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Special Elections in Fairfax County and Alexandria

Sorry this is such short notice, but for those of you who live in the 46th House of Delegates District (Skyline area of Fairfax County, and Western City of Alexandria), you have a special election tomorrow, January 13th, to replace Delegate Brian Moran who is running for Governor.

Your ballot will be:

Blue Commonwealth has a map of the district in case you are not sure. The district trends Democratic by a very wide margin, but in a special election for just one local seat the turnout is likely to be abysmally low and the Republicans have a pretty good shot at an upset win here. Please vote if you are in the district.

There is a second special election for all of Fairfax County to elect a new Chairman of the Board of Supervisors. This one is scheduled for February 3rd, and turnout should be a little better. According to the Fairfax county board of elections, the ballot will look like:

One of the more amusing aspects of this race is that Patrick Herrity (a Republican McCain supporter) is running as far away from his Republican identity as he can. His signs are in green and white and yellow, and his message has been all about change. In a local election, party affiliation will not be on the ballot; but it’s pretty clear that the Democrats are mostly backing Sharon Bulova and the Republicans are mostly backing Pat Herrity. I could not find a campaign website for either of the other two candidates; and it appears to be a two way race despite four names being on the ballot.

Get out and vote if you are in these local areas.

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2009 01 12 snolan Local
News
Politics
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A guitar playlist from TunePost

TunePost keeps improving their beta, now it correctly identifies your older version of flash and prompts a FlashPlayer 10 install to get it to work. So if you had trouble with the stuff I posted a couple days ago, download FlashPlayer 10 and try again.

The following playlist is guitar music: flamenco, classical, spanish, and rock.

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2009 01 10 snolan Music
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Testing TunePost’s embedded Music feature

Just messing around with the early public beta from TunePost. This might not work for everyone, but you should get music when you hit the play button in the embedded code window below…

For those who prefer Rock, and a whole playlist rather than just one targeted song:

2009 01 07 snolan Fun
Music
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Wow – Virtualization via Xen is awesome!

We’ve been virtualizing our systems where I work for months now. OpenSuSE 11 with Xen virtualization and many OpenSuSE virtual servers on each physical server. Today that paid off big time, when I needed to clear one of the physical servers off, I was able to simply shutdown the virtual servers on that host, copy their logical volumes with dd commands piped through ssh over the network, tweak a couple of configuration files, and start up the virtual servers on the new physical server in only a few steps, and what would have only been a few minutes if I had made a typographical error the first time I tried the dd command.

It is simply amazing how far server technology has come in a very short time.
More details for those who care, after the fold…
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2009 01 05 snolan Computers
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The new GParted LiveCD 0.4.1-2 boots RAM disk now

The new GParted LiveCD (v0.4.1-2) allows booting into a RAM disk so you can eject the CD and shred other servers with it while the first server is still doing long-running shred commands. Very cool!

For those who don’t know about it, GParted is a GPL (free and open source) software suite that allows re-partitioning of hard drives for Linux, BSD, Mac OS, Windows, Solaris, Irix, and AIX. It all fits on a LiveCD or USB, and works beautifully for re-configuring boot partitions or securely erasing many disk drives.

2009 01 05 snolan Computer Security
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Yuletide Ball in Washington

My New Year’s Eve started with me day cleaning my home office thoroughly, a multi-day job I am only getting started on; I want to reorganize and deep clean everything and re-configure my home work space…

I wasted a few hours fighting with horribly written Windows software to update our old Garmin StreetPilot 2620 GPS with new maps and more pre-programmed waypoints. The GPS is great, but the PC interface is crap.

We then headed over to the JW Marriott in DC to attend New Year’s Eve Gala at Yuletide Ball with friends. Ann and Dan brought Prosecco which we matched to our own. Montelliana Extra Dry (Montello E Colli Asolani) is fabulous as a dry palate cleanser before dinner.

The gala was a lot of fun, and we got to see many friends we’ve not seen in some time. Squeezed in loads of dancing and saw the current world 10 dance champions Gherman Mustuc and Iveta Lukosiute do some pretty amazing routines.

New Year’s Day we snagged a bite at the Starbucks in the hotel and headed over to the National Aquarium ($7 each) and saw perhaps 140 small and large aquariums with fish, corals, eels, turtles, frogs, newts, and even a couple of crocodiles.

We chased that with lunch and then a lengthy visit to the lovely new Sant Ocean Hall exhibit at the Natural History Museum, which is splendid, and I am still stunned by one high-tech gadget display of a globe with a projector inside suspended by three wires from the ceiling running a educational program about the many important functions the ocean serves our planet; while people watched the globe-screen images from all sides… really amazing… I want a globe like that; wow!

It was called Global Ocean Systems, and apparently there are four shows it is programmed to run. We scored a copy of the museum’s own Ocean book, gorgeous, informative, short article loaded for easy reading in short bursts.

Les Halles is closed, which is sad.

Had fun dancing with Michele, though I had problems with Mambo again. The Ballroom Studio students did well overall.

Woke up Friday to discover the room bill under our door, and they’d charged us $7.70 each for two bottles of tea that had been precariously balanced on a vending plate with sensors under it; the bottles toppled off when I closed a drawer in the bureau that the plate was on top of and we never drank the over priced tea. It’s pretty bad when you lease a room for convenience and comfort and it’s booby trapped with extortion devices. The hotel quickly removed the charges for that.

I bought a new latin shirt from Julio & Julio, and learned that they will be at a few Arthur Murray events this year.

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2009 01 02 snolan Dance
Local
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Yuletide Ball: New Year’s Eve Gala and Dance Competitions

Yuletide Ball has it’s New Year’s Eve Gala ($160/person) tonight; Dan Van Bey may have one more ticket with our group, and the Yuletide folks may have more for general seating.

The Gala is one big New Year’s Eve party with lots of ballroom dancing, some decent food and possibly some professional dance shows. It’s probably not worth the admission price unless you are a dancer and know several other dancers who are going; in which case you’ll make your own party like we do. Gala starts at 7pm and runs until they throw us out of the ballroom well after midnight in the new year.

There are competitions and showcase recitals most of the day each day for the next several days, and even a few dance workshops too for students of ballroom dance. I will be dancing with Michele during session 1 “Pro/Am & Student/Student American Rhythm” Thursday, New Year’s Day, from 7pm until about 10:30pm (only a few heats/entries in there somewhere, probably towards the end). I will be dancing again with Michele and with Ruth during session 2 “Pro/Am & Student/Student American Smooth” on Friday from 1pm through 4:30pm (only a few heats/entries in there, probably spread out).

See the Yuletide Ball website for additional information, prices, schedules. Parking at the JW Marriott is difficult, we usually drive around the block and pay at one of the numerous parking garages in the theatre district along 13th street Southbound, some have indoor access to the hotel. Valet is pricey but available at the 14th street Northbound entrance to the hotel.

2008 12 31 snolan Personal Comments (0) Permalink

Now we clean the pantry….

The fun never stops at our house, we are cleaning the pantry and finding some… uh… er… rather old gems in the canned/jarred food category. Uh, a lot of stuff is getting disposed of since it is so old. Must develop a new habit of checking the pantry before going shopping or when in the mood for a snack.

2008 12 29 snolan House
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Pleased by TV options

I am not myself in the market for a new television, but went out shopping for a new television with Fyrlocc yesterday to help her sort out the crazy marketing doublespeak from the pertinent and useful facts. I was pleasantly surprised by the dropping prices, generally better pictures on nearly all displays, and useful features. I was disappointed in the extortionate prices on extra things (HDMI cables particularly), installation fees, and mounting brackets. I remain deeply disappointed in most brand name televisions ability to display a decent standard definition program, and am deeply disappointed that for most Americans, standard definition television will still make up most of their watching time, and most of the televisions simply display crap when offered a standard definition signal (from an old DVD player, older VHS player, or from their standard definition cable/satellite reception box).

HDTV shopping details after the fold…
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2008 12 29 snolan Personal Comments (0) Permalink

Haiku Day, Solstice

Hear Winter Solstice wind
Enjoy warm hugs, bright smiles, love
Contrast brings beauty

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2008 12 22 snolan Christmas
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