More on Pups 09

So, let’s see. What else happened over the weekend?

Vegas Elvis was, in the main, quite cooperative. Occasionally it would freeze, but all one had to do was reboot Fusion and you’d be back in business. Given VE’s speed of operation, this was about 2 minutes of your life, once you realized that it wasn’t the end of the world. The printer kept coming and going, but this was merely a matter of CP showing me how to reconnect it via the software, so that wasn’t an issue either. Quite honestly, overall Vegas Elvis worked better than my Dell, which has been known to just peter out from sheer exhaustion, and Little Elvis, which is slower than the proverbial corn syrup. Still, I did keep a backup handy, but thankfully I never had to use it.

For the longest time da bruddah printah had been telling me to change the toner. But, since it printed anyhow, I ignored it. But da bruddah has a habit of stopping in the middle of a print job when it really runs out of ink, and nothing you can do, no amount of shaking and shimmying with the cartridge, will make a difference. Needless to say, this moment of Halt! took place while we were printing doubles ballots. Aaaarrgh! So, we replaced the cartridge, simple enough once we read the directions. I put it in, hit start, and guess what. Da bruddah started telling me I need to change the toner. Nice try, bro.

On the Sailor side, the Panivore discovered Au Bon Pain for the first time. Where has this been all her life? “They had all these…breads,” she reported breathlessly, her eyes wide. She bought one of each.

My favorite line of the weekend was in a round that I was walking by on my various errands. “To respond to his point about education and crime, there is no link between education and crime. Crime is what you do in your spare time.” So much for professional criminals.

JV and I talked a bit about case disclosure, the subject of Episode 1 of TVFT. He made one very good point about the word “openness,” which sets up a binary in which opponents are, obviously, against openness, which sounds inherently wrong. I’m sure we’ll talk more about it on the podcast, but the more I think about case disclosure, the more I think that it’s probably a good thing at some level, but probably not the posting of entire cases so much as a brief on framework and thesis. I have a feeling that in a year or two disclosure of some sort will be the norm; exactly how we’ll make it happen, on the other hand, remains a mystery. The attempt to level the playing field of big and small programs is a good thing; how that is achieved is problematic. And perhaps at some point big programs will always have an inherent advantage because of their size.

Speaking of the podcast, CP informed me that it hadn’t come through iTunes. I checked. I updated the RSS but never uploaded it. Is there any lingering doubt that my mind has recently been encased in cement?

Since I drove the debating Sailors in my car, the vehicle, after they disembarked Sunday evening, was awash with empty water bottles (a substance, by the way, that the Pups were selling for about $50 a pop, tsk tsk). What is it with water these days? They didn’t have water when I was a kid. If you were thirsty, you sucked on a salt lick and were happy for it. And we stayed off people’s lawns, too! Those of you who want to see what some of these people look like, by the way, should check out my new FB profile pic. Only Stealth was excluded, but, uh, her nickname is, uh, Stealth…