Monday November 06, 2006

In 2004, 53% of Eligible Americans Voted

Please Vote tomorrow.

Vote for change, or vote to keep things the same. Just get out and vote. Take a sick day or vacation if you have to, or vote on your lunch break. It's worth it, really.

Think of the last Presidential Election. Pretty contested, right? Not how you think.

Only 53% of the eligible voting population actually got off their duffs and voted. That means that 47% of the population either beleives that voting makes no difference, or that there's not a significant difference between Bush and Kerry. No matter what... that's the real poll that we should be worrying about. That almost half of the population

Dubya was elected by a majority of 50.7% of the vote in 2004.
Out of 55.3% of the eligible population that turned out to vote.

In 2000 he was elected by the Supreme Court a 47.9% majority.
Out of 51.3% of the eligible population that turned out to vote.

Bubba was elected by a majority of 49.2% of the vote in 1996.
Out of 49.1% of the eligible population that turned out to vote.

He was elected by a 43% majority vote in 1992.
Out of 55.1% of the eligible population that turned out to vote.

Even less people vote on the off years.

Like in the 30-40% range.

Please vote. And continue to vote. Tell your friends to vote.
Vote Green, Vote the Donkey, Vote GOP, Vote Libertarian.

Excercise your Freedom and Vote.

Don't overlook the simple answers!

Today, I spent a good part of the day troubleshooting an Oracle 10g database who's db_recovery_file_dest kept filling up. Now, I'm not a DBA, by trade, just a technical generalist with a penchant for Googling. I increased the size of the db_recovery_file_dest, and 4 hours later, it was full again. I could not for the life of me figure out why the archiving and log rotation RMAN scripts weren't working. I ran them manually, and voila! problem fixed again, for a limited time.

That's when it occured to me to look in /var/cron/log. Sure enough, I found the answer to all my problems. Well, not ALL of my problems, but enough of the ones I was dealing with today that I rated today a success.

The oracle user's password had expired.

That was it. The root cause of two database outages due to the recovery log destination filling up, and the database refusing connections, and hours of troubleshooting.

An expired password.

This brings me to a lesson I know well, but often forget.

Never overlook the simple answers!

Sadly, I often forget that, and try to solve a complex problem that's not complex.