You think YOU'RE having a bad day? Pity poor Diebold…or maybe not.

Diebold supplies the electronic voting machines to election departments all across the US. They've been under fire since the very beginning of 'Chad-gate' due to the vulnerability of their machines to hackers who might have nefarious intentions of altering the results of an election. Diebold has repeatedly said that someone would have to gain access to the 'innards' of the machine to be able to pull off something like that.

Diebold has a web store that sells various supplies to properly authenticated people. Among those items for sale are keys for the machine. Scientists at Princeton University, who have been investigating Diebold security (or lack thereof) says that someone took the picture of the key from the Diebold website and used it to create a key that opens every single Diebold machine in the world . That's right – Diebold took a picture of an actual master key and posted it on their website.

After getting complaints about how comments were essentially broken I decided to remove the restrictions that I put in place to avoid spam comments and other unwanted material. We’ll see how it goes.

Your post may not show up immediately, as I do have to mark you as a trusted commenter in my database before posts will show up – that only happens on your first post, after that your comments will appear right away.

Well, it's all over…for now.

Traffic getting to the Radisson was horrendous, and I'm sure it's like that every day on the 405 getting to LAX. I had intended on leaving the house at 8 to be there by 9, but JayP suggested 7:30 instead. Good thing she did, as I arrived with only 15 minutes to spare.

I was directed to one of the hotel's conference rooms, where a contestant coordinator checked off my name, handed me a Jeopardy! pen (which I got to keep), an application, a 50-question answer sheet and a little piece of cardboard to use as a writing surface on the tableclothed tables. Then another coordinator took a Polariod of my head and shoulders, after which we were all lead into the room.

There was a large screen and a video projector showing a blank Jeopardy gameboard. The audition started with a short intro of all the coordinators, followed by some pointers of how to spot the helpful clues in the answers themselves, as well as advice to 'pump up' the energy leve, speak in a loud voice, smile, and above all, enjoy yourself.

They played a video of Alex Trebek welcoming us, then of the 'Clue Crew', which are the people in the little videos they play sometimes for some questions. They reiterated a few things to remember: to answer correctly – a lot, to guess when you didn't know the answer, that kind of stuff.

They then started in on the 50-question test. Each clue was in a different category, and the answer appeared on the screen as Johnny Gilbert's recorded voice read each 'answer'. We had eight seconds after the end of each question to write down the answer. I did pretty well on this test, better than I did on the online version back in November. I did leave about 5 answers blank; I couldn't even come up with an appropriate guess for those.

They then explained that everyone, regardless of their score in the written portion, would get to play the pretend game. There were about twenty of us (all male!), so we were called up to the front in groups of three and were given real buttons with which to ring in. In this case, they simply lit a little light that the coordinators would watch – sometimes they would advise whether we were trying to ring in too early or too late. They called on all three players equally, whether or not they were first to ring in, just to give everyone a chance to play. Each group got to play on about a dozen questions each, with three questions in each category. Every time a category would be completed, a new category with three more questions would pop up, so there was no pause in the game to repopulate the board.

After the game, each of the three contestants were interviewed (we all were given a sheet to list 5 facts about ourselves that would serve as talking points for Alex, should we ever manage to get on the air). I said that I was a native Californian, born and raised in the Great Central Valley, worked in the direct mail biz, and that any prize money would go into my 'move to Paris' fund, which raised a good deal of interest amongst the coordinators. They weren't really looking for correct answers during this process, they were more concerned with your button technique, personality, your ability to play the game and 'aliveness' – looking for the people who would be best on the air.

And after about two hours, we were done. As we left we saw the next group of auditioners (including four women that I saw). If I make the cut, I'll be in the contestant pool for a year, after which I'm free to try again. No guarantee that I'll be on the show; in fact, I won't even know that I'm in the pool until I get the phone call inviting me to the studio for a taping day (five shows a day, Tuesdays and Wednesdays). Losers do get paid, too: $1,000 for the third place finisher, $2,000 for number two, but you have to pay your own way there and all your own expenses, and of course you get the consolation prizes which, judging from recent episodes, will be Zip-Lok Bags, denture cream, sleeping pills and pain relief rubs.

Any questions?

In the room…

Okay, so I'm supposed to show up at the Radisson Hotel in Culver City at 9 AM tomorrow morning. The whole thing is supposed to take about two hours, so in reading what other people have written about the process this is what I think will happen.

It starts with a written test of fifty questions. The 'answers' will appear on a TV monitor for 15 seconds each. Our responses will not have to be in the form of a question for this process. 50 questions, :15 each, that'll take less than fifteen minutes.  Then they grade the answers, and everyone who got at least 35 of the questions right get to go on to play the mock game, during which they observe your personality, gameplay, reaction under stress, etc. Everyone gets to play, so that'll take the rest of the time. 

They keep stressing that even if you pass the test and the fake game, there's no guarantee that you'll be invited to play the game for real, and that it could be up to a year before you MIGHT be called. So I guess the name of the game is to have fun, as this might be as close as I get to really being on Jeopardy.

I've been boning up on Greek Mythology, US capitols, foreign capitols and of course, POTENT POTABLES! I'm ready to roll

I've been reading a lot of websites about Jeopardy! these days, a lot from people who have been on the show, but this article from Salon.com dealing with with Math for Jeopardy.

Say that when Final Jeopardy comes around, Arlene is in the lead with $8000, Ben is in second place with $5700 and Chloe is in third with $2700.

Arlene's bet should protect against Ben if he decides to bet it all. So Arlene's correct bet should get her twice Ben's total plus one dollar, or $3701.

However, Ben should not bet all his money, but only enough to protect against Chloe, so that he ends up with twice Chloe's total plus one dollar; in this case, Ben's bet should be $299. Let's look at a chart:

If Arlene gets the Final Jeopardy question correct, she wins, no matter what Ben does. However, if Arlene gets it wrong and Ben gets it right, Ben wins. In fact, because Ben bet the way he did, if both Arlene and Ben get it wrong, Ben still wins with $5,401 against Arlene's $4,599. And Chloe is a non-entity if everyone else bet correctly. Neat, huh?

Here's another example:

Again, each player guards against the next lower player by betting enough so that if they get the question correct, they will have twice the current score of the next lowest player plus $1. But look what Zoe did. If either Xavier or Yolanda get the question correct, Zoe loses, no matter what. But instead of betting it all, she bet just enough to win if both Xavier and Yolanda bet correctly but both missed the question. In fact, if all three got the question wrong, Zoe still wins with $3,000, a dollar more than Yolanda!

The only problem with this is what's known in Jeopardy circles as the 'two-thirds' rule – the 2nd place contestant needs at least two-thirds of the first place contestant’s score to pull this off, same with the 3rd place contestant compared to the 2nd place person. So you gotta stay close!

That's why the break between Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy is so long – there's a lot to figure out!

Guess I was wrong …I just got an email inviting me to audition for JEOPARDY! on January 18 in Culver City!

More later…

No doubt by now you've heard or read about the parents who chose a controversial surgical procedure for their severely-disabled nine-year-ole girl. They authorized the removal of her uterus and breast tissue to keep her at the physical size she is now.

They've posted a blog explaining their situation and defending their decision; it's an enlighening read. What do you think?

I read that President Bush has given himself the authority to search my US Mail without a warrant.

"You want to be safe from terrorism, right? What do you have to hide, anyway?"

I think the war on terror is bogus. I think the threat is far less than the Bush administration wants us to believe. The trumped up war on terror is a cover for the administration's efforts to strip us of our freedom and control us with fear.

Who is the terrorist here, anyway?