Ballot Order

The democratic party has selected their candidate for governor. He has no public policy statements, website, or twitter feed. He has an inactive Facebook group, a picture of himself with some fish, and his own name misspelled. From all appearances, this is the entirety of his campaign. Yet he won by a 2:1 margin.

How? He was first on the ballot. This isn't the first time.

There are two groups that should learn from this.

First, voters. If you don't know who you prefer in an election, don't just pick someone on the spot! All you do is water down the opinions of the informed voters, the ones that should be making the decision. If you don't have an opinion on one office, just don't vote for that office! Your votes for all the other offices will still count!

Casting a vote, any vote, is something you should take very seriously. If you're not prepared to do that, don't vote.

Second, legislators. Ballot order is fixed, by law, in alphabetical order by last name. Ballot order clearly has a significant effect on outcome, giving some candidates advantage over others. Laws should never, ever help particular candidates. That's undemocratic and unamerican.

Each voter should be presented with the candidates in a different, randomly chosen order. The uninformed voters who just pick the first candidate on the list would cancel each other out. If we're doomed to use these stupid electronic voting machines with no paper records, we should at least use them in a way that makes elections work.

And if anyone tells you that these machines can't be made to put candidates in random order, give the machine to me. I'll fix it for you. I won't even charge. This is not a technical problem. It's a legal problem, and it has a legal solution.

Marsha Blackburn: On Municipal Broadband

Ms. Blackburn issued this press release recently. I'd like to ask the Congresswoman to clarify something. You are defending the states' rights, yes. But which rights, specifically? The rights to override the will of the people of a city or town? You claim to be in favor of small, local government. Yet the policies you are defending seem inconsistent with this. You are, in fact, defending the power of central government over local, and using the power of an even more remote government to do it.

I'd like to better understand how this is consistent. Why is it acceptable for the states to dictate terms to the people of their cities? I understand the legal structures are different, but that's a technicality and a cop-out. As a matter of principle, why should a remote central government be able to override the will of a local government in this one case, but not in others?

Please understand, I'm neither Republican nor Democrat, neither conservative nor liberal. Others may put me in such boxes, but when it comes to politics, I'm simply an engineer. I want things to work, I want to fix broken things. And like any observer, I can tell you that our broadband market is broken. Internet speeds in Tennessee are slow, service is abusive, and there is no market of competition to drive innovation. This map shows that the majority of the state doesn't even have two broadband options; you need far more than that to drive a free market! Further, Comcast is a clear example of regulatory capture and the continuous legalized bribery of our elected officials. We live in a government-sponsored monopoly, not a free market.

So if we live in a government-sponsored monopoly, what's so wrong with admitting that, and doing it right? It's what we do with every other utility, and they operate quite well. Several municipalities in Tennessee built local fiber networks before 2008, when the state legislature was 'lobbied' into making building such networks much harder. All these networks provide vastly better speeds than the state or national average. Some are among the fastest in the country, literally a hundred times faster than the rest of the state, and remain a point of technological pride for our state.

In short, municipal broadband works. Or at least it has some hope of working. It's perfectly clear that our current corporate ISPs don't, and never will.

So I have to ask, Ms. Blackburn, why are you fighting so hard to maintain the status quo? Right now, most of our state is locked into an unresponsive, dysfunctional monopoly, with no hope of competition to improve our lot. Those cities that have acted to improve the situation have succeeded; their citizens have better lives and more options. Yet your actions work to lock us into the same dysfunctional system. Why? What matter of principle could possibly justify such a hurtful act towards the people you were elected to serve? It's clearly not about central government vs. local government, we've established that already.

So what is it? Even if your constituents don't deserve modern utilities, they at least deserve an answer from you on this.

Google Fiber in Nashville

Nashville is now on the short list of potential Google Fiber expansion sites. Here's what that would mean: 

• Faster internet speeds for all, making every information-based company in Nashville more competitive
• Free internet connections for thousands of poor families, making job searching and education vastly easier, and relieving considerable burden from our libraries
• Better service offerings from AT&T and Comcast, as they're finally forced to compete and improve their dismal services.

I am not given to hyperbole, so please take it literally when I say that Google Fiber coming to Nashville would be one of the most cost-effective infrastructure improvements that could ever happen in this city. We need to do everything possible to make this happen.

Like all things, you're going to see some opposition. You can bet that that opposition will be supported by Comcast and AT&T. Even in Kansas City, where Google Fiber has changed everything for the better, some bought legislators are trying to keep Google Fiber from spreading to the rest of the state. They claim it's in the name of free markets, but how does preventing competition ever lead to free markets? Free markets are all about having as many competitors as possible!

If you see any such bills proposed here, look past the spin and recognize them for what they are: legalized monopoly for AT&T and Comcast, at the expense of all of us.

TN consumer tax form fail

Anyone tried to fill out a Tennessee consumer use tax return lately? Probably not, since it’s entirely voluntary. That might explain why it’s so horribly designed.

First, it has to be done online; there’s no paper version. That’s OK, but only if you do online stuff right. Second, there’s no way to save your work; you type in a huge amount of information, lose your browser session and have to start over. Third, all the data has to be formatted to an absurd degree. Cents have to be in a separate field from dollars, entered as a two-digit amount. Years have to be two-two-four digits. Miss one, and it won't accept your form, but also won't point out your mistake! Fourth, you have to enter a separate line item for every purchase. If you want to add a number of purchases all at one time, too bad; you have to do that one by one.

Oh, and they don’t take Visa, of all things. Say what you want about whether this kind of tax should or should not exist. But speaking as an engineer, if you’re going to do something, it should be done well.

TV streaming boxes

I enjoy my television setup. I ripped all my DVDs to a pair of USB hard disks, one WD Elements for TV shows, another Seagate Backup Plus for movies. Both are connected to a low-power server, which has a gigabit wired connection to jacks throughout the house. Each TV in the house has a streaming box attached, including two older WD TV Live, one newer WD TV Live, and one Apple TV.

The Apple TV requires an iTunes server, which only supports limited file types. The WD TV boxes are far more flexible and easy to set up; they read files of almost any type, directly off a Windows file share. I especially recommend the newer model, which has a vastly improved user interface.

Neither seems to support any sort of randomized playlist or video shuffle, so it's impossible to set up a sort of "channel-surfing" background noise channel. If anyone knows of a player which supports such a thing, let me know!

So here's the weird part. Whatever show I'm watching will intermittently freeze. The show will stop for between thirty seconds and three minutes. After that time, the video will skip ahead by that length of time, forcing me to rewind.

Imagine, watching the latest episode of Suits. You get to the juicy part (which, let's face it, is the entire episode), and then the show freezes. And worse, when it recovers, you get a lovely fast-forward spoiler of the next three minutes.

Unacceptable!

What's weird is that it's not the network. While the video is frozen, I can VNC into the server, no problem. But the server can't read the USB hard disk! If I try to open it, explorer freezes until the video resumes.This implies that the problem is between the server and the drive.

I've had multiple WD Elements drives behave this way. The Seagate drive, however,doesn't seem to have any such problems; watching movies, I'm fine. I'm seriously considering abandoning the WD Elemenets drives except as backups.

I also had an interesting issue with the server. All three Live boxes, at the same time, stopped seeing the server shares. Any PC could access the shares, and the network cabling all remained functional. The problem turned out to be my newly-reformatted Windows 7 desktop PC. It had assumed the duty of telling everyone where all the network shares were. The server was running XP. Windows 7 doesn't speak the same language as Windows XP in this regard, so suddenly all the streaming boxes couldn't see anything. Turned my desktop off long enough for the XP server to re-establish control, and all was well. One frustrating hour, I tell you!