I've been bitching to friends lately that the internet has become boring. There just hasn't been anything all that interesting out there for the last year or so.

I was just checking out my daily blogs, and now I realize what the problem has been. Ken Layne wasn't blogging.

Now he's back.

Welcome back, Ken...

Yup, I like the new album.

This is mainly because of the presence of Brass in the instrumentation. I've said it before, but there still isn't enough brass in music these days.

This needs to change.

Attention Right Side of the Blogosphere: Can you stop with the Kerry/Edwards gay jokes? Those of you in particular that I'm complaining about were for the most part strongly against the FMA and strongly support gay rights in general, so I know you're not doing it out of any particular malice, but it still strikes me as a bit unseemly. Aren't there more interesting comments to be made on those guys?

I got in trouble with the girlfriend last night because I took the Slate Red State/Blue State Quiz and came up about 75% Red, and also because I reregistered as a Republican yesterday.

As for the quiz, I do in fact live in a Red State. The folks at the bar watch Nascar when I'm trying to watch Football. Some of the Blue State questions were for things that were before my time, while most of the Red State questions are geographical in nature. Bias! Bias!

As for the registering as a Republican, we need to be realistic here. Kansas is run by the Republican party. In this state, I'm probably going to be voting Democratic about 80% of the time, but the best chance we really have to influence politics in this state is to vote in the Republican primary and hope to send up the least psycho of the bunch. That way, when the Republican more than likely trounces the Democrat we won't end up with oh, say, Phill Kline.

On another note, I've tried to get myself reregistered as a Republican before. When I was at the Wakarusa Festival last month I ran into one of those Rock The Vote! types. I decided that would be a nice opportunity to get my party affiliation changed, so I shouted my information over Tabla Rasa to her and signed the form. She did ask me why I was registering Republican, and I explained that it was so I could vote in their primary. She thought that the Republican primary had been opened to non-registered Republicans, but at the time it was still in the courts. (It's since been decided the the primary will not be open.) Regardless, she claimed she'd be mailing all the applications the next day, but when I look up my voter information it still says I'm a registered Libertarian.

There are three possibilities for why this is, as I see it:

A. The Rock The Vote! girl mailed the registration form, but it has not yet been processed.
B. The Rock The Vote! girl never got around to mailing the registration forms at all.
C. The Rock The Vote! people decided that a Republican didn't need to have his voter registration card mailed out, and it was "lost".

OK, C probably isn't the case, but the thought has crossed my mind.

Two other things for Kansas voters to keep in mind: There is a new Kansas law that you must provide ID when voting, and the ID must match your current address. If, like me, your driver's license has an old address on it, a utility bill or something else with your current address will be good enough. I think I'm going to go get my driver's license updated anyway, just so I'm not disenfranchised when I do go to vote in the primary in a couple of weeks.

I still don't fully believe that this is true, but the people at the election office yesterday also said that if you want to vote in that primary other than your registered party, you can change your affiliation on election day and they'll give you a provisional ballot. This option was not offerred to me when I tried to vote in the Republican primary in 2002, but maybe the law has changed since then or they don't offer you this option unless you ask for it. Or maybe the people at the election office didn't know what they were talking about. It's hard to say.

If you can't wait until next Tuesday's release of The Polyphonic Spree's new album Together We're Heavy, you can listen to a couple of songs here, or play a flash game and listen to a couple more here (Sound on most links...).

Spammers have taken all the fun out of the internet. I got my gmail account recently, and since I now have a backup I decided to try messing with the spam filter on Gimpysoft's mail server. Well, in the process I broke it, and I'm really not sure that I care enough to fix it.

As a result, the flood of unfiltered Spam to my old email address is such that I have to log in several times a day just to move the spam to another folder. If I leave it alone for much more than 24 hours, the Inbox gets so full that my webmail client times out trying to read the whole thing. Thanks a lot, you spammer bastards.

The volume of spam is such that I'm pretty sure that I'm missing messages that are actually intended for me, so if you're wanting to contact me, please use the new address. I'm doing my best to keep that address off the web, so if I haven't sent it to you yet or you've lost it, leave a comment here and I'll send you the new address. If you send stuff to gimpysoft.com, I very likely won't notice it, and I actually may be shutting down that mail server entirely before too much longer.

Once again spammers, thanks again for taking a bit more fun out of the internet. Please, ratchet up the comment spam a bit too... If I end up having to spend much more time deleting your comments with links to www.buy-cialis-now.com I'll probably just shut down this site too.