I probably just submitted the first vote for Ron Paul in Utah. Certainly, one of the first. I just completed voting in the Utah primary using Utah’s early voting option. I was unaffiliated with a party, so I had to sign a piece of paper stating that I was changing my party affiliation to Republican. After that, I requested a paper ballot, which caused the election officials to have to make changes on their computer since they assumed I was going to using the voting machines. Then they gave me a ballot that looks a lot like those multiple choice tests in school where you fill in the circles. I filled in the circle for Ron Paul and sealed it in a secure envelope they gave me. Then they had me put the envelope in a red case of some sort that had a slot for the envelopes. The Red case looked kind of like a laptop case with a carrying strap but more sturdy.

This raised a question in my head about how paper ballots are counted. They are probably counted by machine as well. I saw a video the other day on YouTube that demonstrated a machine that counted ballots. It’s kind of like a fax or copy machine. You slide the ballot into the machine and its sucks it in and scans it. The guy did a very simple demonstration with 8 ballots that showed the machine failing to count the votes properly. These things are programmable as well.

At least when you vote with a paper ballot there is the actual paper ballot as evidence of your vote.

I’ve been doing Cocoa development on OS X for about the last 3 years in Salt Lake. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of Cocoa development going on in Utah. If you know of some, I’d love to hear about it. I’d also like to know what hourly rate Cocoa developers are making. I make most of my income doing Cocoa contract work and I sometimes feel like I’m getting the short end of the stick here in Utah. It’s great to work in Cocoa and I enjoy my client’s project but it would be nice to make something comparable to what I could make doing boring Java work. So, if you know what Cocoa developers are making, let me know. And if you need some Cocoa work done, let me know. Ruby on Rails work as well.

We interrupt the current “All PackRat All The Time” theme for this blog for an announcement. This Wednesday (March 8th), I’ll be driving down to Provo to give my Ruby Cocoa presentation to the BYU Ruby Users Group. I’ll probably have some repeat visitors from URUG, but it will interesting to meet some more Ruby people interested in Cocoa.

For some reason, the folks down in Provo seem to be a little more interested in non mainstream technologies like Ruby, NeXT (in its day) and hence Cocoa, etc. I wonder why that is? As a University of Utah alumni, that bothers me a bit. Are the Utes turning out Java, .NET lemmings? The answer is probably another post, but you can look at Alan Kay and his talk entitled “Are Computer Science and Software Engineering Oxymorons?”. He gave this talk at the University of Utah last month and I found it quite interesting.