Google has launched yet another new service. They now provide a DNS server for the public. DNS is how a computer translates an address that is easy for a human to understand (like www.google.com), to an address easy for it to use (74.125.19.99). It can be considered as a phonebook for the Internet. It takes "John Smith" and turns it into a number that can be dialed on the phone (342-555-5243).

I don't buy into this whole "organic" thing. I buy whatever is cheaper and/or better. Those two requirements are best filled by local farmers. The produce is normal and the strawberries are not designed to be drop-kicked and still edible. They know they need to provide value. The food isn't shipped half way across the world with polluting engines, it's delivered by someone driving a few miles at most. If the food is "organic", that's great, otherwise, it's enough to know that the purchase price benefits someone in the community, someone I could run into at the library, someone I could keep buying fresh food from.

The way the Electoral College currently works is a bit of a disaster. The Federal Electoral Commission has asked me to help them come up with a few ideas to fix the most blatant problems. For those not familiar with the system, the Electoral College is a group of representatives who actually vote in the presidential election. The vote that the everyday person on the street takes is actually selecting those groups of electors. Each state has a number of electors proportional to its population. California gets 55 electors while Alaska gets 3, and Indiana gets 11. Most states devote all of their electors to one candidate in a winner takes all allocation. Nebraska and Maine are the only exceptions to that rule; they allocate electors by congressional district instead. 

I realized that running Windows XP on my MacBook Pro, while it works without any major bugs, is not the most optimal solution. Running an old operating system on a one year old machine means I miss out of features, support, and most importantly, an updated version of Minesweeper.