So, I went to take a match-yourself-to-a-candidate poll site, choosing 2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz as the one to run through. Kris had commented this morning that McCain was the bottom for him, which was funny, as he had registered Republican in the 2004 election in order to vote for McCain - his quixotic attempt to boost the demented village idiot from office. I was excited McCain was leading the Republican candidates after yesterday's primaries: we might actually have two candidates worth voting for if Obama wins the Democratic nomination.

Yeah, so the poll. I took the poll, annoyed at the question on health care, as none of the options were what I wanted. The question and options were:

15. What should be done about health care?
a. We need a national health insurance system that makes sure everyone is covered.
b. Keep the current system, but cut regulation and give health insurers more control.
c. No significant changes are needed at this time.

My answer would have been: scrap the entire system, and remove the gouging insurance company middle men. Doctor's offices charge $200 a visit because they know the insurance company is going to pay out only $60 of it, and the patient will pay $20. If the insurance company didn't discount so much, the doctor wouldn't inflate the prices, and those without insurance wouldn't be gouged with the $200 bill.

Something like that happened to me when I went in for a doctor-ordered MRI back in the mid-nineties. I received the bill for $2500. The office had taken my insurance information, but never bothered to submit the claim. Instead, they billed me, added late fees and threatened to send the bill to a collections agency. When the insurance company finally paid the bill, it was discounted to around $500. Gee, $2500 from the patient, or $500 from the insurance company. No wonder they went after me.

The problem with a National Insurance program is that someone has to pay the costs. 98% of the time, it'll be the healthy people paying for the unhealthy people (yes, a made up number, but you knew that, right?). I'm not sure people realize that tax revenues don't just appear out of thin air, they are paid by individual people (yeah, yeah, you really think corporations pay that much? Maybe that's where future revenues should come from - have to think about that one). So, when someone decides to spend 200 billion dollars to take down one man who shot at his daddy, that money has come from the pockets of the people around me. When Hillary proposes some everyone's covered insurance plan, that's my tax payment that's paying for that smoker's lung cancer.

And that last statement shows a horrible bias of mine against people who require preventative medical intervention.

I can't say it's particularly merciful. Another topic I should think about before just spouting drivel. The drivel I would spout would be something like most obese and overweight health problems can be prevented by exercise and life-style changes. Many of them are choices. Yes, it's incredible hard to exercise every day if you don't have motivation (like a sport you love), or a friend to go with you. Not exercising is a choice, though, and the consequences are a result of that choice. Same with smoking. Same with (currently illegal) drugs. Ultimately, though I don't like to admit it, the same with depression, which often has a physical cause that needs to be addressed (though, sometimes it's just life).

Yes, there are illnesses, diseases and health issues that aren't consequences: some cancers, juvenile diabetes, Down's syndrome, other genetic anomalies (hell, migraines with aura caused by weather changes - try to blame that one on me!), . These are the ones that should be subsidized by insurance.

Yeah, don't even get me started on the question about the death penalty.

At the end of the quiz, when I received my results, my thought was, huh? Who the hell is Chris Dodd?

Yay Wikipedia!

Chris Dodd and his political positions (we'll forgive him for his gun stance, and applaud everything else).

I'm still voting for Obama.

Wow.

As part of my goal to "get out there" and be "more social" and "network" (all in quotes because I don't particularly like those phrases), I've been signing up and going to various events, such as last week's Bay Area Geek Girl dinner, and tonight's New Tech Meetup.

The make up of this event is based around four demos at the beginning of the event. Four companies send representatives (usually developers) to demo their product, usually a website, to a crowd of about 140 people.

When I walked into the room where the demonstrations/presentations were held, I was sure I was in the wrong place: the New Tech Meetup crowd is WAAY different crowd that I'm used to at tech events.

Instead of the usual crowd of twenty and thirty somethings, all technical, all with projects of their own, most in t-shirts and jeans, with the occasional sweater or sweatshirt, everyone here was older or, more likely, more experienced. The age groups was probably mid-thirties to late fifties (implying to me, money more than passion), and all in business dress. There was practically no color in that room. I saw one guy in an orange t-shirt, and I had on a red shirt. Everyone else was in brown or dark blue.

Disturbing.

After briefly surveying the room, noting that many people were in groups, as they probably knew each other well, or were networking very well, I walked towards the back to sit next to a guy eating pizza by himself. I quickly struck up a conversation with said person, Doug of muck.net.

Doug explained that there were usually 4 or 5 demonstrations, 3 or 4 of which you'll think, "WHY? Why oh why did you make this site?" and one you'll think, "Wow! That's cool!" Each presentation has a questions session after it.

My purpose in coming to this particular presentation was to see how it went so that I could present next month, though I realized as I was walking to the car that I'll actually be in Boston at the Drupal Con 2008, so I'll have to shoot for April instead. I explained what I was doing with rereuse.com, leaving out the part of trying to launch one website a month. He laughed at the thought there might be a potential viable business around helping people give stuff away, but asked me to let him know when I launch the site to beta.

The four sites demonstrated tonight were:

1. Skitch.com
   A way to (seriously) interactively annotate images on the web.

2. hubdub.com
   A current-news outcome forcaster market, where the wisdom of the crowds and news sources is used to answer member posted questions

3. blogbard.com
   A text to speech to MP3 website where you can specify an RSS feed and download the spoken version to yout iPod.

4. seero.com
   A geo-video site where you can tie location into videos, in real time with the right equipment. This demo, although initially disastrous with the presenters' inability to connect to the internet, was the "wow, that's cool" demo of the evening. It was very much the "killer app" for GPS, allowing people with properly enabled phones to essentially annotate their surroundings.

   Of course, it means their surroundings can be plastered with advertisements, too, ruining the effect, but barring marketing overload, it's a great idea.

Now, the reason I went was was not to see these particular demos, though they were interesting, but rather to see what the crowd was like, what the environment was like, what questions were asked, and what did the presenters do right or wrong, so that I did the good stuff and didn't do the bad stuff.

Questions commonly asked:

1. What's your business model? How will you make money? What's your revenue model? (Every demo got this one.)
2. Who is your target audience?
3. How expandable is your site? Do you have an API? How much effort is it to add new services?
4. How are you currently funded? Self? Goal to be acquired?
5. Who is your competition? What is your competitive advantage over them?
6. What's your single sentence pitch?
7. What's the future use of yoru site? Where do you see the site two years from now?
8. How do you prevent your system from being gamed?
9. Do you have historical information? Is it publically exposed?
10. What is your input methodology?

Also of note for presenting in this environment:

1. Repeat the question before answering it, as not everyone in the room will hear the question correctly the first time, perhaps not even you.
2. Stand up when answering questions: the disembodied voice at the front of the room is disturbing for those in the back.
3. Have a local server ready with the demo, if possible, in case the internet goes down before or during your presentation.

Other notes:

How hard is it to turn off your phone for a 45 minute demo session? I mean, come ON. Over six different phones rang during the four presentations, with one owner saying, "Hello? Hello? No, I can't talk right now." If you can't talk, DON'T ANSWER THE PHONE!.

Apparently this issue comes up every year or so.

This was a great event to go to. I'm glad I went, and, as odd as it sounds, I'm glad I went alone to gather the information I needed for my later demo.

Okay, yeah, I'm skipping the light curse words for some reasonable curse words, so, Megan, turn Mirabelle's eyes away. Mirabelle, if you come across this entry in a couple years when you're reading and your dad left his browser open on the computer, and you googled your name and found this page, please know that I try very hard not to curse, so that your parents will still be friends with me. It's a struggle. Now click somewhere else.

I took the dogs for a walk today. After Saturday's long hike at Lockwood, I didn't feel a need to take them yesterday. Today, though, I needed a walk, so off we went.

We didn't go very far, down three blocks, around the corner and back up the street behind our house. The walk is maybe a mile, if that. Oh wait, I can use google to figure that out.... hey what do you know: 1.02 miles, so yeah, a short mile walk. Takes us maybe 20 minutes to walk, 7 of them spent sniffing, pooping and, for my part, picking up said poop.

That part is important: Kris and I NEVER leave our dogs' poop ANYWHERE. We clean up after our dogs, and often after some other people's dogs, too (often muttering how THOSE people will ruin dog privileges for everyone, not that they care, they'd probably take their dogs to non-dog parks illegally anyway). I've been known to carry Bella's poop rolled in leaves in order to avoid leaving it. So, yeah, poop always cleaned up.

Another rule the dogs have is that they are NOT allowed in anyone's yard. "What?" you ask. "Not allowed in anyone's yard? Where do they poop? The sidewalk?"

No, our dogs poop in the parkway: the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street. That particular strip of land is actually public property: you're allowed to landscape it, but you can't plant trees on it. The city does that.

So, this walk today.

We had walked the three blocks and were coming around the home stretch. As we came to the property that sits directly behind us, and old man, sorry, an old fuck, approached us with a shovel.

Now, this neighbor and I don't get along. It's a short story, but pre-blog, so, here you go.

Back in 2002, a particularly bad wind storm knocked down the fence between our house and a different neighbor, the one to the south:

Now, that neighbor I adore. She keeps to herself, but tolerates much of my gardening, uh, experiments with the front yard. Heart of an angel that one.

When our fence fell, she came over the next morning and offered to pay her share, no problem, just let her know how much it was. She was very prompt and very nice about the whole thing.

Now, when the neighbor behind us looked over the fence and saw we were repairing and replacing our side fence, he asked if we wanted to replace the fence between our properties. My thoughts were something like, "Are you stupid? We're about to shell out $700 for that fence. We've been living here for a year and a half, do you KNOW how much our mortgage payments are? Do you REALIZE we pay more a MONTH in taxes than you do in a YEAR? No fucking way do I want to spend another $2000 for another fence."

My words were something like, "No, thanks. This fence is fine."

The next day, THAT fence had fallen over, too. Oddly enough, with no wind.

The timing was strange, sure. Since we now had an unobstructed view into those neighbor's living room, and they into ours, I went out to stand the fence back up.

And discovered that the only way I could put the fence back into its original position was to lift it over the lower post and push it back. In other words, there was no way that fence fell by accident. Our neighbor had immediately called his insurance company to have them pay for the fence repair, and sent us a quote of $1500 for our part of the fence. I called our fence guy and received a quote for $1500, making our share $700, since we didn't share the full back fence, having an offset to the north. I told the neighbor we would pay $700 from our quote, even if he chooses to pay the fence contractor $3000.

In retrospect, I think the neighbor probably had the insurance company pay for the entire fence, and we paid $700 into his pocket. Of course, it was insurance fraud, since he pushed the fence down in the first place.

The fence was our first encounter with this neighbor. The second involved watching him hack a couple trees, topping them into some gross disfiguration. If nothing else, the gardener in me hates this man for every tree abuse he inflicts.

So, this insurance fraud, shovel wielding neighbor approaches us as we're walking by his house. He gestures with the shovel. "Is this yours?"

I looked over at the guy, then at his shovel, which he was waving around.

It had dog poop on it.

"No," I answered, continuing to walk by. "I always bag their poop." I held up the bio-bag (yay! It decomposes!) full of not one dog poop, not two, but THREE dog poops.

"And what about the piss?"

What? What the hell? Okay, he had me there. I was momentarily stymied, then answered, "I leave it, it doesn't hurt anything." I kept walking.

"It ruins the lawn!"

I took a few more steps, thinking, geez, I don't even let them in his yard. They're always on the parkway. Just as I got to the point where I thought, "I should have said that," I hear him actually yelling at me from 2 houses away.

I couldn't stand it any more. I turned and started yelling back. "They don't pee in your yard. They have never BEEN in your yard. They pee on the parkway! You know, PUBLIC land! And they don't ruin the lawn!"

I (somehow) resisted calling him a moron. Or retarded. Or a fucker, like I wanted to call him. I have no idea how I managed that. Maybe the desire to be able to play with Mirabelle is stronger than I realized.

When I arrived home, I immediately relayed the conversation to Kris, mostly in disbelief. He told me, sheesh, mop up the piss already, what kind of slacker dog owner was I?

He also rationally conjectured the neighbor probably just wanted to be pissed at a dog owner, and I was the closest target at the time. As I was stomping off, after my yelling back at the guy, three dogs were barking at the noise: two were at the old fuck's neighbor, and another was two houses down from that. Why the hell would he think a random person walking dogs CARRYING A POOP BAG would have left her dogs' poop in his yard, over HIS NEIGHBOR's dogs?

Okay, now I can't resist. The guy is a FUCKING MORON.

I am so throwing snails over the fence from now on.

So, apparently my request for help hit a nerve of some sort. Lots of people gave me advice, all (as in, each and every one) told me to contact my high school classmate. What surprised me was the incredible variance in the reasons why every said yes, and the surrounding advice. All of the advice was good, but none of it duplicated.

The common thread through all of the reasons was, as Lori put it better than I ever could, "that EVERYONE was a jerkhole in high school." Some of us were the recipient of someone else's meanness. And some of us were the meanness, which surprised me, as all my friends are good people. How could they be mean?

Oh, yeah, years later. Time. Maturity.

Andy and I went to his land in Lockwood today. We drove down, hiked around a lot, tried to put up a zip line, failed at putting up the zip line, and gathered up the dogs. I took tons of pictures. Bella ran off. Andy found. Andy got sick. I drove us home. A fun day. Wish Kris could have come.