This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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August 2009
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King County Washington Primary Election

So, it is time for another local election. The ballot came a few weeks ago, but of course I didn’t look at it and didn’t look at it. So here I am on the day the ballots need to return, having not yet looked at anything at all, and not knowing anything about any of the races at all. Yum.

So it is lunch time at work, and I’ll be skipping the eating thing in favor of quickly figuring out how I am going to vote. Unlike previous times, I think I won’t do one post per race, but rather will just summarize everything in this one post. I probably also do not have time to give a few thoughts on each candidate as I have done in the past. We shall see, but I need to do this quickly rather than at the length I usually do.

This is a primary, so I believe the top two in each race will be back on another ballot in November.

Anyway… first race.

King County Executive: There are eight candidates. Larry Phillips, Fred Jarrett, Stan Lippmann, Alan Lobdell, Susan Hutchison, Dow Constantine, Ross Hunter and “Goodspaceguy”. That last one is immediately intriguing. Anyway, time to spend a few minutes reading about each of them. I will probably just read each of their statements, I doubt I’ll have time for more…. OK. There are a couple wackadoodles here. And honestly just from their blurbs I don’t really like any of them. I guess if I have to choose… Fred Jarrett. I like that he is a previous party switcher (R->D) and that he is from the Eastside. I think I saw him at some events back in 2008 too and he seemed decent enough. Looks like he has a few prominent endorsements and has a history as a moderate. (Yeah, I ended up clicking through to a few additional websites besides his statement.) Anyway, he will do.

Metropolitan King County Council District No. 9: Three candidates… Mark Greene, Beverly Harison Tonda, Reagan Dunn. Ehh… I guess I’ll go for the incumbent, Reagan Dunn. I don’t see anything really bad there, and the two others did not impress me much.

Court of Appeals Division No. 1, District No. 1, Judge Position No. 3: First, I continue to not like the idea of elected judges. Anyway, two candidates. Robert D. Kelly and Anne L. Ellington. I’ll go with Ellington. Better experience, and the other guy said he would pray he would make good decisions.

Port of Seattle Commissioner Position No. 3: 3 candidates. Rob Holland, David Doud, Al Yuen. I like Holland for the previous port experience. Doud turned me off by mostly talking about how to use properties rather than directly talking about the port. I just didn’t see anything compelling in Yuen.

Port of Seattle Commissioner Position No. 4: 4 candidates. Juan Paraiso, Max Vekich, Tom Albro, Robert Walker. Robert Walker gets my vote. I clicked through to his website and like his humor and his outside perspective. He won’t win of course, but I think a fresh outsider perspective like that would be good in almost any position.

Now wait one more thing… Brandy’s mom told her a week or so ago that a woman from where she works… in the Philadelphia area… heard her family was out here, and asked her to tell us that we should vote for Ross Hunter. It seems that the woman’s girlfriend is Hunter’s sister. Or something like that. I intentionally did my decisions above without looking up the email from Brandy mentioning what her mom said, so I wouldn’t know who that was. As it is I picked someone else. I did just now give Hunter a second look. He doesn’t look too bad. And the Seattle times actually endorsed BOTH the person I picked and Hunter. (Article is here.) If I remember properly when I looked through these guys a few minutes back, Hunter was also on my short list, although as I said I didn’t really *like* any of them that much from what I read. Anyway, I’ll stick to my original vote, although Hunter doesn’t look bad. Doesn’t sound like either of them will win of course.

OK, I guess that’s it. Time to fill out the bubbles. I’ll drop the ballot off in the designated place after work.

Video: Pretty in Pink

pipW350So, this weekend was another Family Video Night. Amy had finally returned her previous movie, so although it should have been her turn weeks ago, we finally had an Amy night. Her movie this time was Pretty in Pink. This was another movie I had never seen.

My first thought while I was watching this was just that it was considerably better than Sixteen Candles, which I pretty much hated. I was actually enjoying most of the movie.

Until of course the last five minutes or so. Then my only reaction was “Huh?”. It veered away from the direction you expected it to go in (well, at least the direction *I* expected it to go) and then had the critical characters all suddenly veer from the paths they had been on in order to tie up a silly ending in a little bow. Now, switching gears for a surprise ending is fine, but it wasn’t done well here. It was just all of a sudden, all issues and conflicts were miraculously resolved in the matter of a few seconds.

Brandy tells me that this is in part because they changed their mind about the ending at the very last minute while making the film, but whatever. Now, don’t get me wrong, the ending I was thinking about would have been fairly trite and predictable too, but at least it would have meshed with the overall arc of the movie. To me this ending was just jarring, and seemed disconnected from all the events leading up to it. I didn’t like it.

Anyway, disliked the last few minutes, but overall it was a fun movie I guess.

Spam Subsiding

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Not quite back to the original rate, still significantly greater actually, but just as suddenly as the onslaught began, it has subsided. It would be nice if it returned to where it was before, but I’ll take what I can get for now.

Mo Picnic Fun

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Amy and the Ambulance


At the Company Picnic


Continental Challenge

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Holder’s Investigation
  • Townhalls
  • Healthcare
  • Birthers
  • Newspapers

Just click to listen now:

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Video: Blue Planet: Seas of Life (Discovery Channel Version): Disk 4

So, yes, we did another family video thing. And yes, I’m switching how I title these posts to “Video” to recognize that in the future not all of these will be DVDs. Anyway, this took us two weeks, but it was once again “One we own but haven’t watched yet” and that meant the next disk in this series.

This time the two episodes were “Seasonal Seas” and “Ocean World”. My basic thoughts on these last few episodes were that the first few were better. I think seasonal seas has a few interesting bits, but my memories of it aren’t that sharp and there was nothing that really stuck out as memorable.

And for Ocean World… the text of the narration made it clear that in the BBC version of the program, this was the FIRST episode, while in this Discovery Channel version they put it last. It was essentially an overview of the whole series, with a lot of things like “In this series we shall see”… which of course was all stuff we’d already seen. So instead of a preview of things to come, it was a retrospective of things we had mostly seen before, although I guess not completely.

In any case, as a whole the series was a great series. I think the first few episodes were the best, but they all held up pretty well, at least if you like this sort of nature documentary. Great visuals, and you learn a few things about the ocean ecosystems. Good stuff. They were all worth watching.

There is a 5th disk, but I think it is all “making of” sort of stuff. I would be very interested in that, but I’m not sure if it will make it as a family movie night thing. We shall see.

Registering on Abulsme.com

Of course, if you do register on Abulsme.com, you get lots of other wonderful benefits, even if you can post comments without registration. I’m just not quite sure what they are right now…

Um…. well, you can sign up to get updates via email when I post, just like the top ten people who email me do automatically. And I’m not sure, there is probably something else too. Maybe I’ll send you a thank you email? :-)

Oh wait, you can do that without registering too. Although I think you can get more control if you register. Oops, well, there has to be something cool you get from registering. Perhaps that thank you email? :-)

OK, OK, I figured it out! If you register it will remember who you are (as long as you are on the same computer and don’t log out or clear your cookies) and next time you comment you will not need to put in your name and email again! Yes, that is it!

Commenting on Abulsme.com

When I switched the blog to WordPress a few days ago, I made it so you had to be registered on this site to post comments here. This was basically just because that is how I had things set on the old pMachine blog. I had turned that requirement on a few years ago because of comment spam. Of course, with WP there are some additional methods of spam control that were not available to me with pMachine. So I’ve switched commenting back to only requiring you to put your name and email, but not actually registering here… plus a spam filter on top of that. We’ll see if that works. If not I may change things up a bit again.

Of course, these days it seems most of my comments are on Facebook from the imports of my posts there rather than comments directly on the blog. Comments are comments I guess, and I’m glad people are reading and commenting, wherever they do it. And I understand why everybody does it on Facebook given they are often already there, but I still like them over here better! :-)

Anyway… we’ll see how it goes set this way.