Ok world, here goes

Voila! I pull the curtain off my new creation: BetterPolls.com

BetterPolls.com, in which you can make spiffy polls and have them counted using the latest election methods, or just look at the data and figure it out for yourself.

What will become of it? Who will use it? I don't know. Will it become an internet fad and swamp my puny bandwidth? I can only hope and dream for as much. If I can just raise awareness and acceptance of using rankings and ratings ballots so that someday (soon) they may be used in real elections, that will be good enough.

Anyway, this is my first announcement. Now it goes in my sig:
Start Running Better Polls

It was a good night for "finishing" projects

Knowing a couple people who did NaNoWriMo, I was curious enough to think about doing it, and then think that "no, writing a novel is not really my thing" but could there be an equivalent for programming? I figure the equivalent ought to somehow be exertion based. I counted my recently announced project and came up with the statistic that the core of the project is 4146 lines, 16249 "words" or 121817 bytes that poured forth from my fingers through a keyboard over the last few weeks. Given the inherent requirement to go back and "edit" a program to fix bugs, one can't just blaze through as one might a novel. Novels don't have to compile (unless they're written in LaTeX). So, can we compare apples, oranges, programs and novels?

Bugs

Just my luck. It seems that the first person trying to test betterpolls.com exposed a bug. It's fixed now, but I can't tell who made the poll.