a new low

BarackBook.com

Shameful. Juvenile. Childish. When you spend most of your campaign time actively trying to sling mud at your opponent rather than actually promote your own candidate, maybe you should try to understand why he has such a powerful following rather than complain about an unfair ‘bias’. You’re surprised that Obama is greatly more in touch with today’s youth than a 72-year-old who admitted to not using the internet? You’re surprised that the media would much rather cover a historic speech overseas to 200,000 cheering people (who can’t even vote for him) than McCain’s trip to a sausage-haus? Your attempts to capitalize on fear and mistrust in order to take advantage of the American people won’t work. Or, at least, one would hope.

tl;dr: Sorry your candidate sucks so much. Stop whining, it’s getting pathetic.

It’s not that he’s old, it’s that he’s wildly inaccurate. And old.

Today, on a prominent morning news show, John McCain said we need to secure the Iraq/Pakistan border.

Sure, perhaps it was a simple gaffe, and in all honesty he probably meant Afghanistan/Pakistan border. (For those confused, Iraq shares no border with Pakistan.) Simple mistake. But add that to him not knowing that Shia and Sunni Muslims are different (they are), claiming last week that Czechoslovakia was still a country (it’s not), and claiming repeatedly that Iran is training Al-Qaeda agents (they’re not), and you start to build a sense of mistrust: Does John McCain actually know a damned thing about what’s going on in the world?

And yet, the biggest nontroversy generated by the right blog hemisphere is that Obama’s daughters (like most young girls) are fans of the Jonas Brothers, who apparently have joined in solidarity with Rachel Ray in the wearing of the Keffiyah.

If you’d like to read a few more factual errors, I found this article to be enlightening. Or, you know, just google “John McCain” and “factual error” – there are plenty. Just skimming the same results of Obama seem to show several hits about that other nontroversy about his grandfather’s involvement in freeing a WWII prison camp (it went something like, Obama said it was Buchenwald, but really it was a subcamp of Buchenwald, therefore Obama is a terrorist). If Barack Obama were consistently making grossly inaccurate statements involving current affairs (especially in the middle east), he would be ridiculed on every nightly news show. Why are we giving McCain such a pass? My guess is that no one wants to chastise an elderly man for forgetting the names of places we’re bombing; just shun it off with an ‘oh, grandpa!’ type laugh. But if that’s the case, how are we expecting this man to lead the free world? I’m terrified that we are so willing to substitute ‘alzheimers’ for ‘retarded’ and let the show go on as normal.

*Edit : Some people are taking notice.

Also, I think this article puts it pretty succinctly: Republicans never liked McCain until they realized they had to pretend to support him. He’s perpetually confused about the Middle East, echos longstanding policies while claiming himself a ‘maverick’, and has admitted to not being too well educated about the economy. I think that article also does a great job pointing how much the media plays into the public perception – it’s big business to make it seem like it’s always a close race. It’s painful when the best advice for your campaign is the familiar adage, “It is better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and resolve all doubt.”

Toured Carmel High School with the Chinese kids today, went to PF Changs afterwards. Best part: the Chinese kids had no idea what the fortune cookies were. And my chopstick skills are improving (anything better than ‘none’ is improvement, after all).

Three Things

First off, this article.

India losing it’s competitive edge? In the short term, sure. Weak infrastructure, unprepared and inefficient government. So if you needed your reason to go back to shouts of ‘USA, USA!’, there you have it. Just don’t count on it to last too much longer. All those H1B students returning home from US graduate schools will invest in the infrastructure, which will in turn bring more students home, and so on. Unless we did the intelligent thing and kept them here, but I so often forget the harsh realities of this post-9/11 world.

Second, this one.

I have no real problem with the content of the article, but as I was reading it I couldn’t help but feel like it was written by a third-grader. I understand that the new wave of online journalism enables anyone anywhere to become a ‘legitimate’ source for news and opinions, but we shouldn’t let that come at the cost of intelligent writing and thought-provoking articles. Poor writing leads to poor credibility, good writing lends credibility. In an age of wikis & blogs where unsubstantiated rumors and unverified sources pass as fact, determining a sense of credibility is key.

Finally, this.

Apple has finally grown tired of Psystar’s antics and filed suit. It will be interesting to see how well a vague EULA stands up in a legal court, but I wouldn’t have too much hope in Psystar making it out alive. Am I surprised? No, not in the least. Apple sued NYC for using a clip-art apple on it’s environmental campaign, of course they’re going to sue someone blatently selling non-Apple Mac-clones. My hope? Enough people got their hands on one to figure out how to reverse engineer the EFI emulation they’ve been using and get the osx86 success rate even higher. After quite a bit of tinkering, I have OSX Leopard running on an HP Tablet PC – and yes, the tablet works, pressure sensitivity and all. Is it perfect? Of course not – Leopard isn’t meant for an SSE2 processor, which is where most of the problems arise. But it is pretty cool? I think so. I’d like to try it on my desktop (SSE3 capable) sometime soon, but I need a large external harddrive, since the possibility of destroying everything on it is very real.

Also, I will meet the Chinese kids tomorrow night for dinner and tour the high school with them on Friday. I bought them some cheap plastic lead-covered novelties as a welcoming gift, to show them what we hold dear in this country. USA! USA!

‘learning experience’

Things I have used in the past month at work:

• c# / vb.net
• actionscript 3.0 + mxml
• javascript
• php
• apache
• nagios
• html / xml / css
• oracle / sql
• jsp
• linux (ubuntu / openSUSE / centos)

things I have actually studied for a significant amount of time:

• java
• html / xml / css

it has been and continues to be a learning experience. and by learning experience, i mean me learning how quickly I can get a headache.

Business Week Online

My Thoughts

I think it turned out well, and all the points I wanted to make are in there. Tom Giles (the editor) did a great job of keeping my style and tone in tact but cutting down on some of that ‘verbose rambling’ that I’m fond of. Let’s see if people notice it tomorrow during the day. Maybe I’ll see if Bob can send out a nice-looking promo email about it. Either way, I’m happy with it.

Tech Briefs 7/08/08

Today : the three major processor powers, whose areas of expertise are quickly beginning to overlap – an eventual benefit for you and me.

AMD, nVidia, Intel.

Tech Briefs 07/02/08

Today: Sun, Dell, Canonical.