White Sox/DBacks

Facebook killed the blogger?

So a couple of weeks ago I started using facebook and haven't written anything in the blog since. Maybe this is just where things are going. For the meantime, I found a practical way to insure that blog posts get stuck on the wall on my facebook page.

I went to Tucson yesterday for a book festival where Elmore Leonard appeared.

I am taking tomorrow off and going to a Cactus League game, Dodgers/A's at Phoenix Muni, going to take the train. I see by today's paper that it is a split squad game for the Dodgers so it's not clear whether Manny et al will be there. Going walk over to the Metro and ride to the game.

Loose Ends

None of these things are worth a separate post but I don't want to lose track of them.

John sent a great article about how the web has changed how we read and think. Worth looking at if you haven't seen it. Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I spent about a week trying to figure out why the power management features on the new computer would not kick in. The PC is configured to, after 10 minute intervals of inactivity, first go to screensaver, then turn off the monitor, then put the computer to sleep. It would do that occasionally but usually it would not. I observed it going into the screensaver and then returning to the desktop on numerous occasions. I made 4 changes, one of which resolved the issue:

1. in MSCONFIG, turned off the startup for itunes


2. in MSCONFIG, turned off the startup for quicktime


3. in MSCONFIG, turned off the startup for adobe


4. removed the link for Logitech desktop messenger from the startup folder

I don't know which one did it but it is not worth debugging since I don't think any of them do anything useful, they just make the computer take longer to start up. The Logitech thingie is there because I have a Logitech webcam and because of the Harmony remote software. I think all that it did was check for new versions and try to sell me things. All of this crap was presumably on on the previous computer, but I guess it interacts differently with Vista.

I got really disgusted with my phone the other day. I realized that I was stuck with it for a while, since it had a two year contract and was purchased in July of last year. So... after making sure that I had copies of everything that was useful on it, I installed Windows Mobile 6.1 (which does a master reset of the phone, i.e. wipes out everything except what is on the storage card.) I also did NOT reinstall Good Messaging, decided to go back to ActiveSync for email/calendar/etc. So for I like it much better.

Among other things, I installed an application that interfaces with Netflix. You can view and update your queue, and also play trailers. I really like the ability to play the trailers.

Two nights ago, we were watching TV when we suddenly heard this voice in the next room, calmly announcing something or other. I got up, hit pause on the remote for the DVR and went in the room. By that time it (she it turned out) was done with the announcement. There were several suspect devices in the room.: two computers, two landline phones with speakers, and the recently upgraded cellphone. The likely culprits were the phone and the new computer, but the computer alleged to be sleeping (see above) and the phone was not lit up. No clue.

So last night it happened again. This time I did not stop to pause the TV. Both of us ran into the study and heard a British woman jabbering about Phoenix weather. The clock in the living room was chiming 9:00. Still nothing lit up but Susan thought it was coming from the cellphone. I unlocked it (stupid Motorola security) and noticed that the icon list at the top of the display was claiming that the most recent application to be used was WorldMate Live. That is a nifty application that does time, weather, currency conversion, flight status, you can access stored itineraries, etc. I have a "gold" subscription because of some arrangement that they have with Motorola. I had installed a newer version of it when I redid the phone stuff. The new one apparently has feature that causes this nice lady to read a weather forecast at a scheduled time. The default for this curious feature is ON and for it to occur at 9 pm. Needless to say she will no longer intrude. I can't imagine what the developers were thinking.

I have finished 3 books in the last couple of weeks. I mentioned When I Was Five I Killed Myself in the previous post. The other two books were Boom! by Tom Brokaw and Big Russ and Me by Tim Russert. Both of these books were written by people from NBC News and both were more or less historical pieces that covered years in my memory. The two books could not have been different. The Brokaw book was a treasure trove of historical information, a lot of it quite fascinating, some of it worth skipping. My favorite parts were personal notes concerning people I was familiar with. The two references to Hunter S. Thompson were great. The first concerned Brokaw's wife.

My wife, Meredith, once shared a cross-country flight with him during the closing days of the Nixon administration. They had a very pleasant visit, and as the plane began its descent into Los Angeles, Thompson leaned accross the seat almost apologetically and said to Meredith, "Look, I've only got one tab of acid, but I'd be willing to share it with you." She politely declined.

The other reference comes up in a discussion about über-Conservative Pat Buchanan:

One of his unlikely occasional companions, when I knew him in Washington, was Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the pill-popping, invective-spewing, hilarious godfather of gonzo journalism. Thompson would blow into Washington on an assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, call up Buchanan, and off they'd go on a beer-drinking all-nighter, arguing their respective views of the world in long verbal jousts that seldom were resolved.

Buchanan recounts these occasions happily, saying "I don't know how he did it. He must have had a case of beer, and yet he was swimming laps in the pool at my house." Thompson liked to call Buchanan, the "best right-wing propagandist since Goebbels," a description Buchanan often repeats with a big guffaw.

It was great book, but still, it was clear that Brokaw, who is 10 years older than me (and Russert) did not exerience the 60's in so much as he reported on them. You get this impression of him as a stuffy guy who wanted to seem cool but never quite got it. Of Woodstock, which he did not attend, he said

It was a mass of hippie humanity, glorying in the sky above and the mud below, cold and wet, with good grass and bad acid.

I have heard a lot about Woodstock but never that the acid was bad.

Russert, on the other hand, arrived at Woodstock on the first night. He and his buddies had 8 cases of beer stacked on their car and a banner for their favorite Buffalo radio station. They "paid eight bucks a piece for our tickets and got up close to the stage." They were wearing Buffalo Bills jerseys. Decidely un-cool or at least atypical but they were there and had a great time. He seems like the kind of person that you wish you knew. I wouldn't have much to say to Brokaw.

Russert's book, purportedly about his father and their relationship, is really an autobiography. There is a lot about the man that I do not relate to. He came from an ethnic, religious, blue collar family, none of which resonates much with me. It seems though, that his growing up in the same era, with many of the same experiences, makes him seem extremely relevant. His humanity, his humor, his feelings for his family all make a lot of sense. His death was very sad, this last year was a hugely enjoyable time from a political standpoint, the primary season was like nothing this country had seen before, and in the process we really got to know the man, and how much he loved politics, the process, the people. Just when it was getting good he was gone.

When I Was Five I Killed Myself

When I was in college I knew a guy from Detroit. I had met him in freshman orientation and we kept in touch for a few years. At one point he dropped out of school and went to Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey clown school in Florida. (I suspect that this was AFTER the draft lottery that was held 12/1/69 during the first semester of our sophomore year.) He subsequently came back to school in Ann Arbor. We were not real close but I have several recollections of him. Other than occasionally using the "I knew a guy who dropped out and went to clown school" bit in conversation, I hadn't thought about him again until a few weeks ago when I got the idea to google his name.

Howard Buten lives in France, is a clinical pyschologist and is a recognized authority on autism. He is a performing artist known as Buffo the Clown and is well known in France. He has written several novels and received the Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in 1991. A novel that he wrote in English in 1981 was translated to French and has allegedly been read by 1 in 10 people in France, sort of a French Catcher in the Rye, according to the preface. It was re-released in the US in 2000 as "When I Was Five I Killed Myself" -- it was originally titled "Burt". It's about a 3rd grade boy who has emotional issues and is institutionalized. It is written convincingly in first person. I just finished reading it and recommend it highly.

New stuff

Last weekend I brought home a Samsung CLP-315 Color Laser Printer. It was $149 at Office Max and seems to make high quality color prints. I also ordered a Dell Inspiron 518 which was delivered on Thursday. The last few PCs had been HPs. Probably anecdotal, but I had a LOT of problems with them. Our current desktop has a bad hard drive. So it made sense to go with Dell. Somebody at work gave me a code that got me a discount, saved about $50. I was able to custom order it, which makes it a lot better than buying from a retailer. I got 4GB RAM, a media card reader, Vista Home Premium, and NO productivity software. I like Vista so far. The only casualty would appear to be my scanner, which I can't get to work even though the vendor has drivers for Vista.

Marathon

I was awakened at 7 AM yesterday to the sound of rock and roll music outside. WTF? Oh, the marathon. Indeed the band that would play at 7th Ave/Thomas was doing a sound check, warming up. I knew it was coming but had forgotten about it when I went to bed. Had enough time to get up, get breakfast, grab cameras and walk to the end of the street. The race starts at 7:40 and they take something like 12 minutes to get here. Pictures here.

Chris Bliss at Dodge Theatre

We went to see the Smothers Brothers at the Dodge last night. rode the Metro down, had dinner at Thai Elephant (which was packed!). The brothers were good, still had the ability to entertain, Tom is in his 70's but still acts like an impish little kid. We had great seats (third row, a little to the right of center). They were less topical than I expected them to be. Tom did make a comment about how the morons would not be running the country any more, but most of it was the usual shtick where he irritates his brother. One of the most amazing aspects was the opening act, Chris Bliss. I am sure that I have seen him somewhere before, maybe one of the Alice Cooper Christmas Pudding shows, but I am not sure when. Anyway, he was a very funny comic, better than most opening acts. He was done, it seemed, and we were satisfied, but he wanted to do one more thing. Maybe you have seen this before, but here is a video of him doing this bit somewhere else. You have to see this...

More Metro

Today we decided to go to the Eye Masters at Christown to order some new glasses for Susan. It took 14 minutes to get to the station and about a 3 minute wait for a train. This was the first day of regular hours for the trains, which started at 4 something in the morning. There were no more volunteers to help people but the trains are still free through Wednesday night. The train was a bit crowded but we were able to get a seat by lowering a 3 seat panel that was folded against the wall. The seats would have been filled if people had known what to do... We got a the end of the line at 19th Ave/Montebello around 11:20. There was a small line of people waiting to get on the trains. We saw several TSA and Department of Homeland Security people on the platform. Although the station faces the mall, it is not completely an enclosed mall anymore. The stores that face 19th Avenue (Target, Ross, some others and some new still empty stores) do not connect to the mall. You have to go all the way around to JC Penney (in what I think was the Monkey Wards when we shopped there 20-25 years ago) to get into the mall. The stores that are in the mall include Penney's, Costco, Walmart, Bath and Body works and a few smaller stores. I bought some olive oil and a blu-ray disk in Costco while Susan ordered her glasses. Then we headed back to the station, this time going behind Target which I think was shorter. There was a huge line but the nice Homeland Security man advised us as to how to avoid the crowd and we got on a train relatively quickly. It was full leaving the station and got fuller at 7th Avenue and Central/Camelback. We got out at Campbell to have lunch at Pane Bianco. Unfortunately it is closed on Mondays. It is open until 3 Tuesday-Saturday. So we walked to the Indian School stop. There were a bunch of people waiting and when the train came it was so full that few go on. We then waited another 20 minute or so for a train and when its doors opened it was no better. We got anyway, to the protest of some of the people inside. Welcome to mass transit, folks, get used to it! The problem was that over the weekend the volunteers were making sure that the trains left the endpoints only partially full so that people could get on elsewhere. There was no one to do that today, so getting on it was very difficult. But get on we did. We got off at Encanto and ended up getting lunch at Schlotzky's, where it was nearly two and there were a bunch of non-business-types eating. I attributed it to the metro but the proprietor grumbled that it wasn't helping him one bit and would not. Anyway, we walked home from there, 3.5 hours all told but an interesting experience. We had planned on riding to Tempe for dinner tonight but decided to wait for Friday when they started charging people and the crowds would thin out. Still I might try my trip to Mesa tomorrow morning if I get up early enough.

Metro!

I was at the opening of the Metro (light rail) this morning as an "ambassador". My assignment was to answer questions, give directions, etc. My shift started at 8 although the trains did not start taking on passengers until 10. I arrived at the Encanto station about 7:55. I had not slept very well, didn't feel good and it was really cold out, the exact circumstance under which to stay in bed but I had been waiting for this for years, literally, and was not going to miss it. We got our instructions and orange vests and then stood around for a couple of hours. I really needed coffee but had been afraid to consume liquids if I was going to stand out there for 4 hours. There was not much of a crowd waiting. By the time that 10:00 rolled around, there were maybe 20 or so people waiting on the platform. At 10:09, the first train (shown here), a northbound train heading to 19th/Montebello (Christown) rolled in, and a southbound train arrived before the northbound one left. The trains ran were supposed to run every 10 minutes in each direction but were pretty erratic. The station became fairly crowded as my shift progressed and there decidedly more passengers wanting to go south than north. On a few occasions the trains were so crowded that people refused to get on. Susan arrived a little after 11:30 and on my advice got on a northbound train (see picture). She went one stop up to Thomas and then walked back. By that time I was done so we squeezed on a southbound and got off at 1st Ave/Jefferson. We walked around a bit, found the booth where I picked up a t-shirt and key ring as reward for the volunteer work. We then got on at 3rd St/Washington and rode back to Encanto. As the day has progressed the crowds at the stations and at the parties has seemed to grow considerably. It was a good thing to get in early. It was all very cool. Trains are free through the end of the year. I think I might wait until about Tuesday and ride the full length of the lines. You can see more pictures here.

BUY the Big 3

GM, Ford and Chrysler are once again testifying in Washington, this time with a plan. They want $34 billion in loans. Michael Moore has what sounds like a better idea. In his Daily Beast article he suggests that the government just buy them. Pointing out that all of the outstanding common stock of GM could be purchased for about $3 billion, he makes a pretty good case. Detroit would have to put up the companies' assets as collateral, and when they inevitably defaulted on the loans, we'd own 'em anyway. By buying them now we could save some money, dismiss the bozoes who run the 3 outfits, and retool them to make green vehicles, light rail cars, etc., the very things we need going forward. Moore is not exactly one of America's leading economists, and there is probably something wrong with the proposal, but it is entertaining and makes sense to me...

Happy Birthday to me

I got a Blu-Ray player for my birthday yesterday. I did a lot of research and picked the Panasonic DMP-BD35K. It is a platform 2.0 player, which means it has BD-Live, picture in picture and a few other things. It got a good review on CNET, which convinced me to pick it over the equivalent Sony. Among other things, the Sony needed a firmware upgrade for platform 2.0, and this one was already there. So far I am very impressed with it.

I had some issues in setting it up, but that is half the fun. Things have progressed a lot since the days when you would hook your antenna or cable up to your VCR, run another cable to your TV, tune your TV to channel 3 or 4 and there was your system.

After hooking it to the TV with an HDMI cable, it worked right out of the box. The audio at this point was coming through the TV. I had also attached a network cable, and when I did the connection test it passed, and showed my the IP address that it had obtained. When I hooked up the optical digital audio cable connected to the receiver I got no sound. I screwed around with this for a half hour or so, trying different settings, etc. The issue with audio is that it can output the latest audio formats (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD) to receivers that can decode them if you are sending data to your receiver with HDMI. My receiver is a couple of years old and lacks both HDMI input and the ability to decode those formats. The manual implied that it would send old style Dolby Digital and DTS along in that situation but I was getting nothing. Finally I checked out the cable and saw no red light emitting from the end that would connect to the receiver. That meant it wasn't passing data. I found another cable and tried it and it worked! I have no idea why the cable went bad, as it had been working in another hookup last week. Ironically the bad cable was a Monster and the replacement was a cheaper Radio Shack cable. The lesson here was that the default setting worked.

On to video. My TV is a two year old 720p Pioneer plasma. It came out just when 1080p started making its appearance. It had the unique offering of accepting both 1080p input and 24p input. Film cameras work at 24 frames per second but most video is 60 images per second. Blu-Ray videos can be 24p which makes for smoother more realistic images. My TV can handle and properly process both 1080p input and 24p input, which is not the norm for a 720p monitor. Anyway I wanted to get the setting such that would allow these things. I was looking at something and pushed the button that made the monitor tell me what it was displaying and it said 1080i. The setting for resolution was set to Auto which means let the player figure out what the monitor can handle. Figuring that this was wrong, I switched it to 1080p. It warned me that that might not be a good idea and that I would have to hold down a couple of buttons for 5 seconds if things did not work out. The screen went black. Holding down those buttons yielded an error message that suggested I had a bad HDMI cable. I had to hook up a composite video cable to again see the screen to get out of the mess. Once again able to see the screen I set it back to Auto. I then messed with settings for a while. At one point it was only outputting 480p. Eventually I set things back to the default. Then I tried to play a movie and checked the monitor and it was in fact 1080p. I turned on 24p on the Blu-Ray player and that worked too. The lesson here is that the player, at least with the Auto setting, puts out either 1080i or 1080p depending upon the content, and that the default settings worked for me.

The remote also provides some issues. I have a Panasonic DVD Recorder/VCR. It has a nearly identical remote. So the remote turns on both players, etc. The solution is to change the "control code" on one of the units, which defaults to "1", to "2" or "3". That works just fine but the Harmony software only seems to understand code 1.

Finally, I am underwhelmed with BD-Live, at least with the one disk that I have looked at, Wall-E. I should start by saying that the internet connectivity works fine and I was able to update the firmware from version 1.1 to version 1.5 fairly effortlessly. It is set to automatically watch for updates. When loading the disk you get a message that says something like Network Connection Started. The first time I started Wall-E, I got another message saying that it needed to update my system (!?) in order to do BD-Live on the disk. I answered OK and it displayed a progress bar for about 10 minutes. The next time I started the disk the same thing happened, but the firmware update was in between and it has not done it again. Still it was painful. Whatever updates it is making must be things stored on the SD card, which is required for BD Live. I got a 4GB card for $9.99 at Fry's. So then after some time spent loading it asks you to log in, directing you to a Disney website to get one. After doing that you learn that there is a verification process via return email AND that your screenname will be approved at a later date. (They rejected "pbenjamin" for some reason, by the way.) Finally armed with an account I logged in. The interface to type in userid and password is cumbersome AND it fails to remember you the next time. After about 30 minutes of work I finally gained entrance. This disk provided 4 options. Two were mail and chat with other people who have managed to register, sounds about as promising as Twitter turned out to be. A third was games, which seemed like a good thing except that the private games had yet to be implemented and the public game that was offered would start in 15 minutes. The final option involved redeeming points (obtained by registering Disney Blu-Rays) for valuable gifts. Wall-E (the movie itself) is highly recommended.

The player itself is wonderful. The picture quality is on par with the best HD that I've gotten from cable, better than most of it given the trend towards broadcast subchannels and compression by the cable companies. So far I own 4 disks: Goodfellas and American Gangster, which I got as birthday presents, and From Russia With Love and Thunderball, which I bought for myself. Wall-E came from Netflix, as will Hancock (which is a BD-Live disk -- second try) tomorrow.

Whither Twitter

Feeling hopelessly out of it, and never having ventured into myspace or facebook, I set up a Twitter account to find out what it was all about. I think I understand now but it is next to useless as I don't know anybody who uses it. Does anybody who reads this do Twitter? For that matter does anybody read this? Anyway, there is a link down a ways on the right hand side of the blog page that point to my (at least for now) Twitter presence.

Motown Mess

The Detroit automakers need help. As anyone who reads, watches or hears the news is aware, they are on the verge of bankrupcy and asking for help. A poll released today alleges that 55% of Americans support the idea, but to hear some of the media you would get the opposite impression. Not helping them has some appeal. They don't seem to learn, these guys. They lost a ton of customers to Japanese automakers in the 1970s when gas got scarce. They continued to lose customers due to the perception that quality was subpar. They made progress on quality but they never quite got religion about fuel efficiency. In the 90s When Americans went nuts over SUVs and gas was cheap they did everything they could to build bigger and bigger bloated behemoths. Why should we give them more money when they can't seem to figure out what Toyota and Honda did when they concentrated on hybrids?

I look at it a little differently. I grew up in Detroit, my brother worked for Ford all of his life and my cousin Bob did the same trick at Cadillac. Half of the people I knew there either worked for one of the Big Three or worked in a company that was dependent on them. A couple of my friends from high school met me in Fort Lauderdale a couple of years ago for a road trip to Key West. Chris was retired from a GM plant and Itura worked for a company that did drafting for Chrysler. Itura lost his job in May. They say if one of the Big Three goes under the job loss would be between 2 and 3 million.

People are going to buy and drive cars. If they stop making them in the US, we will just buy them from other countries. Automobile manufacturing is one of the few manufacturing industries that remains in this country. We have to produce something, we can't all make a living selling services to each other. We have to figure out how to keep the industry alive.

Are they guilty of making gas guzzlers while they should have been planning for a day when gas stopped being cheap? Absolutely. But who helped them get there? Take a look on the road at your fellow citizens with their big ass pickups, their Hummers, Navigators and Suburbans. Think about the government that stopped increasing CAFE standards in 1990 and kept the standards for light trucks (which includes SUVs) much lower. Detroit might have screwed up be we helped them royally.

Give them money to stay alive but make sure that they retool to make more fuel efficient vehicles and invest in the techology for electric, natural gas and fuel cell. Use the economic mess as an occasion to shake things up and improve the industry. Things will get better, even the Depression ended eventually, and when they do, do we want to be buying our cars made by people in Japan and Korea, or people in Michigan and Ohio? Most Americans would buy the better car and not care so much. Let's insure that the better cars are made here.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

I found this on YouTube. We were watching MSNBC when the announcement came in. I think I switched to NBC for HD coverage after a minute or two but this was how it started.

Yes We Did

Jon Talton on the election

From Rogue Columnist:

This moment

And so it comes down to this. A day that will mark the most important election in my lifetime and certainly the most consequential since 1932. The polls show Obama leading and yet... One wonders how wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, standard bearer for the Party that Wrecked America, could have even 41 percent support, much less higher, much less be, perhaps, competitive in Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia.

This support for a candidate who wholly represents the ruinous governing philosophy of conservatism -- a set of ideas so discredited, exhausted and out of step with the values of most Americans that McCain's only strategy was a dishonorable campaign of despicable attacks on his opponent and riling up a hateful "base." The man who claims "Country First" picked -- or was forced to pick -- the most unqualified and dangerous vice presidential candidate in American history. Who are these supporters and what are they thinking? Has ignorance, television-induced brain damage and Republican hate finally pushed us past the tipping point? And election fraud, that determinative agent of the 2000 and 2004 elections, is an ever present danger. And the confluence of moneyed interests that fears Obama.

And yet, we have this moment, this last chance. John Adams reflected the realism of the Founders when he said democracies always eventually commit suicide. Decades later Lincoln rightly called this an experiment, not a fixed or secure order in human events. Now the American generations living will be tested at history's fulcrum.

Americans never have the "perfect candidate." I can imagine what today's Republicans would do to Lincoln; his adversaries at the time likened him to an ape or worse. Franklin Roosevelt was seen as a lightweight, a dilettante, despite his testing and suffering in the aftermath of polio. Eisenhower was slimed by the conservative attack machine, just gaining its training wheels in the form of Joe McCarthy. Behind the winning smile, Ike did McCarthy in -- and Tailgunner Joe never saw the lethal round coming. Each of these imperfect men and many more like them led America to a sunlit future that we baby boomers witnessed -- and have seen slipping away, especially through the past eight years.

George W. Bush rightly hides now. He presided over the debasement of the Constitution, the enshrinement of torture as American policy, an unnecessary and dangerously costly war waged on cooked intelligence, the failure to capture or kill bin Laden, the lethal federal incompetence in New Orleans and the worst financial collapse since the Depression -- caused by the deregulation and oligarchy he championed. As bad are the opportunities deliberately lost, especially on global warming and the limited world oil resources that even Bush admits. America has lost its moral compass, squandered precious moral capital in the world, wasted precious time. The Justice Department and federal judiciary have been poisoned, not only for the theocrats, but to give big business and monopoly an unbreakable hold on power. And John McCain would depart from these policies not one bit, except perhaps to open a new war in Iran.

All of this can be reversed. It will take sacrifice and hard work that Obama rightly said little of during the campaign. A nation living off the sacrifices of previous generations has been living in a haze. President Obama will give clarity and vision, courage and strength, the ability to articulate (!) our vast challenges and opportunities. The president can't and shouldn't do it all. But the past eight years have taught us just how much a president can do, and the danger of another George W. Bush.

For now, we have this moment. God help us that it will be enough.

Dick Cavett on John McCain

I heard him say that when the White House phone rings at the dread 3 o'clock in the morning, you don't want someone picking it up who has to take time to "think and analyze the situation, but someone who will act." This, coming from a man with the "thinking and analyzing" traits of a snapping turtle cannot help but bring the Cuban missile crisis to mind — and what the world might be today had the Arizona senior been in charge. If it (the world) would even be at all.

Good ad

Construction Update

Trees are planted, wall is rebuilt and painted, patio cover is rebuilt and we got tile put on the barbecue counter.

Willo Solidarity

Somewhere in the early primary season, before Arizona voted on Super Tuesday, we got an Obama yard sign. It was the only one on our street for several months, was ravaged by the weather in August and eventually replaced with a new Obama/Biden sign in September. Now there are four on our street (three pictured here, ours is the white one). There are no McCain signs on our street and very few in Willo.