Last Friday, I dropped off my ballot for today’s primary election. I’ve got to say, I really appreciate the new approach in LA County of mailing everyone eligible a ballot, maintaining permanent drop boxes at relevant locations (libraries, etc.), and opening some polling places early to accept completed ballots.

MUCH more convenient than needing the time on one specific day and, in elections with a lot of turnout, waiting 45 minutes, an hour, or longer.

The longest I’ve waited was when I was living in Orange County, either 2003 or 2004, and they actually had to apply the “if you’re in line at closing time, you get to vote” rule. Someone brought a box of to-go coffee from the Starbucks down the street (I think Starbucks might have donated it, too?) and was offering it either to the poll workers or to those of us still in line.

The first election in which the county implemented early voting and flexible polling places (instead of requiring you to get to the specific place on your sample ballot) was also the week before COVID-19 hit the area. Now that I think of it, they still didn’t send out an actual ballot by mail unless you requested one. That changed that when it became clear COVID wasn’t going to just blow over before November. Since then some of the smaller, local elections have been mail-only.

Four years….WTF

Looks like IEEE has finally renamed their sustainable tech conference. Now it’s “IEEE SustainTech Expo.” Not only is it a bit clearer than the old name, but ever since Among Us came out, “SusTech” always made me giggle a bit. I doubt I was the only one.

Update: apparently I was mistaken, and SustainTech is entirely separate from SusTech, which is still going on. Looking at it a bit more, it seems that SustainTech is more of a marketing/trade show, while SusTech continues to be a technical conference.

It was hazy, and the weather forecast was partly cloudy, but the sun stayed visible and the eclipse glasses (used here for the photo) haven’t cracked!

Yellow-orange circle on a black background, with a circular chunk apparently cut out of it.

We didn’t do anything complicated this time: just took the glasses with us as we went about our morning, looking through the glasses every 15-20 minutes to see how much was covered until it reached its maximum coverage of 78% of the sun’s apparent diameter.

And at projections. Leaves are nature’s original pinhole camera!

A bunch of overlapping bright crescents of light on the ground.

A road trip like 2017 to see the full annular eclipse would have been cool, but it just wasn’t something we could do this time around, and with clear visibility, there wasn’t any need to seek higher ground like 2012.

Here’s peak coverage for this area, again viewed through eclipse glasses.

Yellow-orange crescent on a black background.