Silicon Valley Redneck

Now, THAT's what I call phishing!

In addition to my real e-mail at Gumbyware (and the various other addresses that forward to it), I have mailboxes at Yahoo and Hotmail, used basically once a month to check the delivery system for a newsletter I send out.
Well, it's mailing time again, so I check the freebie mailboxes to confirm that they're still alive.  Hotmail, about a dozen spams in the inbox.  Yahoo, just one message that got past the spam filter:

D‮rae‬ Citiba‮kn‬ Me‮bm‬er,

Th‮si‬ e‮am‬il was s‮tne‬ by the Ci‮bit‬ank ser‮ev‬r to ve‮fir‬y y‮ruo‬ ema‮li‬ a‮sserdd‬. You m‮tsu‬ com‮telp‬e t‮ih‬s pro‮ssec‬ by clic‮ik‬ng on the l‮ni‬k b‮wole‬ and ent‮nire‬g in the s‮llam‬ w‮odni‬w y‮uo‬r C‮nabiti‬k ATM-D‮be‬it C‮ra‬d n‮mu‬ber and P‮NI‬ t‮tah‬ you use on A‮MT‬. T‮sih‬ is d‮eno‬ for y‮uo‬r pr‮eto‬ction - b‮esuace‬ s‮mo‬e of our m‮bme‬ers no lon‮eg‬r h‮va‬e ac‮sec‬s to t‮eh‬ir em‮lia‬ ad‮serd‬ses and we m‮su‬t ver‮yfi‬ it.

To v‮yfire‬ yo‮ru‬ em‮lia‬ ad‮serd‬s and a‮ssecc‬ y‮uo‬r b‮kna‬ acc‮uo‬nt, cl‮ci‬k

Hmmm, and there seem to be some Unicode characters in there that confuse my browser, and don't show up until I select the text.  (Seems to confuse Typepad's text editor thingie, too.)

Now, this level of garbling may get it past the spam filters, but who's gonna be fool enough to give his dbeit crad nmuber and PNI to a bkna that spells so poorly?

Brain scans

Via the Volokh Conspiracy: a new brain-scan technique can purportedly detect differences in brain activity between people who are lying and those who are telling the truth.
Expect demagogues to leap all over this.
Hey, it may have some actual utility.  However, such tools have at least one inherent limitation: there's no way to distinguish between someone who's telling the actual truth, and someone who's telling a falsehood which he believes to be the truth, unless you already know what the truth is, or have some other way of verifying it.
I can think of other possible limitations: pathological liars, incapable of distinguising truth from falsehood (but it's worth a try; perhaps a brain scan would give useful information), and actors stepping into roles in which objectively false information is true for the character (again, maybe the brain scan would be revealing - or maybe not).
A small test on a few (presumably basically honest) volunteers who aren't using any special techniques of deception may reveal interesting things about how the brain functions, but I think it's far too early to proclaim this to be the next great tool of justice and/or oppression.

Update:
I hadn't read the article critically enough.  Jim Lindgren points out a basic flaw in the way the experiment was done: the liars and truth-tellers had different levels of participation, thereby introducing another variable which could affect the level of brain activity.

Further update:
Via JustOneMinute, a more detailed description of the experiment.  The mass-media article had (surprise!) garbled important little details; the actual experiment didn't have such a blatant flaw.

Now, this is unusual...

I thought I'd heard this on the radio, while out on errands today.  This article in the WaPo confirms it: the CEO of Kellogg has been with the company for many years, having worked his way up from deliveryman.
This seems unusual - not just for workers (mighty few of whom, after all, become CEO), but for CEOs.  I've gotten the impression that modern executives move from one company to another; after a couple of years, the current company is in ruins, so it's time to collect the golden parachute and move to the next one.  This is the basis of a future essay (after I've found the time & inspiration to do, like, some actual research) on the subject of Farmers and Nomads (with company-hopping CEOs in the role of Nomads).
Anyway, hearing that an old-school company actually has a CEO who's part of the company, and not just passing through, is interesting.  Might be worth seeing where Kellogg got the CEOs before Gutierrez - during the time when the company seemed headed down the drain.  Were they, too, long-timers with the company, or just locusts passing through?

Humball beginnings

Humball LLC began moving into its new quarters (i.e., out of people's garages and my middle bedroom) today.
Being as how we're doing all this with our own money, it's not a matter of calling up an industrial office-arranging company and just having everything done; it's a DIY project.
I neglected to take true "before" photos of the empty building, and some stuff was already there before this morning:

Here's a view from the lab area toward the office & conference room area.  The counter/cabinet thing makes the lab side of what will be the conference-room wall.

View toward the lab, from the conference room.

Another view toward the back, as seen from the office.

No, that's not the company car.  It belongs to a friend of one of our members, and is just passing through on its way to a repair shop.

This is the company car.  Just the thing for picking up groups of visiting dignitaries at the airport.  Today, it came in handy for picking up lumber at Home Despot.

The lumber having been picked up, and the entire technical staff eventually being present, construction commenced.  I took a couple of side trips home (about half a mile each way) for overlooked items: hex keys, and my old Shopvac - which, despite having spent about 2 years outdoors exposed to the elements, turns out to be still in working order.

At the end of the afternoon, we had two walls framed: the low wall setting off the office space from the entryway, and the high wall separating office from conference room.

Here's that view back from the office again.  The stuff in the back will eventually be hidden from the "clean" space up front.  Businessy things go in the nice clean partitioned-off carpeted area up front; the back of the building will be the playpen.

Mailing for Moonbats

Oh, the wonderful mailing lists I get on...

Gosh!  Wow!  A note from The Prophet Himself!  The Sayer of All Great Truths!  This is right up there with, oh, a note from Pat Robertson, or from that guy on the street corner who thinks he's Napoleon.
And "...a values and spiritually sensitive progressive politics...."  Er, is patchouli oil mandatory?
On the back of the envelope, we find the return address:

The Institute for Labor and Mental Health?  How wrong can you get?  I mean, the mental health part goes without saying... and have any of these people done any labor in their lives?  Is that "institute" supposed to be more of an "institution?"

Playgrounds

Greyhawk notes the following:

...our parents made the same mistakes we did in raising children. We end their "fun" days too early, bring them to the grown up table too soon. Proof: there are no playgrounds in middle schools in America. This is a huge mistake. Turn 12-14 year olds loose in a playground and they'll have a great time - I've seen this happen.

How true!  And not just 12-14 year olds; creative people of any age.
For the more advanced children - age 30 to 70, say - more sophisticated playgrounds may be in order.  This is what happens at innovative tech companies: turn the "kids" loose in a playground with whiteboards and test and fabrication equipment, and let them have fun - usually a lot of good stuff will come out of it (though turning it into profit is another matter entirely).
There'll be much more on this subject here in the next few weeks, as the startup company of which I'm currently a part is preparing to move into its new playpen.  Just in planning how to partition off the "fun" (lab / machine shop) area from the "business" (office / conference room) area, we came up with a couple of neat (though probably not marketable) ideas.
More on this topic Monday... and for many days after.

Two hikes in a row

What with this being a long weekend, I've gotten out hiking two days in a row (tomorrow is chores day, then maybe out to the hills again Sunday).
Thursday morning brought my customary turkey hunt at Rancho San Antonio (strictly catch and release).  Turnout was light, but it was 9:30 on an overcast morning, so that wasn't too surprising.  As usual, we didn't see any actual turkeys; Thanksgiving morning brings a flood of family outings, and the turkeys seem to go into hiding.

Well, there's a deer, anyway.  Several of them crossed our path, right in the most crowded area.

Infinite perimmons!

Bunnies!

Interesting fungi.  Edibility not tested.
Hmmm.  No turkeys.  Darn.  We had deer and rabbits; with a turkey, we could have made a deturbit.

Now on to Friday... while that instalanche was getting rolling, I was out on a hike in Huddart Park and Phleger Estate.  The leader had consulted a map, but not actually scouted it; the announcement had somewhat understated the distance (8 miles vs. an actual 9 or so) and the elevation gain (it seemed like rather more than the listed 1500 feet), and some of the hikers weren't really up to it.  Two dropped out after the first hill (but that was due to an injury, not exhaustion); two more decided to call a cab when we reached the highest point (which is right by Highway 35); another two apparently skipped the last hill, sat down in the Huddart parking lot, and waited for someone to drive around from where we'd parked.

The trail signs at Phleger Estate are topped with... um... it appears to be a Plains Indian - what's he doing here? - atop a horse, atop a banana slug.

The damp weather does wonders for moss.

She turned me into a newt!
(This resembles the dreaded Santa Cruz Mountains Newt, which secretes a poison so powerful that just touching the critter can be fatal.  This, however, isn't one of those.  It's easy to tell the difference: the California Newt inhabits the physical world, while the Santa Cruz Mountains Newt lives only in fanciful warnings that were making the rounds in the early 1990s.)

Cute little mushrooms!  Better not nibble on them, though: they might have been touched by that newt.

A nicely spooky spot - or it would be, with a bit of fog and less light.

There's the signpost up ahead.  Your next stop....

Update:
The Friday hike started right next to the Runnymede Sculpture Farm, reminding me that I have yet to visit it.  A bit of Googlery turns up information, e.g., here and here.  If it's only open a couple of times a year for special events, I guess there's not much chance of doing a group outing some June 15th (especially as the place turns out to be named after a horse, so the anniversary of Magna Carta probably isn't one of those special occasions).

Things to be thankful for

#37967:

Being too small and scrawny to look like food.

Textbook warning labels

Via The Moderate Voice, here's an assortment of disclaimers for science (and other) textbooks.  Please secure all drinking materials before reading.

Another bandwagon!

Instapundit offers a happy thought: Vaclav Havel for Secretary General!  Replace the crooked, dictator-coddling, genocide-condoning Kofi Annan with someone with moral authority, who'll stand up for what's right!

Get out the vote!

Here's the bumper sticker!  Click for PDF.

Oh, that's right: we don't get to vote for Secretary General, do we?
Here's a handy button:

Update:
For those who quibble about colors and fonts, here's one with orange text and a less-weird font.  If you have a better idea, grab a copy of Inkscape and make your own - it only takes a few minutes....

This'n doesn't scale down to button size very well:

Updated again:
OK, Sean has a point about the yellow text.  Here's the last tweak I'm making this evening (and it's adjusted so the PDF matches the bitmap, too - Inkscape still has some quirks where Postscript export is concerned).

SVR Makeover, Part 2

Following up on the previous post....
I spent the better part of two days decluttering the lab.  Unfortunately, this being done in haste, it mostly entailed sweeping stuff under the rug.  Now the rug has 30 cubic feet of clutter swept under it, and it's just a tad lumpy.
For the past several years, the middle bedroom has been the Bluebeard room:

And here's what had accumulated behind that always-closed door:

Not very promising, eh?  No wonder I'd been using the sewing table out in the living room as an electronics workbench.
Well, things having gotten slow around the beginning of October, I started work on the great project of turning the storeroom back into a lab.  By mid-October, I had enough space cleared that I could move the electronics stuff into the lab, and use the sewing table, once again, for sewing.

The photo above is actually from mid-November, after I'd put in more shelving, added some more test equipment (spectrum analyzer, bench multimeter, etc.), and actually gotten some work done in there.  This is about where things still stood Monday morning, when I got the call to make things look nice for a photoshoot.
Here's the lab today:

No, your eyes don't deceive you, that's a gen-yoo-wine 1964-vintage HP multimeter winking its Nixies up there.  Last calibrated in 1975, though I believe it was in service for quite some time after that calibration expired in February, 1976.  It's not actually in use now, but it makes a nifty lab ornament, almost up there with a big honkin' wall-mounted ammeter.  (A Jacob's ladder in the lab would probably not be in compliance with current ESD guidelines.)

Floor space!  Look at that floor space!

Next on SVR Makeover, the living room.  After that, the garage....

SVR Makeover: PANIC!

Long ago, in Part 1, I got my home office into some semblance of officeness, clearing away much of the clutter that had accumulated over the years.
Since then, I've been working on the lab / storeroom / Bluebeard room.  By mid-October, I had enough space cleared that I could move my electronics work off the sewing table, in time for Halloween.  I've gradually been clearing more space, adding shelves, adding test equipment, and so on.  Some of the larger clutter is meant to go to the new quarters of the startup company of which I'm a part, once we actually start moving in (which should be later this week).
Well, this afternoon there was a mission change.  Last week, Fearless Leader went to a conference, and talked to various people, including a newspaper reporter.  Now the reporter wants to interview him - and wants to get a photo, in his office.  Oops.  We don't have the office yet (should have the conference room set up in another week or so).  He has a garage, and a living room.  And the Starbucks where we've been holding the weekly company meeting.  Happy thought: get the whole gang over here for a group photo in my lab.  This means I need to clear the rest of the clutter out, and make it look respectable, by Wednesday morning.
It's been a busy afternoon.  I've cleared out about half the remaining clutter, including most of the big stuff (the other big items are shoved under a table, looking like they belong there).  Mopped the furthest back part of the floor for the first time in, um, ever.
Since I haven't bulldozed the living room yet, and the front yard looks like it's been hit by fall (and generally not tended much even during the summer), we may have to blindfold the newspaper folks for the journey back to the lab.
Back to work now....

Some hikes get weirder than others

This should have been a perfectly routine hiking day... I decided to go on a little (6-mile) hike that somebody else was leading, over at Fremont Older Open Space Preserve.  So, the group gathered at the carpool location, and we got organized....
The leader gave directions that seemed to make sense, but someone else was also trying to give directions, and things seem to have gotten a bit mixed up.  Basically, it should have been "Thataway on Homestead, left on Stelling, right on Prospect, out to the end, and you're there."  Somehow, though, McClellan got into the directions, somewhere between Stelling and Prospect.  I was driving, and following another carload.  The driver ahead turned right on McClellan, which seemed to have some connection with what we'd been told, except that, as one of my passengers ponted out, McClellan runs parallel to Prospect.  A few turns later, and we both stopped; we had a quick discussion, and concluded that we hadn't gotten to where we thought we were - U-turn time! - and back down the hill we headed; just then, there appeared, coming up the hill, a new Prius driven by somebody who looked familiar and waved - another of ours? Who knows... the two stray cars proceeded back down the hill in the direction of Stelling, and ended up in a maze of not-a-through streets in one of these new (i.e., not on my map) housing tracts.
There followed a chase scene straight out of a French movie.
As the French car chase emerged from the housing tract and retraced its tire tracks, the aforementioned Prius was coming back down the hill, and pulling off.  Was the driver consulting a map?  Phoning someone for directions?  Who knows....
Anyway, back to Stelling, down a few blocks, and right on Prospect.  This is the right road!  Er... why is my trunk ringing?*  Pull over, pop trunk, let a passenger retrieve his cellphone, and proceed to the parking madhouse.  Call to passenger's cellphone had been from a pasenger in another carpool (not that Prius).  That car is missing.  The leader counts heads: we're four short.  Yup, one carload - driven by the guy who had been trying to give directions, and including a passenger who had supposedly been here before.  Cellophonic communication established: they're not here.  A few calls later: they've somehow ended up at Stevens Creek County Park.  Well, that's not too bad; they should be able to hike up the steep trail / fire road from the picnic area and meet us on the ridge.  We set up off the trail....
Eventually, we reach the ridge.  The Lost Carpool isn't there yet (and it should have been a sorter hike for them).  We set off down the trail in the direction whence they should be coming.  Another cellphone call: they're at a picnic area, but can't find the trail.  Nobody in our group is carrying a county park map; the MROSD map shows the trails through the county park, but not details like the names of picnic areas.  Hmm... it also doesn't show the trail we'd assumed they'd be coming up (which is not really an official trail; it crosses some private property between county park and preserve, but everybody uses it anyway).
So, we head down the trail toward the dam (which is the trail they'd be coming up, if they found an official trail sign).  We reach the dam; no sign of them.  Another phone call: it's not clear where they've gotten to, and it seems that hostility has broken out within their group.  OK, sounds like the Lost Carpool is well and truly lost.  We decide to turn left at the dam, and take the big loop back: past the reservoir, past the group picnic areas, and back up over the ridge to Fremont Older.  It adds a bit of distance and a lot of hills compared to the original plan for the day, but what the heck.
A couple more phone calls along the way.  The Lost Carpool has resorted to cannibalism.  One of the passengers has applied for a UN resolution calling for them to be rescued.  As we climb the last ridge and return to Fremont Older, we get the word: the survivors have finally gotten their bearings, and found the trail leading out of the parking lot.  An attempt on their part to rejoin us is discouraged, since at this point we're at the furthest possible point from either of the parking lots, and the Sun is trying to hide behind the next hill over.
After that, it was pretty much uneventful, except that the group got slightly mixed up again when most of us decided to bag a peak on the way back (a whopping 100 extra feet of elevation), while the leader and the stragglers skipped the peak and just headed down the trail, but we caught up with them eventually.
It ended up being just 7 miles, hardly over the original plan at all, but about 2000 feet of elevation gain, which was distinctly over the estimate.  I'm a bit sore now, but that's probably just because I ran part of the way (combination of high spirits, cool weather, and sugary snacks instead of a proper lunch).

* Trunk ringing?  As in, "The more he tried to get it free, the louder buzzed the telephee?"

Packaging!

So, having gotten the wondrous 2-channel motor controller working to the point where I really need to try controlling something with it (so I can see where tweaking is needed), I headed down to the local Chinese junk* emporium in search of a pair of bargain-basement cordless drills.  It's my lucky day!  There's a pile of cordless drills there for $10 each.  The boxes proclaim them to be 18V!!!! units; erratum stickers say they're actually 9V.  What the heck, I figure to use a 12V battery geared (well, PWM'ed) down, so this sounds about right.  The display unit has a big macho battery which feels suspiciously light.

The mismarked battery pack next to the proper battery pack from my decent-quality Black & Decker*** cordless drill.  It's about 60% bigger; why's it 6 ounces lighter?

Did I really need to ask that question?
Hypothesis #1: the big macho housing Makes It More Powerful, like the black plastic stock on an "assault rifle" or the extra-large exhaust tips on Rice Boy's Honda Civic.
Hypothesis #2: there are several models, all using the same plastic, but with diferent motors in the drill, and, accordingly, different numbers of NiCd cells stuffed in the same plastic battery case.
Incidentally, that turns out to be a 7.2V battery, not 9V.  Whatever.

Anyway, here's what I was really after, shorn of its orange plastic housing, drill chuck, and overload clutch.  One each 7.2V motor, with planetary reduction gears.
Unfortunately, while figuring out how to discombobulate the first of the two drills, I overlooked the existence of the screw that hides down the throat of the chuck, and ended up breaking it in the process of removing the chuck.  So now, in order to mount a wheel on the thing and have it stay put, I need to round up a replacement #10-32 left-handed screw....

* Correction: is sampan.**

** Three bonus GumbyPoints^TM to the first person to identify the Bullwinkle cartoon that comes from.  Especially if it was actually Super Chicken.

*** Disclaimer: I have stock in Black & Decker.

A needle in a haystack...

...a secret weapons program in a country the size of California...

...a Woodruff key in a swarf pile...

Feh.  Try to fix the lathe, drop a Woodruff key, see it bounce off my knee and go under the lathe, hear it bounce at least once, sift through the swarf, move the lathe, look behind it (amid swarf and spider webs)... no key.

Oh, well - I think OSH carries Woodruff keys these days.  Even if they are part of K-Mart now.

A glorious day at the coast

As usual, click on any of the little images to see a larger one.

The forecast had been a bit iffy, but my Saturday afternoon outing to Fitzgerald Marine Reserve met with fine beachgoing weather:

Now this part of the reef must be a sealy pinnipedic mattress (extra firm):

Hmmm, someone's broken the hands off this tidepool clock.  How will the hermit crabs know when it's low tide?

As usual, there were plenty of sea anemones (they haven't yet migrated south for the winter).

A fairly large hermit crab...

Oooh!  Look at the color on this sea anemone!  Has someone been feeding it radioactive waste?

The egrets were out on a sushi hunt, too, only they weren't playing catch and release.

Sea urchins!  On the hacker food chain, a C urchin must rank higher than a script kiddie, right?

Obligatory starfish:

(Sorry, "sea star."  The political-correctness folks have decided that piscene nomenclature is offensive to echinoderms.)

A kelp crab, lurking among the coralline algae (which bears little resemblance to kelp, so his camouflage isn't working too well):

Oooh, pretty!

(Abalone shell, shape partially obscured.  Vacant, of course.)

A big honkin' sun star!  A docent was feeding pieces of squid to this critter, which was moving quite fast for an echinoderm.

(This was late in the afternoon, and lighting conditions were horrible for through-the-water photography.  Not having a polarizing filter probably didn't help, either.  I finally tried a dumb move, i.e., using the flash, which actually worked surprisingly well, giving the results you see here.)

Those seals (and gulls) are still on the rocks...

So there we are, standing on the cliff watching the Sun set, when this... thing... goes past.

One does see some odd aircraft flying out of the airfield out by Half Moon Bay.

Ah, and there goes the Sun.

The hour of darkness being upon us, we proceeded to Princeton to check out the line at Barbara's Tourist Fish Trap.  Surprisingly, there was no line-out-the-door, and we only had to wait a few minutes for a table.  By 6:30, though, the line had appeared.  Good thing we got there early!

Nice combination of headlines

Here's the front page of the morning paper:

I think that sums it up pretty well.

Random thoughts in the wee hours

OK, so it's not the wee hours anymore, but now I'm awake, Googling, and blogging, and all set to check out my strange notion:
There have been various references to "small-l libertarians" - i.e., those who believe in libertarian principles but don't necessarily agree so much with the Libertarian Party.  I seem to fall in this category, as well as small-r republican, small-f federalist, and so on.
What about small-a anarchist?
Curiously enough, Google only finds 12 results for this (it'll be 13 once this is indexed, of course).  They seem to match the expected meaning.
Surely, though, small-a anarchists must be ubiquitous on the Net.  After all, we see their symbol everywhere:

@

Another weekend winds down

Well, it's been a pretty good weekend.
Saturday: Vintage Computer Festival.  Spent a couple of hours wandering around the exhibits...  a lot of the usual Altairs, Commodore 64s, ancient game boxes, and the like; also a complete PDP-11 datacenter (working!), two elaborate mechanical computers (lacking only pipe-organ memory), a USB-to-PDP-11/70-front-panel adapter (just in case you have a PDP-11/70 front panel lying around, and want to connect it to your PC), and somebody peddling baby PDP-8s (built around the Intersil/Harris chip, of which he'd located some new old stock).
At the end of the afternoon, there was just time for a quick look at the Visible Storage area of the Computer History Museum.  Lotsa good stuff there; gotta go back sometime and spend a whole afternoon looking around, and maybe even catch one of the docent-led tours.

Sunday: hiking through the four open space preserves at the intersection of Page Mill and Skyline.  Perfect hiking weather, though a bit too foggy and hazy for good sightseeing.  It was a fast-moving group (presumably the less ambitious hikers went on the other hike, which started at noon).  Just as we got back to the cars, the clouds were starting to close in.

Patches of fall colors on the hobbit hill at the end of the hike....

No doubt about it... I gotta get an older watch

You are getting non-Y2K-compliant... verrry non-y2k-compliant....
Well, I tried swinging my watch in front of the touchscreen voting machine, to hypnotize it into thinking it was 1904 and Teddy Roosevelt was on the ballot.
You can't fool me!  That watch was made in 1906.  If this is 1904, your watch hasn't been made yet, so you can't be using it to hypnotize me!
I couldn't persuade it that the Democrats had nominated Lieberman, either.  Foo faddle.
Oh, well... if there was nobody to vote for, at least there was plenty to vote against.  A little selectivity was called for, though, as there were actually a couple of propositions that deserved a yes vote.

The California proposition numbering system has gotten seriously screwy.  Many years back, the system was changed to prevent re-use of numbers before some number of years had gone by, to avoid association with memories of high-profile measures from past elections (13 and 6 come to mind).  Somehow, this has gone weird, so on this ballot we have: 1A, 59, 60, 60A (no relation), 61..72.  This includes a Proposition 65, which is another of those high-profile numbers that everybody remembers, because we find Proposition 65 warning labels on just about everything.  ("Prop. 65 warning: bullets contain lead, which can be harmful to your health.")  Fortunately, this doesn't matter, because the current Prop. 65's own mother wouldn't vote for it (the authors have instead endorsed the competing Prop. 1A).
You want issues?  We got issues!  Vote to require surplus stem cells wagered in tribal casinos to be used for emergency children's DNA samples!  Or... require that the top two felons in a primary election be required to provide health-care coverage to local governments!  Vote for and/or against everything!  It's all one big circus around here!

There was a bit of a line at the polling place, which is unusual; I don't know how much was high turnout, and how much was the unfamiliar voting machines (the newfangled touchscreen thingies, with no paper trail, though some people were exercising the paper-ballot option).  No sign of electioneering (unless there's a Touchscreen party; I did see stickers that said "I voted Touchscreen"), and the atmosphere was somewhere between civil and cheerful.