Follow along and see how to draw a monkey in four steps. I drew this happy little guy using Pixia, an awesome and free drawing program for Windows. All the anime aside, its got a powerful pen/brush, bezier/spline curves, and layer system. Note, you\'ll have to click through to the full story to see the final result.

First, sketch out your monkey. Give him big ears on the side of his head, not on top like a dog or cat.

Second, black in the major lines. Trace each one using a spline or bezier curves and then stroke a line using the current brush and color.

Step 3, using a flood fill tool to color in his head, ears, and mouth.

Step 4, finally add some highlights and shadows to give him a 3-D effect.

Avi Rubin, a well-known and vocal critic of electronic voting wrote up his experiences serving as an election judge in Maryland yesterday. His account is a good read and it sounds like a positive experience both for him and the folks he worked with.

Over the next several hours, we all were busy checking in voters and dealing with running the election. Everybody calmed down, and we started joking around with each other and the mood became more positive. We only had one other minor press incident during the day. During breaks, I decided to educate Marie and Joy about the security problems of electronic voting machines. Amazingly, they really started to get it. They confessed that they had been ready to fight me, and that there was great animosity towards me, but that, in their words, I wasn't "such a bad guy after all". At the same time, I started realizing that some of the attacks described in our initial paper were actually quite unrealistic, at least in a precinct with judges who worked as hard as ours did and who were as vigilant. At the same time, I found that I had underestimated some of the threats before. I think that being an election judge was the best thing I could have possibly done to learn about the real security of elections.

His overall assessment of electronic voting is still not as rosy.

I continue to believe that the Diebold voting machines represent a huge threat to our democracy. I fundamentally believe that we have thrown our trust in the outcome of our elections in the hands of a handful of companies (Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S) who are in a position to control the final outcomes of our elections. I also believe that the outcomes can be changed without any knowledge by election judges or anyone else. Furthermore, meaningful recounts are impossible with these machines.

You have to click through to check out the pictures! The university of Kentucky claims an Italian tv show copied their mascot. You have to hate your job when it requires you to say stuff like:

"Their mascot is silent and conceptually different: He's mute and moves along the sidelines of basketball courts," Damerini said. "Gabibbo is something else. He talks, he's a sort of journalist, he does investigations, he's a real and proper character."