Checksum Arcanius

Two teenage boys were killed and another was injured in a fiery single-car crash in the Cougar Mountain area near Issaquah yesterday.

The crash occurred about 1:05 p.m. on Southeast 60th Street near 182nd Avenue Southeast, said Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County Sheriff’s Office. The 2000 Volkswagen Jetta went off the road, struck a tree and burst into flames.

Excessive speed apparently caused the crash, Urquhart said.

The 16-year-old driver and a male passenger in the front seat died at the scene. A 14-year-old in the back seat was taken to Harborview Medical Center.

Investigators did not release the identities of the boys. All are believed to be from Bellevue, Urquhart said.

Thats 8 driveways down from me…

The Seattle Times Contributed to this article

Simple: so you don’t have to look like a fool and publish gibberish like this.

“Because they are windowless, iframe elements support the zIndex attribute in Internet Explorer 5.5 and later. Windowed controls, such as select elements, ignore the zIndex attribute. If your applications were designed for earlier versions of Internet Explorer, you might want to redesign pages containing iframe elements that are stacked on top of windowed controls. You can use the visibility attribute to hide windowed controls that you want an iframe element to overlap. You can also position windowed controls so that iframe elements do not overlap them.”

… Or Internet Explorer could follow the rules, and web designers wouldn’t have to worry about Select boxes appearing on top of divs, and other such crap that makes IE a pain to make webpages for.

I believe I have found a more elegant solution for my permalink problem – directories. I already had WordPress running running from from the /wp, directory, but with a duplicated index.php in the root directory, which acted as a front end. Now, I still have that same setup, but the internal pointer is to the copy inside the /wp directory, so all the links you see will have /wp in front of them now. So all I have to do is keep that direcotry untouched, and all my links should continue to work. So this is my little way to fight link rot, unless you already linked to me, but even then I won’t contribute to link rot until I move on from wordpress, if ever. Yay!

For the Titan Robotics Club, I mostly stood by while Bob set up Mailman. He managed to get everything working extrodinarily well, even making all of my mail work better (especially with AOL) , by using Comcast’s mail server as a smarthost.

Now, Mailman isn’t a perfect solution to the TRC’s needs. For example, each mailing list a user subcribes to creates what is essentially another user account. This list-centric thinking instead of user-centric thinking means that the a single user could have to remember a seperate passwords for each list, unless they explicitly set them up the same. This is a true issue, and the designers of Mailman know it as well (its on their list of things to fix in upcoming versions).

However, the more I become familiar with Mailman, the more I am impressed by its consistent design philosophy and robust nature. So far, it has caught every single bounced email (no eternal loops like the MeetingCenter would send out), its archives are excellent resources, and its admin pages are feature-rich and while not compact, overall quite well laid out.

Three cheers for Mailman. I might learn Python just to help out with the project.

Yesterday, for an unknown reason, I awoke at 6:00am. And I wasn’t going back to sleep, so I capitulated, ate breakfast, showered, and left for work. By the time I made it there, however, the anti-sleepiness had completely left me, so I scooted the chiar forward, leaned it back covered myself with my coat and got another hour and a half or two hours before work.

I had a nice long talk with Liz Vandenberge today, and learned some important things about the changes we are being told about, and the reasons behind them. First and foremost, I was happy to hear that the ASB is on our side. They want the clubs to succeed, and as one of the most widely recognized clubs inside and outside of IS, they definitely want us to succeed.

In order for that to happen, however, since we are an ASB club, we must function within the ASB guidelines, which have not been consistently enforced before. Sinc we often didn’t know about, or bother to find out about, these regulations, we often felt like they were punitive, constricting and arbitrary. And while I am no friend of bureacracy, remember that the reason it exists is because someone has screwed over the system before, and they want to prevent it from happening again, so they make rule. True, often they are arbitrary, but once we know about them ahead of time, we can plan with them in mind, and in reality, there is very little we are prohibited from doing once we get the proper approval.

I will now transcribe the list of what we went over:

1. If we want something in the bulletin, we need to get it approved by the advisor [Brad]. Marty’s preferred method is email, and this should make it really easy for us too. Once the executive board decides on a course of action that requires an announcement in the bulletin, an officer emails the announcement to Brad, who looks it over and (presumably) approves it by sending it on to Marty. We can also submit things on written clearly and legibly on paper, and signed by Brad, but I don’t see why we would bother; email seems a lot easier.
2. As most of you are probably aware now, if we want to schedule the building for use, we must do so at least a week in advance. According to Marty, this is as a courtesy to the custodians who need to scheudule their work around the activities going on in the building to maximize their limited time. The custodians have always been extremely generous with the TRC and we should definitely try to make their lives easier when possible. Besides, planning things at least a week in advance is always a good practice.
3. Most of the fundraising rules that we need to abide by are due to various federal, state, and local laws governing non-profit organizations and public money (since we are part of a public institution). In order to comply with these laws and pass an audit, if that were to ever happen, we need to work within the bounds of these rules. They may feel restricting at first, but I trust they are much nicer to deal with than an auditor who is finding discrepencies.
4. Liz gave me a packet, called “ASB Fundraising.” I suggest we go over it at the next leadership meeting. Speaking of leadership meetings, last Sunday’s seems to have worked for most people, and when I talked to Genevieve Sunday night, she indicated that in the future, Sunday afternoon/evenings would work for her too. I move to make Sunday leadership meetings a regular activity. What times are best for everyone?
5. Liz also gave me the form that we need to fill out to get a fundraising plan approved by the ASB. The timeline for this is as follows: We submit the completed form (including signatures) to Liz before Tuesday at lunch, and it will get onto the General ASB’s agenda for Wednesday, and presuming that it is approved, we can begin fundraising that Wednesday afternoon. Thats a pretty good turnaround – we never have to wait more than a week to get a fundraiser approved.
6. Raffles are a form of gambling – as such, the police must be notified, and tickets can only be sold to adults (18+). Of course, the ASB must also approve it as a fundraiser, since they are only allowed to have three raffles a year for all the clubs in the IS ASB.
7. I also got an “ASB Activity Coordinator Guide,” which is basically a guide for us on how to make Brad’s life as advisor easier. We should go over this at the next leadership meeting.
8. As far as spending money goes, the big deal is that we show that it was students that decided to spend the money, not teacehers, mentors, or anyone else; but the students in the club. As such, I suggest we hold off on ammending the constitution with the current proposal and wait for a new ammendment which will embrace this new reality. In other words, its ok for only the executive board to vote to spend money – as long as the executive board is composed of students in the club. This is a big improvement over what I thought would turn into a requirement of having the entire club to vote on every expenditure. I also think this is a vast improvement over the way we have been doing things in the past, where most people had no idea we were spending club money on. All expenses must be preapproved, and that is also a good way to run things. Also, its easy, since now pre-approval simply means a vote of easily-accessible club officers, in a meeting where official minutes are taken.
9. Brad, or another staff memeber who willingly accepts responsibility for us, must be in the building whenever we are in the building. This one is pretty straightforward.
10. As a part of the ASB, we can’t spend money on anything that gives students credits or a grade.

So student leaders – write back to the list on wether Sundays are a good day for you, and what times work for a weekly meeting.

Remember, ASB is on our side. We can not fail now :-)

I did.

Its amazing how good I felt about myself after choosing, finally, to vote libertarian in this primary election. Now the ballot is filled out and in the mail – gotta love the absentee system. I took a picure of both sides of the ballot just for fun too.

Voting with a free conscience is a great gift. I pity all the republicans and democrats who can’t do that because, as I explained cheerily to the rest of my family, the political landscape is like a slope descending on one side into the water. The democrats pull down and to the left; the republicans pull down and to the right. Their combined effort takes us straight towards the water. Alone, the democrats and republicans would still each take us underwater (financially as well of other metaphorical ways). Only the libertarians pull our government away from drowning all of us (greens, in case you are wondering, dig down and to the left. Their lpolicies will lead to not only drowning, but dronwing in filthy mud, probably among our own waste as well.

Vote Libertarian. You won’t regret it.