Photo: Arne Müseler

The very first computer game I can remember playing was "RESTRANT" (the 8 character name for "Restaurant") on the TRS-80 in Mr. Saint's computer lab at the age of 9 or so. It was a game in which you were given a small restaurant and you made decisions, chose prices for meals and let the primitive simulation run. If you made poor decisions, your little restaurant would get run into the ground or food would spoil or people just wouldn't visit your bistro.

I played that game a LOT as a kid (incidentally, would love to find a copy of it for emulation). Ever since, I've enjoyed the kinds of games where you make high level decisions and the simulation runs. Actually, I enjoy them enough that I had to quit playing them a few years ago to avoid sinking hours and hours into them.

So, when a web-based political simulation in which you found your own nation state and make policy decisions, the ramifications of which play out in the simulation, you can imagine my piqued interest. When I discovered that playing likely only takes 30-60 seconds per day, I broke my rule against playing simulations and founded the Republic of Glass Too Big.

We shall see if my little exercise in nation-building will go well or not. If you decide to found your own nation, please share.

Somehow, I've managed to get added to the lists of not only all of the candidates on my ballot, but all of the major parties and a bunch of races I can't even vote for. They've managed to get most of my contact information and have been using that information to their advantage.

Up until this week, it's been pretty much limited to email and postal mail. Those messages, often phrased as a message that clearly assumes I already agree with them. That's been interesting in and of itself. It's pretty revealing what the core of their message is when you get communication like that.

Anyway, as email and regular mail, it's fairly easy to ignore. Just toss it out or hit "delete". However, tonight, dozens of automated phone banks have been fed my phone number and I'm spending my night dodging the calls of recorded messages from politicians.

Too bad I already made my mind up on all of the ballot entries a LONG time ago.

Last week, amidst the media rush to cover North Korea in some unique way, I heard a story on public radio about an animator who spent several months in Pyongyang, supervising animation work.

As an artist, he made up for the restrictions on taking pictures and condensed his experience into a ~200 page graphic novel. I happened to be near a computer when I heard the story and ordered a copy. I promptly forgot about it until Sunday morning, when I left for breakfast and found an Amazon box on the step that I apparently didn't notice as part of the Saturday mail.

I tossed it in the truck and didn't get around to opening it for a while and suddenly remembered ordering it. I spent most of last night and early this morning poring over the black and white drawings. The striking similarities to George Orwell's 1984 are everywhere, including such "facts" as the Glorious Leader's "11 holes-in-one" on his first ever golf outing. That kind of revisionist history just reeks of Newspeak.

With the aging population fast approaching the day when no one remembers anything prior to 1953 and the rise of the current situation, the reality in North Korea is really tragic. If you're even a little bit interested in getting a better understanding of what is arguably the most isolated place on earth, you owe it to yourself to check out this book.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea

If you checked the election results today, you noticed that I finished with about 3% of the vote. Given that only 2 people move on, that means that this is the end of my involvement in the 2006 elections as a candidate.

Now, the results weren't surprising in any substantive way. By the second week of July, I was pretty sure that Carmody and Willson were going to be the ones moving forward. I kept moving forward because I viewed this whole process as an experiment of sorts. I was curious what results you could get as a baseline in a municipal election.

Here's my take on the results.

First, only 2102 people voted on this issue in this primary election. When you consider that Brooklyn Center has 30,000+ residents (2000 census), that's not very many people who affected the overall outcome.

Second, remember that I only spent the $5 filing fee. I decided to only buy signs if I made it through the primary. While I was tempted (by quite a few people pushing) to buy pamphlets, etc. However, I wanted to see what a real baseline run for office ended up looking like.

Third, between projects like painting the house (which still isn't finished), prior commitments and a few things that came up in my private life, I didn't do the pavement pounding that's free. Given that I would have only needed to convince 584 to come out yesterday and vote for me, a few weekends spent going through the neighborhood and talking to people would have likely paid of fairly well.

Speaking of which, I didn't mention it earlier, but this weekend, while I was painting, Kathleen Carmody came through the neighborhood dropping off pamphlets. She gave her spiel, but made absolutely no effort to ask me anything (not even my name) and just shoved the paper into my hand. I was about to tell her that I was actually running against her, but she was already nearly gone, so I just protected my secret identity behind the oh-so-clever disguise of a 30 year old guy painting his house and let her walk off.

However, that interaction has me pretty seriously leaning toward Willson. I haven't yet met him, so I'm not endorsing him or anything, but my experience, combined with what I've heard from residents about her makes it pretty hard to recommend voting for her.

Anyway, so what's next, politically? Well, this has been fun and, now that I know what the baseline looks like, I think I'd like to run for city council the next time a seat opens up. These part-time offices are really the only ones that wouldn't make a mess of my career, so I won't be running for state office of any sort any time in the near future.

Overall, I'd seriously recommend running for office. I got to talk to a significant portion of the 61 people who voted for me, got to have conversations with neighbors about local policy, got to understand the process a bit better and have more of a desire to participate both as a candidate and as a citizen.

It's been fun. Thanks for all of your support and participation.

This is the first chance I've had to check in about today's election. The polls are currently open and will close at 8:00pm, at which point, the returns will start coming in. The official website for the election returns in this race is over at the MN Secretary of State site. It's all zero's right now and will be that way until that 8:00CST time rolls past.

I got out and voted first thing this morning. Shelly and I always vote before work, both because it's usually less of a pain at 7:00am and because it doesn't threaten a meal (hey, I enjoy my meals). It is amazing, though, how much the size of the crowd differs for a primary election over, particularly a presidential general election. We weren't actually there until about 10 after 7 and were the 7th and 8th people through the process.

This is the first election we've voted in since moving here (I really can't remember why we didn't vote last year). Since we've had our drivers' licenses for this address since last summer, and we always check the "register me to vote" box at the licensing bureau, we didn't even think about the fact we might not already be registered.

It turned out that we weren't. I'm not going to worry about why that happened. That's because Minnesota has one of the best same-day voter registration policies in the country and, after a bit of checking to make sure that he didn't need our drivers' licenses AND a bill in our name at the address, we got our ballots and headed off to the little tables.

The voting equipment here in Brooklyn Center is the same as what it was in St. Paul: little blue tables with a small plastic "shroud" that keeps your neighbor's eyes on their own paper. No "booths", handles, levers, etc. Just a scantron bubble sheet to be fed into the reader.

After a quick vanity check to make sure I was on it, I filled in the front side of the ballot, voting for my choices in the Independence party for governor, senator and the like and flipped it over to the local races. I went down the sheet, showing great restraint by voting for myself in the proper order of the ballot.

A quick trip over to the machine and my vote was cast. I entered a mayoral race for a $5 filing fee back in July, did little to no campaigning (though I wish I had had time for more than I did) and spent exactly $0 beyond the filing fee. My name was on the ballot for the primary election and I voted for myself this morning. Depending on the results, this may be the end of the road for this year's edition of this experiment or I may be head-to-head for the general election. Out of the 5 candidates you see listed here only 2 move on to the general election.

Overall, thus far, it's been an interesting look at the mechanics of running for office and, I hope, lowered the perceived barrier of entry for some folks. Now, lets watch those returns come in.