Yesterday was a busy day with the election and my talk. Both were successful, but only barely. The charter was defeated by a margin of 14 votes. Evidently that means that next year the supporters can easily petition that the question be placed before voters again, but its still a victory and we'll take it.
My talk went well and had a surprisingly good turnout. It was marred only the failure of the demonstration I had planned. I had installed phpwiki on my MacOS X laptop. When I set it up, I connected to it at "localhost", but was redirected to "erosxenko.local", which is the address provided by Apple's vile "Rendezvous" (which I have come to pronounce "Rend-ez-vous") internal multicast DNS system. I thought this might actually be a use for Rend-ez-vous, but when I went to use it in my talk, I found that it only works when you have an active network connection. Luckily I had a backup and was still able to demonstrate both moinmoin and pikipiki. The rest of the talk went great and I had lots of interest and good questions.
One question I'm never sure how to answer comes from folks who live in disenfranchised departments that have no technical staff and no servers. How can they take advantage of cool free software like wikis? They're pretty much out of luck and its no fun to have nothing to offer them. I know that the technology faculty member in Education uses free services on the internet. There are a fair number of such services (though fewer every year), but many of them require advertising, have limited capacity for customizaion, and often put onerous restrictions on what you can do. There just isn't a substitute for having skilled people to support what you want to do.
After the talk we had a very nice dinner at Panda East. Panda East has a website which is undoubtedly a candidate for the "most gratuitous use of flash animation" award. You can 
visit their site if you want to see what I mean. I got the Mongolian Lamb, which was excellent. Joe ordered the Kung Pao Squid, which horrified both Mort and Helen, but which I appreciated.
I paused for a few minutes yesterday and stood at the window, watching the snow fall on the campus center. Dennis asked me what I was looking at. I replied that I was imagining cobra helicopters flying over our campus pond and shooting hellfire missiles into the campus center. I can't get that image, replayed over and over again in the footage from An Nasiriyah, out of my head. Bruce Sterling is thinking the same thing.