I attended the Approve Referendum 71 community or­ga­ni­za­tion meeting this evening and came away with several good ideas.

Emma and I are going to organize a fundraiser in late September or early October. Stay tuned.

I’m getting Freely Speaking Toast­mas­ters and BiNet Seattle to officially endorse the Approve Referendum 71 campaign.

Large businesses like Microsoft and Boeing endorsed the campaign yesterday. I’m told a number of small businesses have too. I’m going to ask our CEO to endorse the campaign. Robbie was willing to host Patty Murray at Cozi and to appear in her press releases, so why not.

I offered my technical services to the campaign, though I’m willing to do grunt work too.

Twibbon is a service that allows you to overlay a cause’s badge over your Twitter icon.

I created a Twibbon overlay for Approve71.org.

The results look great on Twitter and Twibbon.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, if I save the image and upload it to Facebook as my profile picture, it doesn’t look so good. Even if I use the FB UI to pan around in the image, the cropping ruins it.

I just mailed stormideas, the people behind Twibbon, asking if they could do something similar for Facebook profiles.

The SPECTRE-like Stockholm Syndicate is ruthlessly spreading terror among the European gov­ern­ments. The shadowy Telescope or­ga­ni­za­tion, led by former cop Jules Beaurain, is fighting it.

The plot is pre­pos­ter­ous but engaging in a classic Cold War thriller way.

After the events of The Letter of Marque, Jack Aubrey is reinstated as a post-captain in the Royal Navy. He and Stephen Maturin are sent on a diplomatic mission to the South China Sea. Stephen gets to indulge in both a great deal of natural history and in behind-the-scenes political intrigue during the ne­go­ti­a­tions. Soon after their departure from Pulo Prabang, the Diane beaches upon a reef and breaks up during a storm, marooning them on a remote island.

The book stands on its own merits, but …continue.

Two months after our memorial for Frank Maloney, we took the ferry over to Vashon Island to scatter his ashes. It was a beautiful September day, sunny but not too hot, and a 20-minute ferry ride was most pleasant.

Kim and Holly fed us lunch at their place and we all fell in love with their six rescue kittens. We drove to a secluded beach and each of us scattered a teaspoon of Frank’s ashes upon the waters. We sat there for a while and talked and wandered. Then, back to Holly and Kim’s for cake and coffee.

I know that Frank would have thoroughly enjoyed the day: the fine weather, the ferry …continue.

I’ve been running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 RC since June. It’s been quite painless on the whole.

One wrinkle that I ran into was with some batchfiles which launch ap­pli­ca­tions in %Pro­gram­Files% (normally C:\Program Files). Due to the magic WOW64 redirector, 32-bit ap­pli­ca­tions are actually installed into %Pro­gram­Files(x86)%—normally C:\Program Files (x86)—instead of %Pro­gram­Files%. This is trans­par­ent to the 32-bit ap­pli­ca­tions, which think they’re running in %Pro­gram­Files% (C:\Program Files).

However, the cmd.exe shell is 64-bit (unless you make a special effort to run the 32-bit cmd.exe in SysWOW64), so batchfiles see the 64-bit %Pro­gram­Files% which contains 64-bit ap­pli­ca­tions.

Hence, a batchfile that launches an installed 32-bit ap­pli­ca­tion on Win64 must use %Pro­gram­Files(x86)%, not %Pro­gram­Files%.

It sounds trivial to …continue.

I spent 90 minutes phonebank­ing for Approve 71 after work today. I called voters who had already been identified as leaning pro­gres­sive and asked them to vote APPROVE on Referendum 71 in November.

Under the recent Domestic Part­ner­ship law (SB 5688 aka the “ev­ery­thing but marriage bill”), registered domestic partners (same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples with at least one partner over age 62), and married couples, are now treated equally under the law in all parts of Washington state.

The Religious Right objected and put together an initiative which scraped together just enough signatures to be on the ballot. They’ll be voting to REJECT the bill, which would overturn domestic part­ner­ships in this state.

Civil rights should not …continue.

Paying bills always makes me grumpy. More than just the drain on my wallet, it’s also the sheer hassle and tedium.

I think it was last year that I finally switched over to using electronic billpay. (I’m not always an early adopter.) The hassle is less and I seldom write checks now.

I’d like to know why electronic payments take days, not mil­lisec­onds, to clear. More predatory bank practices, no doubt.

I wrote several checks tonight. For months I had been putting off renewing my membership in various do-gooder or­ga­ni­za­tions like the ACLU, the EFF, and GLAAD. Some I wrote checks to, others I used their online forms.

I’m going to be getting a couple of …continue.

Jack Irish is a one-time lawyer who makes a living doing odd job­s—in­ves­ti­ga­tions, racehorse hand­i­cap­ping, cabinet making—in Melbourne. A former client, who went to jail years ago while Jack had crawled into a bottle, tries to reach Jack and promptly turns up dead. Jack starts looking and what he finds isn’t pretty: corruption all the way up into the state government.

Jack isn’t stupid, but he is naïve and out of his depth for much of the book. Temple combines the Australian backdrop, social commentary, a decent plot, and in­ter­est­ing …continue.

I held my annual fundrais­ing barbecue for the AIDS Walk today. Actually, the weather was so wet this morning that we cooked and ate inside.

I am happy to report that thanks to the generosity of my sponsors, I have raised $982 of my original goal of $1000. With three weeks left until the walk, I am predicting success in reaching my goal.