Since 2006, Washington’s Republican Secretary of State has canceled more than 450,000 voter registrations in an effort to “clean up” the voter rolls. Sure, many are duplicate registrations or persons who moved out of state. But many are persons who think they’re properly registered and intend to vote in November. I personally know people this has happened to!

It doesn’t take much to get removed from the voter rolls. You may have been removed if, for example:

(1) you haven’t voted in a long time,
(2) your signature on your absentee ballot envelope wasn’t deemed a match with the signature on your registration card, or
(3) your absentee ballot was returned by the post office (the post office doesn’t forward ballots to your new address).

Everyone should check to make sure you are currently registered at your current address. You can do this online, and in most cases you can update your registration online. But you must make any changes by October 4!

Please take a minute to check your registration by clicking here.

Please forward this message to your friends and family! Everyone should check their registration before October 4!

Thanks!

On every visit to the Bay Area, I’m reminded that Berkeley and San Francisco are quite similar to Seattle in their political inclinations, but rather different in their expression (most notably, in the volume and artistic quality of that expression). The city of Berkeley has decided who it will be supporting in this year’s presidential election (no surprises here), and of course they have their own very unique Berkeley way of expressing their preference.

An Obamamobile — with Obama speeches playing on the loudspeaker.

Obamaphone

But Ted Stevens has also given the world a great gift, in the form of a few words of wisdom he spoke on a fateful day in June of 2006.

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Every time I experience slow upload speeds on my cable internet at home, or a website takes a few minutes to load, or I see a big truck, I think of Ted. When my demo app at TechEd 2007 in Orlando took a few moments to download data from my server back in Redmond, I was able to fill the time with a simple reminder to my audience that the internet is a series of tubes.

Recently, one of Kenny’s co-workers asked him a question about one-way messaging and WCF. He forwarded me his response, which borrowed a few of Ted’s words of wisdom to illustrate how TCP and pipes work:

UDP is fundamentally one-way. MSMQ also fundamentally supports one-way.

HTTP and TCP (and pipes) have built-in throttling to the protocol. While you can send one-way messages down the pipe on TCP and Pipes, they will eventually back up (remember, the internet is not a big truck; it is a series of tubes and sometimes they get clogged)…

Thanks, Ted.

I wonder how they targeted this one - I’m married and female, but probably not quite within the prime age range for fertility therapy.

At least I’m not getting any pressure from my mother on this front yet…

Batted around by history, Ljubljana has seen cultural influences from all sides — most notably Prague, Vienna, and Venice. This has left the city a happy hodgepodge of cultures. Being the midpoint between the Slavic, Germanic, and Italian worlds gives Ljubljana a special spice. And now Ljubljana is proud to be a trendsetter in the “New Europe” — most notably as Slovenia holds the rotating EU presidency for the first six months of 2008.

People often ask me: What’s the “next Prague”? And I have to answer Krakow. But Ljubljana is the next “next Prague.” 

Of all the cities we’ve visited on this trip, Ljubljana would be my first candidate for a repeat visit. And not because we missed many of the major attractions here — in fact there aren’t many — but just because the ambiance and overall mood in this city are wonderful. It struck me as we were walking around today that Ljubljana feels a bit like Amsterdam (but of course without the canals, Red Light District, pancakes, and coffeeshops). It’s often dubbed a mini-Vienna. I haven’t been so can’t weigh in on that, but the architecture certainly has that Baroque Viennese flair. The couple of museums we visited were great, but I’d love to come back here just to spend more time walking around, sitting in cafes, and enjoying the amazing food. And as an added bonus, it would be great to see the city when it’s not pouring rain.

And another thing Ljubljana has going for it is, with notable the exception of a very brusque reception desk employee at the Hotel Park (we ended up staying elsewhere), all the Slovenes we’ve met have been extremely friendly and have bent over backwards to help us.

I wonder if I really just love any city with cobblestone streets and a river running through it (see Paris, Florence, Budapest, etc.).

The park is actually outside the city, and it takes about an hour to get there from central Pest by public transit (metro + bus). Our bus driver neglected to stop there, even though we’d told him we were headed to Statue Park, but fortunately Kenny noticed the statues out the bus window and we were able to alert the bus driver before we’d gone too far.

Statue Park, or Szoborpark in Magyar, is like a Soviet kitsch wonderland. After the fall of Communism in 1989, the Hungarians had a lot of extra Communist art lying around. Obviously they didn’t want to keep it in the city, but rather than disposing of it, they decided to collect it all and deposit it in a park just outside town. They held a design competition, and the winner, Ákos Eleod, said the following about the concept he developed:

This Park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described and built up, this Park is about democracy. After all, only democracy can provide an opportunity to think freely about dictatorship. Or about democracy, come to that! Or about anything!

Kenny fends off the warriors!

These soldiers had the buffest thighs I’d ever seen.

The interplay of the various statues in the park made for some interesting views.

I went crazy with the camera at Statue Park. More photos in our Budapest set.

KENNY: I was telling Claudette earlier that you’re a Berkeley feminist, not an East Coast Ivy League feminist.
LAUREN: Oh? And how would you define each of those?
GIO: One is an Obama supporter, the other is a Clinton supporter.

Go Bears!