Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Lights! Camera! Peanut doodles!

I cast my vote this evening during my dinner break. I used one of the Diebold voting machines; and whether or not I think they have enough safeguards engineered into them, I also think they're pretty nifty gadgets. I'm a sucker for touch pads.

And with that profoundly patriotic thought in my head and a rumble in my belly, I went home, listened to the radio while I ate my dinner, and then turned the radio off and walked to the bookstore to buy a book for the flight tomorrow. Or three books, actually, and they'll probably last me longer than the remainder of a busy week.

I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV. No, not really. People have mistaken me for several flavors of scientist or engineer -- correctly, for the most part, since labeling academics by departments is a medieval notion, however time-honored -- but that's about the extent of it. And I'm not dramatic enough for television, and that's the way I like it. I can only imagine what my response would be to someone crying Lights! Camera! in my direction. I'm a mathematician and a computer scientist, and the television in the living room is broken, and has been for quite some time.