Good Morning, RVA: Cloudy with a chance of cracked passwords

Today’s weather reflects the mood this week at the State Board of Elections.

April 15, 2015; 7:02 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: State Library and Archive of Florida

Good morning, RVA! It’s 51 °F, and if we’re lucky, today’s high may crack 70 °F. Looks like most of the rain did its thing yesterday leaving today cloudy and generally rain-free, but you might could see a drizzle here and there, though.

Water cooler

It’s Tax Day! If that’s news to you, I…think you might be screwed. The Richmond Main Post Office on Brook Road will be open late tonight, if you should need it. If you do…Godspeed. Godspeed.

VITA, the folks who handle the state’s IT, recently investigated a weird problem with the voting machines in a single precinct. This lead to a recommendation that all of Virginia stop using WINVote (PDF) voting machines, along with terrifying/hilarious realizations that the WEP key for every machine was “abcde”, the administrator account password was “admin”, and the password to the database containing voting information (again, on every machine) was “shoup”. The State Board of Elections voted yesterday to immediately ban use of the machines–which, you can imagine, sucks for those localities that have June primaries. Richmond City has 49 precincts that will need to replace their voting machines and train polling staff before those primaries. As you can also imagine, this will not be cheap. Good time to be a voting machine vendor, though.

Public Service Announcement: If the above passwords sound similar to any passwords you use, please go buy a copy of 1Password today.

By the way, here’s the School Board Facility Needs report (PDF) that I couldn’t find yesterday. It’s a massive PDF that’s also massively interesting.

The 2105 Spring Richmond Restaurant Week begins next week. Each year a million RVA restaurants offer a prix-fixe, three-course meal, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting FeedMore. Check out all one million menus here, and make your reservations soon–places tend to fill up quickly.

The Sweet Briar College Situation™ continues to get more legally complicated each and every day.

Yesterday, SpaceX successfully launched their Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, which carried 4,300 pounds of supplies to the International Space Station. The pictures in that previous link are incredible. The rocket attempted to land on a floating drone ship named “Just Read the Instructions” but tipped over due to “excess lateral velocity.” You win some, you lose some. The next rocket launch and landing attempt is just around the corner in June.

150 years ago today, at 7:22 AM, President Lincoln died.

Sports!

• Squirrels with a morning game! They’ll take on Altoona at 10:35 AM. Last night’s game was, obviously, postponed.
• Nats lost to the Red Sox, 7-8, after the latter scored three runs in the 7th. They’ll finish the series today at 1:35 PM.
• Stanley Cup playoffs begin tonight for the four-seed Caps as they take on the five-seed islanders at 7:00 PM.

What to expect

Today, on RVANews:

• Time’s running out on your chance to showcase your brilliance to RVA
• Prepare to be inspired by Cheryl Groce-Wright
• 5 adorable things to do with your adorable families

This morning’s longread

What Part of “No, Totally” Don’t You Understand?

“No, totally.” “No, definitely.” “No, exactly.” “No, yes.” These curious uses turn “no” into a kind of contranym: a word that can function as its own opposite. Out of the million-odd words in the English language, perhaps a hundred have this property. You can seed a field, in which case you are adding seeds, or seed a grape, in which case you are subtracting them. You can be in a fix but find a fix for it. You can alight from a horse to observe a butterfly alighting on a flower.

This may be the most interesting article I’ve read thus far in 2015. Word nerds unite!

This morning’s Instagram

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April 15, 2015 7:02 AM 0