Brian’s Utah Weblog

Nothing much happened in Utah yesterday. It was a warm, sunny autumn day along the Wasatch Front with calm winds and even calmer political winds.

In the most important races, there was no change. County Council incumbent David Wilde (R-Murray) narrowly defeated challenger Diane Turner to secure Republican control of the Salt Lake County Council for two more years. That loss will put our transit future in peril even with the measure three money. Corrupt Utah House Speaker and admitted thief of public money Greg Curtis (R-Sandy) made his way back into the legislature by a slim 40 vote margin over hardworking challenger Jay Seegmiller. There will be recount in that race and some provisional ballots need to be counted. If you love Utah, you will pray for good news in that race but the margin is likely large enough to hold.

The partisan divide in the House remains 56-19 and in the Senate remains 21-8.

Only two seats changed parties in the legislature. In House 22, Carl Duckworth (D-Magna) has been hit with accusations of weak and ineffective leadership throughout his past term. He avoided a primary this spring by only a few votes in convention over progressive challenger Greg Schulz of Magna. Tuesday he lost to Republican Deena Detton Ely, but the result was a razor thin 25 votes and an automatic recount is in progress.

In House 36 Phil Riesen defeated Susan Lawrence (R-Millcreek) to give a solid chunk of the East Bench complete Democratic representation. Districts to the north and south were already Democratic.

No senate seats changed party hands.

Bond initiatives in both Salt Lake and Utah counties for transit passed by wide margins.

The biggest change this year is that there is a new sheriff in town. Jim Winder, Salt Lake County Sheriff-elect will bring energy and strength to a department that had weakening leadership under Aaron Kennard. Congratulations to Jim Winder and Salt Lake County.

Update (11-9):  The Senate is 21-8 Republican.  When I wrote 20-9 I was still dreaming that Utah had won with the election of Trish Beck in Senate 9.  It had been a late election night for me.

The Tribune did a story today on the Mozy computer programming Deathmatch.

Jon Jensen wrote a story about the Deathmatch on his weblog.

Mozy reports that of several hundred entries and 122 who submitted some answer to one or more challenges

• 93 were eliminated in round one
• 21 were eliminated in round two

And none of the eight submissions in the finals completely met the criteria of the challenge, although some came close.

The results page shows that my entries for the ten problems in rounds one and two were all successful but my entry in the finals, like the seven others, didn’t meet all the performance criteria.  We came pretty close, though.