Very soon I will be getting on a plane to get the hell out of here. It will be about another week or so till I'm actually home, but still, it's the first step. And it's quite exciting. I have been in Afghanistan for about 350 days or so and while it hasn't been particularly tough or challenging (probably the easiest job I'll ever have), I'm eager to move on.

Whenever I have mentioned that I'm leaving in x days, people always have some desire to ask why. As though they're trying to determine if I couldn't handle it or something. Yes, I can't handle being paid tons of money to sit at a desk for 10 hours every night and do almost nothing. I meant that as sarcasm, but it's actually, basically, true. No, honestly, I could probably do this for years without being phased--but I don't want to. I didn't come out here to stay for years. I came out here to stay for one year, save up some money, and move on to better things.

Remember that movie, Paycheck? That's sort of what it's like. This year is basically an empty hole in my life. The whole night shift thing didn't help as far as that goes, but eh, it was easy and I had plenty of time to do my own stuff. Now I can go and do stuff that's more meaningful to me. And I can do it without sharing a toilet with hundreds of people. It will also be nice to have more bandwidth to my house than the whole of this base gets for private internet access.

So yep, that's it.

Well, I've had a fun little adventure lately and if anything is worthy of being 'blogged' about, this is.

So, every day I look through the links at reddit so as not to die of boredom (typically at work). I saw a link to this site that has picked out some issues that are of concern in the current US presidential race. They list the top twenty or so candidates and their views on a couple dozen issues in a nice table so you can compare.

www.2decide.com/table.htm

Looks great, although it's somewhat hard to process all the information in that form and I think, well, wouldn't it be great if you can just tell them what YOU think about each issue and then it does the eyeballing for you? Surely. I was not the only person on the vastness of the internet to think this, although I was, it would appear, the first to implement it.

I saved the HTML from the 2decide site onto my computer and then wrote a little script to parse the HTML tables and print out all of the data in some quick-and-easy PHP arrays like so:

$candi["Biden"]["Embryonic Stem Cells"]=1;
$candi["Biden"]["ANWR Drilling"]=2;
$candi["Biden"]["Kyoto"]=5;

Actually, first I tried looking at the chart and typing it in manually, but after about half an hour of doing that (and getting through, like, 4 candidates), my brain exploded. Plus, I was sure that I would end up making mistakes at various points. So I spent only a few minutes to write the script that parsed the HTML outright. Phew.

Before long I had a working script. Here is a transcript of an amusing conversation I had directly following that:

me: did you see http://www.2decide.com/table.htm ?
e: no
e: what they should add is some way for you to input what you care about so it highlights how close each candidate gets to your ideal
me: something like this www.dehp.net/candidate
e: aw
e: how cute

Yes, how cute. Then I posted it to reddit and bam, lots and lots of hits. I had written it so that it logs the data that people submit and I quickly saw that the majority of people were getting Kucinich as their top pic. I had heard of Kucinich (well, mostly just of his hot wife) before, but didn't really know anything about him. Nice, apparently he has some pretty likable views on a lot of issues that are important to me and to, apparently, a lot of other people.

I wanted other people to see what the records look like, so I whipped up a script to parse the log into easy to use stats (although the stats page now has much more information than when I originally put it up). Look at the stats:

www.dehp.net/candidate/stats.php

At this point, I'm not sure if I'm a Kucinich supporter, as I still don't know *that* much about him. Seems worthy of my support, although it would also seem to be a pointless endeavor to support him. Of the 3 viable (democratic) candidates, Edwards was at the top for me--and he's the least viable of those 3. Nice. At least Obama isn't too far down the list. Not perfect, but I could vote for him.

Okay, last bit. Kucinich has a web site. The design is first-rate and it features on online community that basically mimics myspace (we should call it kspace). Here's my profile:

http://action.dennis4president.com/mdickw

Yes, well, I've begun a blog. I'll admit in case you don't already know, that I'm not a very big fan of 'blogging' so this might be somewhat unexpected. But... I'm going to be working on a number of projects and I'd like to keep them documented to some degree so that other people can benefit from them. So yeah, that's all. Don't expect any posts until after I'm actually home.