Nov
05
2008
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Wednesday, 05 November 2008 |
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As a good California resident, it's no surprise I cast my lot (figuratively) with Barack Obama, the clear favorite of the Golden State. Indeed, after the shortest election night I can remember, we heard the concession speech just after 8p and the victory speech soon after.
One has to admit that the real surprise of the night was John McCain's concession speech. It was the McCain I remember pre-2004: the man of integrity that puts his country above his own interests and those of his party. He was gracious beyond reproach, in one fell swoop making me forget the rhetoric he had been spewing for months. Besides, the words were aided by his demeanor. John McCain seemed genuinely relieved this election was over. Not that he lost it, mind you, just that it was over and that he could return to being the man he had been his whole life long. I doubt we'll see him running for president again.
Barack Obama's speech was great, but it wasn't a surprise. He said all the right things, he re-emphasized his main campaign points, he pushed the notion of bipartisanship and of coming together. He was brilliant, but somehow we have gotten used to it already, and expectations on this side of the fence are almost infinite, yet it somehow seems that what we consider infinite now is doable, quite doable.
To my dismay, California Proposition 8, the Gay Marriage Amendment, passed by a slim majority of 52% - 48%. I am really heartbroken about his, especially because of the questionable provenance of the support for it.
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Jul
21
2008
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Monday, 21 July 2008 |
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Well, if this is not a telling example of how things are progressing in the world of open source... I recently bought a heart rate monitor, since I realized there was something wrong with the calories burnt displayed on exercise equipment. Never one to leave out a geeky detail, I ran to the closest sports equipment store (in my case Sports Basement) and checked out the latest gear.
My geek heart was pounding for the latest and greatest, of course: the Garmin Forerunner 405 was beckoning, a GPS-enabled masterwork that seemed just made for my nerdy self. It had everything you'd want from an exercise watch, and I had already used the Forerunner 201 to great satisfaction in my cycling days.
After a little deliberation, I decided that I really just needed a heart rate monitor, not a full exercise computer. I wasn't going to use GPS any time soon, and even if I wanted to, I would have probably used the GPS in my cell phone, the BlackBerry 8830. There is software for that one (BBTracker) that records GPS data, and that's all you need for real.
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Sep
13
2008
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Saturday, 13 September 2008 |
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Amazing what the web will do! I have been a fan of Intrade for years, using it first to gain a better idea of how the 2004 Presidential election would shape up, and then following the 2006 and now the latest 2008 election. Well, the platform is ever improving, and now Intrade officially tells you to embed the image of their current trades in your site. Here is the probably most important chart of the year, the Obama vs. McCain daily trades:
I thought it might be a good idea to keep it on the front page for a while, so that we all get a glimpse of the future, and how people are betting on it.
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