The campaign for governor of California has started, more than a year before elections. The Republicans have started a series of campaign ads blaming Governor Gray Davis for the current power crisis. Actually, the ads are paid for by "Taxpayers for Equity" or something like that. But we all know it's a front for the other party. There are just way too many "consumer groups" that are really just Republican or Democratic fronts, funded by Republicans and Democrats though not the parties themselves since that would be illegal.

In any case, the ads want to call the black outs "gray outs" and blame the ISO which are a bunch of Davis appointees (ignoring the probably fact -- not that I'd know since I don't know much government -- that those appointees had to be approved by the state congress). Not that I don't think that Davis did enough before it got this bad, but we should all be working together to get through this crisis instead of blaming each other. It annoys me that Republicans would be doing this.

Then there's this ad I saw for KCRA. Their meteorologist saying that with a good weather report you can plan ahead for the hot days so that we can save energy. The weather being something that is very unimportant yet everyone has it -- so it's like trying to say that "hey, our jobs are important too!" And then there are the other ads. There is one billboard that promotes some other state (Pennsylvania?), inviting businesses to move there since *they* don't experience power problems. Just a bunch of vultures circling the state. I should stop this line of thinking or I'll get a persecution complex...

Here's something that bothers me a bit (as if most things don't bother me a bit), on my drive to work I use the southbound 880 freeway. CalTrans has been repaving that direction from about the Oakland Airport to the 238 interchange and they're over halfway done. So I drive down this stretch of freeway, two lanes newly paved and two lanes still to go. CalTrans uses these temporary lane markers, quite ingenious by whomever thought them up. But eventually they got around to laying real paint, though they still don't have reflectors on the ground.

I'm driving on the 3rd lane. On the right are the old lane markers, faded and worn, straight as an arrow, old reliable. On the left are the new lane markers, bright and shiny, and remarkably crooked and meandering. Even though CalTrans is doing this in the dark and late at night, you'd think the paint truck would be able to keep in a straight line. It's really weird. One dash is one way, the next is crooked a little, the next is crooked but the other way. How the heck did they manage to do that? This is what happens when we don't fund programs sufficiently...

I rearranged some of my books a bit (hmm, I say "a bit" way too much) and I now have 83 books in the "to read" queue. Last September I said I had over 100 books in the queue and I've bought something like a couple dozen books since then. And I've read a few other books that are not officially in the queue, say about six. So that's like 47 books in about 44 weeks. Not too bad a rate, though that still means a year and a half to go *if* I don't buy any books.

But I have to keep buying. Gobs of Star Trek books since I've dropped off buying those to catch up in other lines. Whole lines that I want to read but haven't even bought the books (Discworld, New Sun, Planet Krishna and other licensed worlds for GURPS). I'm reading "Apache: The Definitive Guide" which is an O'Reilly book, published in 1999. When the book was published Apache 1.3 had just been released or was about to be released and after three chapters I've caught several things that are no longer true. But my comment here is that this is the first O'Reilly book -- and I've read eight others -- that is substandard. The writing style is a bit off. For an O'Reilly book it seems aimed at people who find Windows NT conceptually difficult (now, I'm not saying that NT is easy, but it's conceptually easy, just implemented badly). I'm hoping the book gets better.