Kaff, kaff

The theme of the teams this year is B-movies. So I'm on "The Invisible Man in the End Zone", and there's "The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman Who Wouldn't Go Long", "Count Stripula", and "Abominable Throwman". Our team's logo is a marked end zone with a little word balloon coming out of nowhere saying, "I'm open!"

From the 40 minutes of playing that I watched, it looks like we might have a good team this year.

I even bought some new cleats for the season. I have some nice Nike Air Shark high-tops from last year, which unfortunately are too narrow for my extra-wide feet (they're size 11), and chafed my feet all year last year. I found some Nike Land Sharks (3/4 height) which are size 12s and bought those. I think they'll be much more comfortable.

Meanwhile, I spent all day today tracking down a really lousy bug.

A little context: I've been hacking some of our frameworks to update them to behave nicely with some of the new standards on Mac OS X. This has been a little more effort than originally expected, but not a lot more, and as I've mentioned before I wrote some code which Tom was able to re-use as well, so it's had its side benefits. As it turns out, though, some of what I need to change is in a framework I'm not familiar with, and this particular bug turned out to be in some rather gnarly code which I had never seen before, and which turned out to be tough to track down. I think I finally nailed it before I left today, though, which will be a really good feeling if so. I really want to get this project behind me and move on to the more interesting (and important) stuff.

Gah.

The Presidential election is still in doubt, with the recount in Florida showing that the race there is closer than anyone thought, and there will likely be many lawsuits filed over the matter. It's possible we might see the election get tossed to the House of Representatives, which probably would mean a Bush presidency. I think if the House can't decide by sometime in March, then the Vice President (Gore) becomes President until a decision is reached. Sheesh!

The Presidency aside, I'm actually very happy with the election results. The Democrats gained seats nationally in both houses of Congress, and might prompt a 50-50 split in the Senate. They gained seats in the California legislature, which is very, very firmly under their control now. And every state and country referendum went the way I voted, except for the "use of private contractors for civil engineering projects" one (which passed). School Vouchers was defeated resoundingly, getting just under 30% of the vote, which makes me really happy. (Venture capitalist Tim Draper, who backed the measure with $23 million of his own fortune, somehow really honks me off whenever I read anything about him.) Apparently a similar measure lost big in Michigan, too.

The only real downer is that a couple of states passed anti-gay-marriage laws. But overall this was a pretty decent election. Not "a great victory for liberalism" or anything, but mostly a pretty successful turning back of a barbarians at the gates for another couple of years.

Even if Bush wins, I think liberals have things to be happy about.

I'm trying to plan a trip home for the Christmas holidays, but I'm a bit stymied because the cost is ridiculously high - over $600. If I leave a few days earlier then apparently I can save a couple hundred bucks, but I'm a little leery of asking my friends to sit for my kitties for that long. (I still haven't found a good cat-sitting service in this part of the Bay. Besides which, the cost of such things would balance out whatever I'd save in plane fare anyway...) So I will think on it for a few days.

What a strange week it has been. I guess I must be in a pretty good place, though, because mostly I'm not too torn up over these things which aren't going as planned.