Today's good news:

President-elect Rafael Correa appointed seven women to his Cabinet on Wednesday, including Ecuador's first female defense minister, saying he wanted to promote gender equality in his South American nation.

Used Aeron chairs seem like a pretty good bargain. I found one for $550. It has a cast iron (I think) base and seat frame, so it's pretty sturdy. The lumbar support is intrusive; maybe the mesh has a bit more give now than it used to. But the lumbar bar can be removed completely, and the mesh is still pretty strong around the lumbar region. One problem is the arms, which are non-adjustable. Even if they were adjustable, I type with my keyboard in my lap, so I don't want arms at all. Here's how to take them off:

1. using a 3/16" hex head (in retrospect, it's a bit wobbly at 3/16", so it's probably the next bigger metric size), remove the four screws that hold the back of the chair to the seat
2. Using a T-27 star drive head and a bit of WD-40, remove the two screws, one per arm, that hold the arms on.
3. Put the back back on with the four hex screws

Seattle has been riven with controversy over whether the Seattle viaduct, a nasty concrete structure that separates downtown Seattle from the waterfront and is scheduled to collapse in the next non-trivial earthquake, should be replaced by a tunnel or by a new viaduct. For assorted political reasons whose details can presumably be summarized as "money", the governor has a big say in this. Here, on page 32 of a 57-page document labeled "Findings and Conclusions", are the first sentences of her findings:

Therefore, here is my recommended path forward:

Let's ask the voters of Seattle. I will accept their vote and ask legislative and City leaders to do the same.

1. Will it be a cut and cover tunnel or an elevated structure?
2. Are the Seattle voter's willing to accept the additional cost of the tunnel?
3. The public discourse and educational value associated with a public vote is a powerful tool to help City residents lead us all past the stalemate. Ultimately [blah blah blah]

Are the Seattle voter's what? willing to accept the additional cost? And which Seattle voter are we talking about? I thought there were hundreds of thousands.

So the Governor's findings are, don't ask me, let's ask the voters. And nobody proofread the findings so they have a misplaced apostrophe in a key sentence. For this we elect officials and pay their salaries?

In case you care, my own preference is to remove the current viaduct and put in a park. The tens of thousands of daily drivers can find other routes. Give them enough warning and they'll find other jobs and other housing that don't require driving through downtown each way for their daily commute. And you know what would have helped? A friggin' monorail over the same route, which even after the cost overruns that led to its cancellation, was still only half as expensive as the (pre-overrun pricetag for the) cheaper viaduct replacement option.

(This post's title originally bungled pluralization, by reading "Governer of Washington ('s staff) bungle punctuation". It has been corrected since publication)

(A year later, noticing this page was surprisingly high in google results for "Governer of Washington, I realized that governor was mis-spelled. People in glass houses ... need a lot of transparent spackle.)

Today's good news:

Sen. Robert Byrd has built a reputation in Congress and in West Virginia using special interest funding to bring federal jobs and money home, but the king of pork said he's willing to give up his projects for 2007 to find a way out of the "fiscal chaos" left by the outgoing Republican-led Congress. —Gannett News Service

Between this and not giving an impeached judge a committee chairmanship, this batch of Democrats is failing to completely suck. This is very disorienting.