detainee bill. I’ll be sitting that one out. If you’re unhappy with how things are going, I urge you to do the same. Don’t vote for someone you don’t like, just don’t vote at all. You’ll feel better about yourself in the morning. (Do show up and vote in the other races, though. Leaving a few spots blank on your ballot is perfectly fine.)

National Geographic is my favorite magazine. There are other magazines I like, but the only one I subscribe to is National Geographic, and I’ve been getting it for about ten years. I’ve kept every issue I’ve received, and even have them all in the slipcases you can order to keep them organized.

The thing is, I never go back and look at old issues, and my archive is already up to a good 80 or 90 pounds. Assuming I continue to subscribe for the next twenty years, I’ll have shelves and shelves of National Geographic magazines. I think it’s time to cut and run from my magazine collection. The question is, what should I do with them? I can’t imagine throwing them away.

I could offer them on Craigslist to anyone who’s willing to haul them off, but I’d prefer to donate them to some worthy institution. Anyone have any ideas on who I should contact?

Interestingly, National Geographic has a time capsule of web design of sorts on its Web site. Going back to July 1996, they have preserved the individual home pages for each issue of the magazine they’ve published since then with its original design. The archive is a good illustration of how web design has changed since then. Unfortunately, they don’t have the full content from each magazine available online. Maybe someday.