Month: August 2012

Cobb County had a runoff election yesterday. Two important ones, actually: Commission Chair and District 4 Commissioner. Here are the results:

Commission Chair

Tim Lee 52.37% 14,309

Bill Byrne 47.63% 13,014

District 4 Commissioner

Lisa Cupid 75.62% 3,065

Woody Thompson 24.38% 988

Tim Lee (the incumbent commissioner) squeaked by with a 1,300 vote margin. Woody Thompson (the incumbent) got hammered. Ouch.

I have no idea what was going on in District 4. That’s the entirely other side of the county from me, however Commission Chair was something I followed closely because Bill Byrne is a former Chairman who espouses Agenda 21 nutjobiness and is generally crazy.

It’s depressing to me that so many people will come out and vote against Tim Lee and for Bill Byrne. The only reason that the vote went like this is because of taxes, taxes, taxes. There wasn’t any other issue in the campaign. But, instead of picking someone reasonable in the primary, they picked a conspiracy theorist. Good job, Cobb Countians. Thankfully, we didn’t pick him in the end.

It’s more interesting about the relative numbers of voters turning out. Here are the results from the primary elections last month.

Mike Boyce 17,042 23.29%

Bill Byrne 19,403 26.52%

Tim Lee (I) 29,055 39.71%

Larry Savage 7,666 10.48%

Total turnout vote for Commissioner was 73,166. Turnout for the runoff was 37% of that. Ouch.

LISA CUPID 4,334 39.51%

MONICA DELANCY 789 7.19%

RUTH E. NEGRON 419 3.82%

MICHAEL RHETT 1,280 11.67%

CONNIE TAYLOR 1,201 10.95%

WOODY THOMPSON (I) 2,945 26.85%

Total turnout for District 4 Commissioner was 10,968. Turnout for the runoff was again 37%. Double ouch. What’s even worse in this district race was that the incumbent took 40% of the vote in the primary but only 24% in the runoff. Triple ouch.

Commissioner Lee had a 59% share of the vote against Bill Byrne in the primary, but only a 52% in the runoff. Obviously, there were lots of people just plain voting against him, rather than for Byrne.

So now it’s on to November. Commission Chairperson Tim Lee is unopposed in November, so he’s in. I’m not aware if Lisa Cupid has a Republican challenger for this district. As I said, I haven’t been following that race.

As a part of my professional engineering continuing education, I’m acquiring the one professional development hour of time in the category of ethics, as required by the State of Texas. While reviewing the board rules, I re-read the section on who may use the term “engineer” in their work life. In general, only licensed professional engineers are allowed to advertise themselves as “engineers” however there are exceptions:

(3) Pursuant to §1001.061(b)(2) of the Act, a person employed by an operating telephone company or an affiliate of an operating telephone company engaged strictly in the art and science of telephony may use the term “engineer” in the person’s job title or personnel classification if the person does not offer engineering services to the public and if the designation does not imply that the person is licensed under the Act.

…

(5) Pursuant to §1001.066(2) of the Act, a person employed by a business entity whose products or services consist of space vehicles, services or technology required by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) may use the terms “engineer” or “engineering” in the person’s job title or personnel classification if the person only uses the designation in association with the products and services related to NASA.

I love government regulations. You can almost smell the back-room smoke within them.

For my birthday yesterday we went indoor rock climbing at the Wall Crawler Rock Club in Atlanta. It was fun and reminded me how much I liked climbing when I was a teenager. All of the climbing I had done before was outdoor, in NH, so this was a switch. Much fun was had. John, one of the staff members, took good care of us.

If you aren’t wired ((Ha ha!)) into technews, you may not be aware that the Wired writer Mat Honan has had his online digital life mangled and wrecked, which included a great deal of personal data on his laptop. The article is enlightening, but the bit I took out of it as most important is this:

Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

If you read farther in, you’ll realize that in all probability, if Mr. Honan had been using a cloud service to do his automatic backups, those would have been wiped as well.

This is a horrendous cautionary tale, but the primary lesson I take from this, which just reinforces an opinion I’ve held for a long time, is always have your own data in your own hands where only you have control over it.

I’ve had various schemes set up for backing up data and I do this religiously. ((By religiously, I mean every so often, but frequently enough that I’ll never be out more than a week or two of data.)) I do a tiny bit of cloud-based backing up, mostly for music, but the core of my backup protocols are two 2 TB hard drives which are regularly swapped out, and one of which is located off site. If my computer goes belly up, I’ve got a backup that’s about a week old. If my house burns down, I’ve got a backup that’s less than a month old. This gives me piece of mind given the 70 GB worth of images, 64 GB worth of music, 20 GB worth of podcasting files, and literally dozens of years worth of documents, letters, emails, and other bits that are on my hard drive. ((70 GB worth of images on my laptop, but another 700 or so contained on another drive, which is also backed up))

Here’s a good backup routine, and general discussion, focused on photography. Here’s the same guy talking about how to do it while travelling. I think cloud-based automatic backups are excellent tools, but make them secondary, rather than primary. One of my old sigfiles said, “You only own those things you can carry on your back at a dead run.” That has some applicability to data backups: “You only own data backups that you can carry with you out of the house during the zombie apocalypse.”

As a producer of a lot of digital content, I’m extremely sensitive to the possibility of losing my data. How sensitive are you? How valuable are those emails, those pictures, those music files. If nothing else, how willing are you to spend the time reassembling things you might have around your house, or from other people?