Brian’s Utah Weblog

Yesterday I signed up for the $10,000 Mozy.com Deathmatch, a computer programming contest.Mozy, the product of Berkeley Data Systems of Amrican Fork, is a very cool best-of-breed personal online data backup system. To keep up with technology development, Berkeley sponsored a contest to find top programmers around Utah. I expect the top winners will all be getting notes and phone calls to remind them what a wonderful place American Fork is to work.

There were two online elimination rounds yesterday with ten challenges to be completed within strict time limits. Most had to be done within ten minutes. Then the competitors who completed all or almost all the challenges were invited to a live round in American Fork.

There were eight of us left at American Fork at 4:00pm for the final round. The challenge was to write an extremely high-throughput internet server from scratch in ninety minutes. Unless you’ve done it before, that is almost impossible. But we did get several entries which came close to the theshold of processing ten thousand simultaneous connections.

Since none of us quite crossed the line, however, we agreed to split the prize money and look forward to another contest next year.

“Christensen Doesn’t See Bush As Liability” says the front page headline in the Tribune. Apparently he’s the only candidate in the country still using Bush in his teevee commercials.  The headline should say “badly losing candidate also displays poor political judgement.” That would be news.

I’ve been working on voting and targeting data this week and I noticed an interesting thing about primary voters.Republicans closed their primary to unaffiliated voters in 2002 and now you must be a registered Republican to vote in the Republican primaries.But voters are registering Republican for just the day and then changing back in huge numbers. It takes lots of paperwork to fill out multiple voter registrations once to change affiliation and once again to switch back. But people don’t like being forced to declare their loyalty, so they switch.

What I hadn’t suspected was the sheer numbers of switchers.

In 2004, there were a few hundred votes in Democratic primaries statewide. The Republican primaries included over one hundred thousand. But here are the current party registrations of voters in the 2004 primary,

Current Party	2004 Republican Primary Voters
R	128044
D	8079
L	78
G	48
None	47398

Each voter on this list was a registered Republican on election day. Every one who is not has changed registration since the primary (except for a few hundred Democratic primary voters).

I found another postcard in my mailbox today from Mr. Joe Jarvis, Republican candidate for Utah Senate in district 2.

And still Mr. Jarvis doesn’t have a single mark on his mailing to indicate that he’s a Republican. The last one was even worse as it included the word “Democrat” in several places quoting Democrats who like Mr. Jarvis’ position on health care. Of course, incumbent Senator McCoy’s position is just as strong and McCoy does not need to pretend to be someone he is not.

Does he think we’ll be fooled when the election comes? Doesn’t he know that names are on the ballot with party affiliations listed right beside?

I hope you’ll all join me in supporting the new star of the Utah Senate, Senator Scott McCoy.

It’s an exciting election season, but the big races are just not that dramatic.

Wise and reasonable folks are going to vote overwhelmingly for Representative Jim Matheson (D-UT2) and send him to join the Democratic majority in Washington, D.C. Even committed Republicans are crossing party lines for Jim.

I think Pete Ashdown is the cat’s pajamas, but he isn’t going to win this year. The same reasonable people who elect Jim Matheson are going to pick Orrin Hatch (R-DC) whose privileged Washington D.C. state of mind is so focused on personal power that we’d be better off with no senator at all.

Steve Olsen would be a great congressman but he hasn’t made enough progress against the awful Rob Bishop (R-UT1).

Christian Burridge is actually the most interesting candidate for Congress this year. He won’t win outright, but if he can climb up into the low 40’s leveraging big endorsements against corrupt Chris Cannon (Abramoff-UT3), he could really win next time in 2008. He just needs that level of experience and credibility to raise enough money to get the message out. Burridge is young and vigorous, keep an eye out for him.

But that isn’t enough excitement from big races. What is really at stake in this year’s elections? It’s the local races.

I’ll post on a few of the really exciting ones and how they offer us the opportunity to make life better for all Utahns this week.