Checksum Arcanius

You can now say that you read the blog of the secretary of the Libertarian Party of King County.

Yeah.

Now, the story…

About a week ago, I got an email from the Libertarian Party of King County (LPKC) inviting me to a “Liberty Forum” at the Azteca resturant in Bellevue. Well, I like Mexican food, and I like liberty, so I thought, sounds like a good deal to me!.

I made it to the resturant (after driving maddeningly around in circles due to the circuitous nature of Bellevue’s roads in the vicinity of Azteca), and on the way to the back room, I ran into the Jimmas, but that is another story. After chatting with them, I went back into the room, where the experience truly began. In attendance was Ruth Bennett, recent gubernatorial candidate who won something on the order of 50 times the votes that divided the other two candidates, J Mills, a senatorial candidate, who later spoke at length about the contested governor’s election, King 5’s mistreatment of the Libertarian Party, and several other topics. But back to the story.

The first order of business was election of new officers. Two students from the University of Washington became chair and vice-chair of the LPKC, but then when the call went out for nominations for the Secretary, the room was silent. Well, I had actually played with the idea of running for an office before arriving, but there was a small problem – I was not a member of the Libertarian Party, officially. I informed the group of my willingness to fill the position, and of the caveat.

“Well, we can fix that,” burst out Ruth. So, with a move to nominate me, a second, and no objections, a vote was taken, and I was unanimously elected to the post of Secretary of the Libertarian Party of King County.

My duties consist of taking minutes at about four executive meetings over the next year and a few other miscellaneous tasks that I’ll have to get rebriefed on, because frankly, I forgot what they were. So as you can tell, I’m already doing a great job…

More seriously, however, could this be the start of my political career?

I am sitting in my Philosophy of Science class listening to my teacher pontificate about how government programs really are more efficient and accountable than those in the private sector.

 

 

 

 

 
Oh

 

 

 

 

 
My

 

 

 

 

 
Goodness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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I think that the worst thing that ever happened to my ability to completely read books was a laptop computer. When the computer can go anywhere I can, almost as easily as a book, there are plenty of excuses to hop on it (check email is a good one), and plenty of reasons to stay on (get involved in an IM conversation), and the reasons to leave (sleep, books) never seem complelling enough until they are already by the wayside. Thus, I write this at home, already having missed 10 minutes of my class; I don’t know if I’ll even make it there today, since, well, I’m on my computer…

After seeing the robot off into the hands of the FedEx guy to 1:30 today, Dan and I went into Seattle to eat, walk Alki beach, and eventually, watch Constantine at the Cinerama. I had read a review in the Seattle Times that, though not exactly lauding, piqued my interest, so I decided it was worth a shot, and most any movie is better in the Cinerama.

And the choice was a good one. Though Dan didn’t think too much of it except for the special effects, I quite liked just about everything about the movie. Maybe it has something to do with my own internal search for truth; I don’t know. But Keanu Reeves was the right man for this role, and the theology behind the movie was intriguing, to say the least. The movie could have been extraordinarily silly, but for me, somehow, it stayed on the right side of the line, and instead I found it fun, exciting, and very much worth the day away from work.

This morning, I went to bed at about 6:00 am after staying up to finish up the Chairman’s Award submission before the deadline at 9:01 pm tonight. The good news is that I actually did finish it. On the other hand, I don’t know how much sense I make at 6:00 am, so I’ll probably have to go back and edit it today But at least that is considerably easier than writing the entire thing tonight, with the deadline quickly approaching.

No, I didn’t fall off the end of the earth… Instead, I have been below the radar due to the upcoming FIRST Robotics Competition deadlines. Along with Tim and Cheuk, I have done a lot of work on the TRC website, preparing to win (hopefully) its third sraight Best Website award. Since the site is written in ColdFusion, I have started to learn a little more about the Macromedia product. Its fairly easy to pick up on the basics, and already I have implemented foward-looking event queries (it’s a little bit of a hack, but it should work through the end of the year, and it will never be worse than it was before, when it only showed events on the current day), a more intelligent “What FIRST means to me” cutoff point (before it was hard limited to 500 characters; now it searches for the end of a sentence that occurs after 200 characters), and a new banner that most people, including me, are not entirely pleased with (suggestions are welome – but before February 22nd, please).

So go take a look and let me know what you think.

I planned this post last week, after my second successful geocaching expedition, but in a fit of blogger’s block, I was unable to convert it into a post. So now it comes today, after my third successful and fun geocaching expedition. This time the location was Woodinville, the target was a multi-cache on the Burke-Gilman trail. Along for the fun this time was a member of the fairer sex, a fellow BCC student and adventurer named Vanessa. After finding the cache at the fourth tree, we ate lunch at a nice Mexican place and then called it an afternoon. Overall, quite an enjoyable experience.