Thoughts from Inauguration Day

A few random thoughts on yesterday:

Though some in the progressive blogosphere disagree, I thought Obama’s inaugural speech was very good. His start, contrasting taking the oath of office “during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace” (as now-former President Bush did [1]) versus taking the oath as he does “amidst gathering clouds and raging storms” really set the tone for the whole speech. With Bush sitting right there – mere feet from the podium – Obama categorically rejected almost every policy of the Bush administration. When they cut to a shot of Bush in the middle, he didn’t seem to be enjoying Obama’s speech very much. In a way, I was reminded of Steven Colbert’s epic performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner a few years ago. Of course, the difference was that Colbert was speaking truth *to* power while Obama is speaking truth *from* power.

Speaking of Ex-President Bush (man, I love writing that) I can say a lot of negative things about him, but I will grudgingly commend him on handling the transition. However, it does feel like it’s grading him on a massive curve: “Sure he’s been an abysmal president, but at least he was able to peacefully hand over the reigns of power without fucking that up too.”

I felt sorry for Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who had to speak after President Obama’s inaugural speech. Everyone started heading for the exits after Obama was done. I hope those early exiters could hear Reverend Lowery’s benediction, it was awesome. I realize Reverend Warren was a controversial pick to deliver the invocation – certainly, I’m not a fan – but I respect Obama for being inclusive of all-viewpoints. And while having a quartet with the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma was awesome, I especially liked John Williams’ inaugural piece “Air and Simple Gifts”. But wouldn’t the theme to Superman have been more appropriate? :)

Finally, I skipped the rest of the pre and post inauguration analysis and commentary other than the Countdown podcast which I listen to on my way to work most days. Frankly, I didn’t need to be reminded of what an historic day it was. Res ipsa loquitur.

[1] The Onion was disturbingly prescient with their article eight years ago “Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'”

My.Change.gov Idea

The words everyone is using to describe President-Elect Obama’s transition is “hit the ground running.” Of all the aspects of the transition, I wanted to call out Change.gov, the new website dedicated to the transition. There’s not much up there yet: Obama’s election-night Grant Park speech, Obama’s first press conference and first radio address as president-elect, the announcement that Rahm Emanuel will be Chief of Staff and transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett’s MTP appearance. Of course, it has been less than a week since the election – there’s only so much that could get done in that time, even when you hit the ground running.

Most interesting about the site is how it invites average American citizens to participate. Maybe not surprising, given the Politics 2.0 campaign Obama ran, but it’s nice to see an administration that’s interested in my story about the election, my vision for what America can be and my ideas about solving our biggest challenges. Obviously, it remains to be seen how an Obama administration will use this information, but there’s little reason to ask for everyone’s opinions if you’re not really interested in reading or acting on them.

The one criticism I’d make about the site is that it looks like these stories, visions and ideas aren’t publicly published to the site. Obama’s campaign site had My.BarackObama (which will “live on”) but there’s no corollary My.Change.gov – at least, not yet. On the other hand, with only 71 days until we drop “elect” from “president-elect”, maybe it makes more sense to hold off on deploying that kind of infrastructure to a more permanent home. Personally, I’m rooting for My.WhiteHouse.gov. My.USA.gov, My.House.Gov and My.Senate.Gov would also be nice to have. Since Change.gov doesn’t publicly publish stories, visions or ideas, I wanted to post my idea here as well.

(Side note, is it just me or is http://www.usa.gov/ a pretty crappy home page?)

Obviously, there are immediate economic issues to deal with and we need to bring the troops home from Iraq. But after those, I would like to see the Obama administration put renewable energy at the top of it’s priority list. I believe that investing in renewable energy as well as the infrastructure to deliver that energy (the so called “smart grid”) should be our top priority because I believe it provides the most bang for the buck when it comes policy.

First off, it will create jobs which is probably the most critical step for turning the economy around. We’ve lost 1.2 million jobs in the past year and unemployment is at a 14 year high.  Second, I’m a big believer in Obama’s long-stated goal of eliminating our dependency on foreign oil. This would have the dual benefit of improving our own economy while reducing the economic strength of petro-dictatorships, some of which sponsor terrorism. Third, shifting to clean renewable energy will reduce our carbon emissions. We need to do more on the climate change front, but it’s a good start. Finally, a smart grid would essentially be a new nationwide market for energy. Even though many Republicans are in the pocket of big oil, they are also big believers in free markets and individual responsibility, so maybe smart grid legislation can be passed in a bipartisan way rather than over the Republican’s wishes.

There seems to be a lot of indication already that energy is Obama’s top priority after an economic stimulus package, so maybe he doesn’t need to hear it from me. But that doesn’t change the fact that the soon-to-be President is continuing to embrace to concepts of Politics 2.0 in an effort to bring Americans together to solve our toughest challenges. Here’s hoping he keeps it up long after “elect” is dropped from his title.

Election Predictions

Is it to early to start making predictions about 2010, 2012 and beyond yet? Probably, but I’ve got a few thoughts anyway.

First, if Obama runs his presidency like he ran his candidacy, he’ll be a great president and will win reelection in a cakewalk. Obviously, there are *huge* challenges ahead, but I have faith his administration will be able to handle them.

Second, assuming prediction #1 pans out, we’ll see another wide open race in 2016. I’m a big Joe Biden fan, but he’ll be 74 in 2016 – two years older than McCain is now. No way he runs. Hillary Clinton will 69 so I don’t see her running either. Well, maybe they run but I doubt they’d win the nomination. I’m guessing the Democratic nominee in 2016 will be someone who’s not top of mind today – someone who emerges in the next two or four years as “the next Obama”.

Third, we haven’t seen the last of Sarah Palin. I’ve been extremely critical of her, but my libertarian friend recommended I not underestimate her. So I won’t. I think she’ll be the Republican nominee for president in 2016. I know folks are talking about her for 2012, but I think she’d rather take her chances in a wide open race in 2016 than go up against Obama a second time. She’s only 44 now, so she’ll be 52 in 2016 – about perfect for a presidential candidate. Eight years is a long time for her to close the unqualified gap.

In fact, I’d say Ted Stevens apparent reelection is a likely silver lining in otherwise crappy election for the Republicans. Ted Stevens was found guilty on felony corruption charges and faces expulsion from the senate, regardless of his apparent victory yesterday. If he is expelled, there would be a special election to decide his successor. You have to assume Mark Begich, Stevens’ Democratic challenger, would handily win that special election. But what if Palin ran against Begich? She’s taken a hit it her approval ratings since joining the VP ticket, but she’s still very popular in Alaska and probably liked best by Stevens’ supporters. I’m not saying it’s a shoo-in, but I believe she’d have a very good chance to win a special election.

Being a senator for eight years would be long enough to shore up the concerns about her qualifications but short enough not to have much of an attackable voting record. She’d have to win reelection in 2014, but given that Stevens has won seven elections in a row dating back to 1970, I’m guessing getting reelected in 2014 would be no problem.

So my predictions are a fairly easy Obama reelection in 2012, followed by Sen Palin (R) vs. “The Next Obama” (D) in 2016. Midterms in 2010 will probably see Dems give back some of their recent gains, but not enough to lose control of either house of Congress. 2014 is to far out to predict, much less who wins in 2016. But looking at voting trends among minorities, party ID advantages, etc, I like Democrats chances for the foreseeable future.

Finally, I wonder if this is the “end of identity politics” as some have suggested. One election is not a trend, so I tend to think that Obama was immune to such attacks more than those attacks no longer viable. We may need to wait until 2016 to find out. When Palin does run again, will she still be a pitbull with lipstick? I like to think identity politics is toast, but I’m guessing the Republicans will go back to that well a few more times before giving up on it. Democrats, on the other hand, have all the proof they need that they can win against identity politics: President-Elect Obama.

Yes We Can

What a difference four years makes. In 2004, I was up until the wee hours because Ohio wasn’t called until the following morning. This year, with Pennsylvania called at 8pm EST and Ohio about 90 minutes later, it was basically over before my kids finished their dinner. We were watching SNL on the DVR from last night when my Dad called to tell us the nets had called it for Obama.

As I write this, Obama has 349 electoral votes – 79 more than he needed to win – with three states still to be called. It looks like Obama will pick up North Carolina (ahead by 12,160 votes with 100% of precincts reporting). Montana looks to be going for McCain (he leads by 7,000 votes with 77% reporting) and Missouri looks like a true tossup, with McCain ahead by a scant 1,740 votes with 99% reporting. Assuming those leads hold up, that would give Obama 364 EVs to McCain’s 174 EVs. Compared to the last two elections, that’s a good solid win on par with Clinton’s win in 1992 (370-168) but nowhere near the ass-kickings by Regan in 1980 (489-49) or 1984 (525-13) or Bush 41 in 1988 (426-111).

(BTW, check out the electoral college map from Carter’s win in 1976. It looks like Bizarro’s electoral map. The south went all blue while California went red? Can you even conceive of that happening today?)

But even though it wasn’t 500 point blowout, consider that Obama flipped all the following red 2004 states to blue in 2008: Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and (probably) North Carolina. My parents are very excited to live in a blue state (VA) now. McCain on the other hand flipped none – goose egg – from blue to red. McCain’s only real hope was Pennsylvania and it wasn’t even close – Obama won PA by 9%.

I did like McCain’s concession speech. Obviously, with the president around 25% approval rating, the incumbent party is at a major disadvantage to start with. But of all the Republican candidates, McCain was the only one I was ever worried about. IMO, any of the other Republican possible nominees would have lost by a much worse margin. McCain was attractive to independents in a way no other Republican candidate this year was.

But in the end, McCain had the probably impossible job of pulling together the 25% of Americans who approve of Bush (politely called “the Republican base”, though I call them “wack-jobs”) with another 25% of Americans who don’t. Kinda like trying to push like charged magnets together, they just wouldn’t stick. To me, it seemed like McCain tacked hard right and prayed the independents would still support him. But as I watched McCain’s concession speech, it made me wonder if McCain could have won by running an honorable campaign, tacking to the center and hoping the conservatives would still support him. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t, but he ended up running as a hate-mongering Rovian erratic demagogue and significantly damaged his personal brand. I can barely reconcile McCain from the stump with McCain from the concession speech. I’m guessing he’ll retire instead of running for reelection in two years.

(I’ve also got thoughts on Palin’s political future, but those will wait for another day.)

As for President-Elect Obama, I’m obviously excited than he won. Patrick made me promise to tell him who won in the morning (it wasn’t official until the west coast results came in after he went to bed). I’m going to show him Obama’s victory speech - it was amazing. I especially liked when he said “And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.” My libertarian friend who thought it would break for McCain today (way, way wrong dude) immediately went political, pointing out that the Democratic “trifecta” means they can’t shift the blame if things get worse. I’m guessing Obama will have to do quite a bit to earn my friend’s support but I’m hopeful that he can.

In other races I’m following, looks like Gov. Christine Gregoire will win reelection and Darcy Burner is leading in her race to unseat Rep. Reichert (though with only 21% reporting so it’s far from sure thing). In California, Prop 8 to ban gay marriage is currently leading but with only 51% reporting so I’m hoping that changes. (Amending the constitution in CA doesn’t require a super-majority? That sucks).

Finally, a quick shout out to my friends from New Zealand that I hung out with after the Opshop concert at the TechEd Attendee party back in September. They confided in me that “everyone in the world” was pulling for an Obama victory. Based on this Global Electoral College from the Economist magazine, “everyone in the world” is pretty close to spot on. Happy that my fellow Americans and I could deliver an Obama victory. Feels good, doesn’t it?

Election Day 2008

(Editor’s note: almost every time I make a political post, some yahoo, typically anonymously, suggests that I “stick to technology”. I will remind you, dear reader, that This Is Not A Technical Blog. If you don’t like my politics, you’re free to ignore the political posts or simply unsubscribe from my blog altogether. Anonymous suggestions as to what I should or should not be blogging about will be summarily ignored.)

Jules and I voted this morning, before work and school. Patrick helped Julie vote and Riley helped me vote. I’m assuming regular readers don’t need to be told who I voted for. Riley just wanted to help fill in the bubbles because it’s like coloring. Patrick kinda got what was going on – check out Jules’ post about how they cast “our” vote.

For shits and giggles, I went back and looked at my posts from two years ago. It doesn’t make me Nostradamus, but I did guess we were going to have “a very ugly race, especially from the Republicans” and that “the nomination race will be worse” than the general election. If Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow want to get in on this insightful political analysis, they know where to reach me. :)

I’ve been obsessed with three polling sites over the past few months:

• FiveThirtyEight.com which is projecting 6.1 point popular vote / 159.2 electoral vote Obama victory
• Pollster.com which is projecting a 7.6 point PV / 149 EV Obama victory (with 105 toss-up EVs)
• Real Clear Politics is projecting a 7.5 point PV / 138 EV Obama victory

My wingnut libertarian friend (anyone from my kids’ playgroup who reads this blog can guess who I’m talking about) thinks McCain will win with “295-305” electoral votes. This election is far from being in the bag for Obama, but the suggestion that McCain will come from six or seven points down in the polls to win a 10-20 point bigger EV victory than Bush did four years ago seems like crazy talk. As for me, I’m not willing to make a firm prediction except to say that I think the polls are wrong – I’m just not sure in what direction they’re wrong.

On the one hand, if the polls are underestimating Obama’s support by excluding cell-phone only voters and Obama’s Get Out The Vote effort is as strong as it looks, that could net Obama as much as five or six points on top of the lead he’s already got and we’ll be looking at an epic landslide with Obama maybe brushing up against 400 EV. For example, Pollster.com’s 291 solid/lean Obama EV + 105 toss up EVs would be 396 total EVs for Obama.

On the other hand, if the polls are overestimating Obama’s support due to the Bradley Effect, the undecideds break for decisively for McCain and Obama’s GOTV effort doesn’t materialize, McCain’s might net those five or six points and turn this into a toss-up squeaker decided by less than 35 EV (about the size of Bush’s victory in 2004). For example, if McCain wins all of Pollster.com’s tossups + the lean Obama states, it’s a scant 8 EV Obama victory (273-265). If McCain could also pick off any of New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa or Pennsylvania in that scenario, then he would win by anywhere from 2-34 EVs.

Of course, those effects could cancel out and leave us where we are right now, Obama with a six to seven point PV and low 100s EV victory. Frankly, I’ll be happy to be wrong about the poll inaccuracy since that would give Obama the presidency.

How do you think things are going to play out today?

I Survived October

It' felt touch and go at times, but I did manage to make it thru PDC prep, PDC itself, shipping IPy 2.0 RC1 and Halloween relatively unscathed. I was Superman for Halloween – the perils of letting the five year old pick everyone’s costume, we we’re *all* Superman (well, Jules and Riley were Supergirl) – but given how exhausted I was, I could have skipped the costume and just gone as a zombie.

My inbox is currently just under 500 messages, I’ve got a mountain of stuff to finish for IPy RTM, I’m presenting at the p&p Summit and I’m finally get some attention from the legal dept (now that we’re past PDC). In other words, it’s not the end of PDC is ushering in a golden age of zero work for Harry. But with PDC in my rear view mirror, I don’t feel quite so overwhelmed as I did.

And on top of all this, I’ve been borderline obsessed with election news. I’ve basically given up on all my non-political blog reading – if I hadn’t been working on PDC I might not have even been aware of the big announcements like Oslo and Azure. Things are looking good for Obama and the Democrats, but as this hilarious video shows “Being in a good position to win is not the same as winning.” I haven’t had the time to volunteer for Obama but my father has been volunteering for Obama in Northern Virginia – aka “communist country”. It sure would be nice to see my home state go blue.

Morning Coffee 172

• I took the kids to see Fly Me To The Moon recently. We had to trek to Monroe (about 30 minutes away) because it's a special 3D movie, and it was only playing there and in downtown Seattle. The movie's story is insipid - three flies stow away on Apollo 11 - but all the space shots were actually kinda cool. It sure felt like they wanted to be scientifically and historically accurate about the the actual mission (well, other than the part about the flies). Patrick really liked it (he wants to build a rocket in the back yard) and Riley sat thru the whole thing with a minimum of fussing.
• I'm a big fan of Joe Biden, so I'm really happy Obama picked him to be his running mate.
• I know it's old news but what the frak was John Edwards thinking? I like his policies, but the arrogance it takes to run for president when you know you've got that skeleton in your closet is mind-boggling.
• On the other hand, watching the Sean Hannity and guest's hypocrisy on Edwards' affair, only to watch them scramble like cockroaches when Colmes points out McCain had admitted to having an affair was frakking hilarious.

OK, onto geek stuff:

• My new boss Dave Remy has moved to a new blog. If you're curious what he was up to for the 10 months he was away from Microsoft, he's happy to share.
• IPy and IRuby developer Curt Hagenlocher (aka Iron Curt) is blogging. Cue the Ozzy...I AM IRON CURT. Or don't. Anyway, he dives in the deep end of the pool - no "hello world" lollyblogging for Iron Curt - digging into the stack implications of rethrowing exceptions and debugging emitted IL.
• Srivatsn writes about static compilation of IPy scripts. Note, we're not talking about static typing - it's still the same good-old dynamically typed IronPython, just packaged up as an assembly, rather than as a bunch of .py files. Note, if you're interested in compiling IronPython, you should check out the PYC sample we published as part of Beta 4.
• Speaking of IPy Beta 4, Shri Borde posts about the COM dispatch support which is enabled by default as of Beta 4. If you're driving COM automation clients (like Office) from IPy, this is a huge improvement over the old mechanism.
• Jeff Hardy has released a new version of NWSGI, a managed version of Python's Web Service Server Gateway Interface. My understanding is that this would allow any Python web stack written against WSGI to run in IIS with IronPython (subject to IronPython's compatibility with CPython). Jeff's been documenting his efforts getting Django running with NWSGI on his blog. Awesome work Jeff! (Thanks for the correction Seo!)
• I never really bought into the "Attention Economy", but Chris Anderson's economic analysis of his DIY Drones site traffic was fascinating.
• Lutz announces "it is time to move on" from Reflector and there was a collective horrified scream in the .NET community. He's handing it over to Red Gate, who promised they "will continue to offer the tool for free to the community".
• I missed this when he posted it in June, but I really liked Nikhil Kothari use of the DLR in Silverlight to cut down on the XAML verbosity in his ViewModel action binding.
• Brian McNamara previews the new Add Reference and file ordering support in the upcoming F# CTP. I'm really looking forward to the project-to-project reference support. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten burned because my main project recompiled but my test project didn't. You just get used to hitting Rebuild All instead of Build. As for file ordering, it's a bit of a bummer that F# requires it, but the new experience is hella better than editing the project file by hand. I'm really looking forward to the new CTP.

Nobody Cares That I Called McCain a Dick?

In Febuary, when I said "Romney's a real douche bag", several upset commenters vowed never to read my blog again. I was even called a bigot (though Dale jumped in and explained how wrong a charge that is). Frankly, anytime I run a political post, especially ones where I call prominent Republicans names, that's the reaction I expect.

So it kinda surprised me that the response to calling McCain a dick and his campaign an embarrassment was so tepid. No outrage. No promises to unsubscribe nor predictions that others would do likewise. Dale sounds like he agrees that McCain's campaign is an embarrassment, even though he clearly supports McCain. RandyG doesn't have anything to say about McCain one way or the other, but he thinks Obama is a "pompous dick". Only BigJ provides any defense of McCain at all, but it's an extremely weak defense. He described McCain as "not afraid to tick off a powerful, influential, big money contributor", which I would expect is hard to say out loud with a straight face. Given that McCain has raked in millions in contributions from the oil industry after flip-flopping on offshore drilling, describing the Hilton's $4,600 contribution as "powerful, influential, big money" is laughable. Hell, McCain is returning ten times that amount in "unusual" (read: possibly illegal) contributions because they "just didn’t sound right".

I figure there are two main possible reasons for the lack of outrage:

• All my readers who are willing to unsubscribe because I don't agree with their political view have already left, leaving only those who agree with or simply ignore my political posts.
• The number of people willing to stand up and defend McCain, even anonymously in my small corner of the Internet, is very small.

Personally, I probably a little of both, but I'm guessing it's more the latter than the former.

McCain's Dick Move of the Week

This segment on last night's Daily Show was fantastic.

At the rate McCain's going, Jon Stewart is going to have to change this segment to "McCain's Dick Move of the Day". I don't know which is more embarrassing, McCain's campaign or the mainstream media coverage of the campaign.

Lunchtime Coffee 158

• My friend (and hopefully my next representative) Darcy Burner is leading a group of congressional challengers in publishing A Responsible Plan To End The War In Iraq. I haven't read the plan itself in detail, but I sure like what I'm hearing about it.
• Speaking of politics, Obama's speech today "A More Perfect Union" was fantastic.
• Bioshock is getting a sequel. 'nuff said.
• There's a new version of FolderShare out and I've got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I've been a regular user of FolderShare for a while so it's nice to see it get a face lift. On the other hand, it's been over two years since Microsoft bought FolderShare and we're only just now getting a new version, which is literally nothing more that a face lift - this version introduces no new functionality at all.
• I was hoping to geek out vicariously via someone else's hacking around with Singularity. Luckily, Matthew Podwysocki provides just such an opportunity.
• Looks like "Prism" is the new CAB. Glenn Block has two extensive posts covering a project overview and their first drop. I think it's interesting that the Prism team is focused on building a reference implementation, and letting the framework eventually fall out. Reading thru the description, it sounds awesome. However, based on the massive increase of inbox throughput I'm experiencing since I accepted the new job, I can't imagine I'll have time to play with it. Maybe Matthew will start playing with Prism too! (via Sam Gentile - btw, thanks for the kind words on the new job Sam!)
• Speaking of Sam, he points to a series by Bob Beauchemin entitled LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework: Panacea or evil incarnate? With a title like that, who can resist reading the whole series? Err, I can because LINQ 2 SQL & EF performance just fell off my radar entirely. However I gotta agree with Sam's point that he "can't think of anyone more qualified than Bob" to tackle these questions.
• Tomas Restrepo blogs his dev environment PS script as well as a PS fortune script. Personally, I use Chris Tavares' vsvars wrapper for PS, though I'll gladly take an "official" PS based dev environment.
• I wonder if Ted Neward will get jumped for admiring Mort the way Nick Malik did. Given that Ted called himself Mort while Nick compared Mort to agile developers, I'm guess Ted will have to go back to his Vietnam analogy if he wants to create controversy.
• Speaking of Ted, I agree with his point that conferences are about people. As a python pre-newbie (I figure I'll reach full newbie status by the time I actually start my new job), I spent most of my PyCon time connecting with people rather than trying to learn technical stuff. Also, I love Ted's WHISCEY acronym.
• Speaking of PyCon, my soon-to-be new teammate Srivatsn Narayanan blogs his thoughts on PyCon. I'll try and get to my PyCon thoughts soon.

Morning Coffee 156

• My hockey team won last night 4-2. No points for me, but I was even on the night. I did spend some time in the penalty box, but I was serving a two many men on the ice bench minor. We only had nine skaters, not enough for two full lines, so I'm pretty tired today. However, I'm not as tired as I was two weeks ago - that's a good sign.
• Politics 2.0 watch: The Obama campain announced yesterday that they raised $55 million in donations in the month of February. That's significantly more than Clinton ($35 million) and McCain ($12 million) combined. Even more impressive is that $45 million of that was raised online, of which $40 million were from donations of $100 or less and $22.5 million were from donations of $25 or less. I guess in Politics 2.0, individuals contribute more than online punditry and video parodies of political commercials.
• TextGlow is a Sivlerlight 2 based Word docx file viewer, created by James Newton-King. Nice, but what I really want is "SlideGlow", a SL2 based PPTX file viewer. (via DNK)
• Speaking of Silverlight, Windows Live launched an experimental site called PhotoZoom which will let you create DeepZoom photo albums. (via LiveSide)
• Charlie Calvert has created a home for Language Futures discussion on MSDN Code Gallery. If you'll recall, back in January he asked for input on Dynamic Lookup. Now he's looking for feedback on Call Hierarchy, a proposed VS IDE feature to help you visualize how your code flows. Great idea, but the Call Hierarchy dialog mockup isn't very intuitive. Couldn't we put these visualizations into the code editor window directly, like CodeRush does?
• John Lam continues his Dynamic Silverlight series, first building a Flickr image browser in Managed JScript then showing how to integrate an IronRuby version of the Flickr image browser with an ASP.NET MVC app.
• EdJez is inspiring. Subscribed. (via Brad Wilson)

Experience vs. Change

My wife and I usually watch The Daily Show a day late and yesterday was no exception. Hillary Clinton was the guest Monday night in advance of yesterday's big primaries in Ohio and Texas which Jon Stewart called the "Ultimate Last Final Showdown (Unless Hillary Wins One or Both of the Larger States)". If you missed it, you can watch the interview online (part 1, part 2).

I haven't seen much 'raw footage' from either Democratic candidate in quite some time, and through most of the interview all I could think was "I may have an Obama flair on my website, but I'd be happy with Hillary". However, there was a section of the interview where she was trying to draw a distinction between her and Obama that didn't sit well with me. She's been on this whole "action not words" kick of late, trying to take the wind out of Obama's sails. For example, in her speech last night in Ohio, she said this:

Americans don't need more promises. They’ve heard plenty of speeches. They deserve solutions and they deserve them now.

America needs a president who’s ready to lead, ready to stand up for what's right even when it's hard. And after seven long years of George W. Bush, we sure are ready for a president who will be a fighter, a doer and a champion for the American people again.

To be clear, this kind of talk doesn't bother me on it merits. Some folks aren't happy with Clinton because she's "dumpster diving" or they think that she's ripping the party apart. I think she's fighting for her political career and I would hope any Democratic candidate would go down swinging as it were. Besides, as Howard Dean said, the negative campaigning we've seen so far is a "tea party" compared to what the Republicans will throw at the eventual nominee. I'd also make the argument that it's better to get as much of this stuff "out there" now so that it's old news by November. That that doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?

However, I do think Clinton is painting herself into a general election corner with this experience vs. change strategy.

I get why Clinton played the experience card - she had to do something to take the wind out of Obama's sails after 11 straight victories. If the popular primary vote results from Tuesday are any indication, the experience message is working for her. So I would expect we'll hear a lot more about how we "don't need more promises" but that we need a president "who's ready to lead" in the next seven weeks ahead before the Pennsylvania primary.

However, if she does win the nomination, she'll have to to argue the exact opposite position in the general election. I'm certainly no fan of McCain, but there's no question his 25 years in Washington will cast him as the "experience" candidate (even though he hasn't accomplished much in that quarter century). Plus, with the Howard Dean already framing McCain as "four more years of George Bush", it's pretty obvious either Democratic candidate will be cast as the "change" candidate.

Will Clinton have credibility running as the candidate for change when she's spent the spring arguing that experience matters most? I don't know. Combined with the rabid anti-Clinton (both her and her husband) emotions her candidacy is assuredly going invoke among conservatives, I'm much more concerned about her ability to win in November than Obama's.

In the end, I doubt it will matter. Obama's roughly 160 pledged delegate lead seems pretty insurmountable. Even with Clinton's impressive victories yesterday, estimates are that she's going to only net around ten delegates total, meaning the delegate math is largely unchanged. With only 561 delegates left in the remaining twelve contests, she would need to win almost 65% of the remaining delegates just to draw even. Frankly, that's not possible given proportional delegate allocation method that Democrats use. At this point, her only hope is to cut the margin as much as possible and hope the undeclared superdelegates break her way. Hope isn't a strategy, but I don't see how she has any other option.

Morning Coffee 148

• As I predicted yesterday, Microsoft announced that "For the first time, community games will be distributed through Xbox Live." I haven't seen a press release yet, but it looks like this will allow any XNA developer to publish on XBL. Joystiq has a few details. According to Major Nelson, six community games will be available on XBL later today. Also, it looks like you'll be able to make XNA games for your Zune as well. Details to follow.
• Speaking of yesterday, I referred to President Bush as "President 30% Approval". This was incorrect. From now on, I'll refer to him as "President 19% Approval".
• Speaking of politics, two more big wins for Obama yesterday. The Clinton camp, looking more desperate every day, unveiled a new website purporting to provide the "facts and myths about the race for delegates". Memo to HRC: "Florida and Michigan should count" isn't a fact, it's an opinion. I can't see how this site helps her cause.
• Joel on Software, who used to work on the Excel team, provides a facinating look into why the Office File Formats are so complicated. Nothing more to add, I just thought it was an interesting discussion of "real-world" complications to something that seems like it should be simpler.
• Scott Guthrie provides a client product post .NET 3.5 roadmap, much like he did for web products a few months ago. Unlike the web roadmap, which includes exciting stuff like Silverlight 2.0, IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET Extensions (including MVC), the client roadmap includes: better setup, better perf for WPF, better memory utilization and startup time, WPF designer improvements, and some new WPF control. Color me under whelmed.
• My old team recently launched the Software + Services Architecture Center. S+S guru Gianpaolo Carraro recently wrote about the different perspectives this new site is trying cater to. S+S hasn't been on my personal radar, but it's something I really would like to dig more into.
• In a recent charity hockey game, Team Cure beat Team Hope 2,250 to 2,223. No, that's not a typo. The two teams of twenty faced off for 240 straight hours of hockey in sub-zero weather to raise $300,000 for cancer research. That's frakking dedication to a cause.

Morning Coffee 147

• My son Patrick turns five today. The big treat was his cousin Jack coming up for a visit. Here's a picture of the two of them at Patrick's party on Saturday. My wife has all the details on her blog. Update: My wife just posted a whole slew of Early Patrick Pictures.
• If my son is five, it means this blog is also five - I started this blog about a month before Patrick was born. I never remember to mark the occasion until Paddy boy's big day comes around.
• Major props to the House of Representatives for growing a backbone and not caving to President 30% Approval on telecom immunity...yet. Personally, I'd like to see the House bury the measure completely, though I'm not holding my breath. But given that even the right-wing Washington Times reports "Analysts say FISA will suffice", maybe the House Dems will do the right thing.
• After tearing it up since Thanksgiving, the Caps have gone a little cold. 5-4-1 in their last ten and 2-2-1 in their last five. In the month of February, they're 1-3-1 against SE division opponents. Good news is that they're still even with Carolina (two points behind with two games in hand), half a game up on Atlanta, a game and a half up on Florida and two and a half games up on Tampa Bay.
• Bill Gates announced a new program called DreamSpark to provide college students access to all of Microsoft's developer and designer tools, including Visual Studio, Expression, SQL Server, Windows Server and XNA Creators Club membership. This looks like an outgrowth of the MSDN Academic Alliance program. I think it's a great idea. Update: Looks like high-school students will be able to access the DreamSpark program too. However, since they're minors, they have to get the software via their teachers. (via LiveSide)
• The winners of the XNA Silicon Minds contest have been announced. Of the five winners, Specimen looks the coolest to me. I wish I had more time to get into game development. (Via LetsKillDave)
• Speaking of game development, this week is the Game Development Conference, so be on the lookout for lots of game-related news. Xbox Live VP John Schappert is giving a keynote on "Unleashing the Creative Community". XNA GM Chris Satchell said last year they would "announce full details on, and ... vision for, opening XNA creations to the community" sometime this year. I'm guessing this is said announcement.
• Speaking of Xbox, there's a rumor that Microsoft and Netflix will announce this week that Netflix is bringing their Watch Instantly service to Xbox 360. If true, sign me up!
• Grigori Melnik announces the GAX/GAT February 2008 final release. Key feature is VS08 support. Is it just me, or does calling it the "final release" make it sound like they won't be upgrading GAX/GAT further?
• Speaking of p&p, Grigori also announces the Feb 2008 CTP of Unity, p&p's new IoC container. I've seem lots of folks echoing the announcement, but not much in the way of specifics on Unity itself. For example, Chris Brandsma describes IoC and mentions Unity, but he doesn't cover any Unity specifics. :(
• MSIT EA Nilesh Bhide has started blogging. His first post is on Customer perception of Service Quality in S+S/SaaS. I've worked closely with Nilesh in the past two years, so I'm excited to see him take to the blogosphere. (via Nick Malik)
• I don't know how I missed it, but the MSDN Code Gallery launched last month. As Charlie Calvert explained, this is logical successor to GotDotNet's user samples area. Between Code Gallery and CodePlex, GotDotNet has finally been shuttered for good.
• Telligent, makers of the very popular Community Server, have released Graffiti CMS, which looks like a more flexible content platform than Community Server. (via DNK)
• In somewhat unexpected news (at least, unexpected by me) Microsoft has released specs for the Office binary file formats. I'm not sure why this is happening now, rather than say when we released the specs for the Open Office XML file formats. (via DNK)

Morning Coffee 146

• The writers strike is officially over. Everyone goes back to work today. Thomas Cleaver has what I thought was the best post summarizing how the writers won. TV Guide has a rundown of how and when various shows will resume. I can't wait to see Daily Show and Colbert Report tonight. Lost - aka the best show on TV - looks like it will be getting five more episodes (in addition to the eight shot before the strike).
• Speaking of TV, Battlestar Galactica Fans: circle April 4th on your calendar.
• Obama won all three "Potomac Primaries" yesterday, and is now the Democratic front-runner, though there's a long way to go before the convention. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has a great take on presidential experience - I'm guessing he's an Obama fan.
• In minor acquisition news, Microsoft is acquiring Caligari, makers of 3D modeling tool trueSpace. The Caligari folks are joining the Virtual Earth team, though I wonder what the XNA folks think of the acquisition. This isn't the first 3D modeling product Microsoft ever acquired - we owned Softimage for four years in the '90s.
• Scott Hanselman and Tomas Resprepo both write about PowerShellPlus, which I saw week before last @ Lang.NET. Scott really likes it, for both PS novices and gurus, but Tomas thinks the UI is busy, based on the screenshots. Personally, I'm not doing much PS work lately - occasional one off stuff, but that's it - so it doesn't seem worth the effort.
• Speaking of Scott & Tomas, Scott also has a nice gallery of VS themes. I'm partial to Tomas' Ragnarok Grey. Is there a VSThemesGallery.com site somewhere?
• Still speaking of Scott, he points to the new ASP.NET Developer Wiki (beta). I poked around, but didn't find anything shiny. I was very surprised that searching for "MVC" returned no results.
• Speaking of MVC, Scott Guthrie has a rundown on what's coming in the MIX preview release of ASP.NET MVC. Biggest news IMO is that it's /bin deployable - i.e. you don't need your hoster to do anything special to support MVC (assuming they already support ASP.NET 3.5). Also big news, they're releasing the source so you can build and patch (and enhance?) it yourself.
• Chris Taveres continues is ObjectBuilder series and Tomas continues is DLR Notes series. BTW, my F# based DLR experimentation continues, albeit slowly (frakking day job). Hope to be able to post on this soon.
• One of the things driving my interest in F# is manycore. An interesting tangent to manycore is general purpose programming on graphics processing units (aka GPGPU). MS Research just released a new version of Accelerator, just such a GPGPU system. I personally haven't played with it - I've been focused on writing parsers, not parallel code.
• Is XQuery really "a promising technology of the future" as Don Box suggests? I see exactly zero demand or use for it in my day-to-day work. Of course, Don's paid to build future platform goo, so maybe it is promising and Don's afore-mentioned goo will leverage it, though I remain skeptical. As for XML being "Done like a well-cooked steak", I'd say XML is like a great steak cooked perfectly, except it's done exactly how you don't like it. You can appreciate its quality, but you don't really enjoy it as much as you could have.

Morning Coffee 145

• Saturday, I participated in the Washington Democratic caucus, which was handily won by Obama. Much has been made of the record Democratic turnout in this race for the nomination, my local caucus location was no exception. It appeared that attendance outstripped expectation about 2-to-1. My precinct alone had 56 attendees, which went overwhelmingly for Obama.
• I had never participated in a presidential caucus or primary before - the race has always been decided by the time it got to my state. I really enjoyed being a part of the process. So I'm going to play amateur pundit today, and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled geek blogging tomorrow. If I insult your favorite party or candidate, please feel free to leave a scathing comment explaining that I'm an idiot and how you're never going to read my blog again.
• Obama not only won the WA caucus, he also won Louisiana, Nebraska and Maine over the weekend. And he didn't just win, he won big. He won by 37% in WA, 36% in Nebraska, 21% in Louisiana and is leading by 15% in Maine with 70% of the vote counted. Momentum hasn't meant much in this campaign, but five double-digit Obama wins in a row (with three more likely Obama wins tomorrow) can't be good for the Clinton campain. Polling that shows Obama matches up against McCain better than Clinton doesn't help. 
• Speaking of McCain, he sure had a shitty day Saturday. He lost Kansas by a whopping 36%. Louisiana was close, but McCain still lost. And in Washington, it looks like the state Republican Party simply stopped counting with 1500 votes still left to be counted. I'm guessing the local GOP party leads were trying to keep McCain from going 0-3 on the day. Had they simply counted the votes and McCain lost, everyone would have forgotten by the time he got the nomination. However, this little helping hand makes McCain look weak and keeps Saturday's butt-kicking in the news for several more days.
• Of course, McCain is the presumed Republican nominee because Romney dropped out suspended his presidential campaign last week. The Daily Show's coverage Thursday night was hilarious. Jason Jones is right, Romney's a real douche bag.
• Apparently, McCain is "eager" for President 30% Approval Rating to "embrace" him. Furthermore, the President apparently thinks McCain would be the best to carry forth his agenda. I gotta agree with Steve Benen on this - "Could Dems really be this lucky?"
• In the wake of McCain's Super Tuesday victory, Rush Limbaugh said he and other right-wing talk show hosts are "trying to stop the wanton destruction of the [GOP] party". Limbaugh and his cohorts aren't going away, but certainly they've been reduced to irrelevant status, standing on the sidelines and stamping their feet while the Republican rank-and-file hand the nomination to McCain. Sure is hilarious to watch. Has anyone considered that Republicans are rooting for the wonton destruction of what their party has become?

Morning Coffee 144

• I finished Mass Effect last night. I definitely need to play thru that one again, though I'll probably wait until the new Bring Down the Sky DLC ships next month.
• Caps won again last night, improving to 20-10-4 since changing coaches at Thanksgiving. They're now at 57 points, taking the lead in the SE division with a full game on Carolina, Atlanta and Florida. Still a ways to go - 27 games left in the regular season - and things are far from "sewn up" but we're a damn sight better off than we were in November.
• Speaking of a horserace, looks like Clinton and Obama are in one after Super Tuesday. Their estimated delegate counts are basically tied. On the other side of the aisle, McCain opened up what is probably insurmountable lead - even though he has the right-wing media stars and Christian leaders against him. Money quote of the day:

“The real story of the night, when you look at their rallies and their turn-out numbers, is that the Dems have two strong candidates either of whom could lead a united party to victory. Forget the gaseous platitudes: in Dem terms, their choice on Super Duper Tuesday was deciding which candidate was Super Duper and which was merely Super. Over on the GOP side, it was a choice between Weak & Divisive or Weaker & Unacceptable. Doesn’t bode well for November.”
- Mark Steyn, National Review 
(via Carpetbagger Report, lest you think I regularly read National Review)

• Charlie Calvert is starting a new series on the future of C#. First up: Dynamic Lookup. Probably most interesting is the news that the DLR "will be the infrastructure on which the C# team implements dynamic lookup". Does this mean C# will target the DLR? Sure sounds like it. I think it's a good addition, but I'm not a fan of the proposed syntax. (via Bitter Coder)
• Brian McNamara saw me present @ LangNET and sent me a link to his blog. He's building up a monadic parser combinator library in C# 3.0. This is basically the same concept that FParsec implements, though C#'s syntax is much less attractive than F#'s for this kind of code. However, Brian does a very good job explaining why monadic parser combinators are useful and making the idea accessible to the C# programmer (i.e. you don't have to learn F# or Haskell to understand what he's talking about). He also points to Luke Hoban's C# 3.0 monadic parser implementation.

365 and Counting

Steve Benen points out:

You may have noticed, on bumpers or t-shirts, the “1.20.09” slogan. It denotes, of course, Inauguration Day for Bush’s successor.

I just thought I’d mention that after seven painful years, the Bush presidency will end exactly one year from today. It’s obviously something to look forward to.

It’s an awkward period in Democratic politics right now — a contentious presidential primary, a frustrated Democratic Congress — but looking at the light at the end of the tunnel, and knowing it’s probably not a train, might serve as a morale booster.

From the morale perspective, it's worth noting the voter turnout in the primaries so far. Yesterdays' Democratic Nevada primary is the third in a row to set turnout records. On the Republican side, Benen points out that McCain won South Carolina yesterday with a 135,000 votes but eight years ago, he got nearly 100,000 more votes in a losing effort. By my calculation, Republican South Carolina turnout was 30% less than it was in 2000.

Voter turnout in early primaries doesn't make this election a sure thing by any means, but it sure is an encouraging sign.

Morning Coffee 137

• Note, I somehow duplicated Morning Coffee 135. So I've skipped 136 to make up for it.
• Congrats to Hillary Clinton for her unexpected win in the New Hampshire primary. As I said last week, I think Obama has a better chance of winning in November, but I've got nothing against Clinton or her politics.
• Speaking of winning, congrats to LSU on winning the BCS. Are they the best team in college football? Personally, I don't think so - there are at least three other teams (Georgia, West VA and of course USC) who can make a persuasive argument that they should be #1. But losing to teams like Penn Pitt and Stanford, neither WVA and USC have an argument they should have been in the championship game. But that's what makes the BCS such BS. If nothing else, at least the "we need a playoff" meme is picking up steam.
• This is sort of cool: Eye-fi is a wireless enabled SD card so you can wirelessly upload pictures from your camera to your PC or favorite photo service. However, I think the price needs to come down a bit. I recently bought a 2GB SD card for my wife's new camera for $20. A 2GB Eye-fi card is $99. Not sure wireless upload is worth 5x per card.
• With all the focus on LINQ providing type-safe queries, it's easy to forget that some apps do need to build their queries at run time. Scott Guthrie points at a Dynamic LINQ C# sample (also available for VB) that builds LINQ expression trees from strings. It kinda takes you back to the bad-old-days of embedding SQL strings in your code, but there are scenarios - especially BI scenarios - where you need this capability.
• Soma announces the VC++ 2008 Feature Pack Beta. This is the long-awaited (by who?) MFC update as well as support for the C++ TR1. TR1 provides some FP-esque support like function objects and tuples, so maybe this is worth a look. On the other hand, given that much (all?) of TR1 is lifted from Boost, maybe we should just use that.
• Speaking of cool libraries, check out C5 (aka the Copenhagen Comprehensive Collection Classes for C#). It's basically a complete redesign of System.Collections.Generic (or SCG as they call it). I've read thru their online book and I'm very impressed. Of course, with me focused on F# of late, I'm primarily using immutable collections, so I'm not sure how much use I have for C5 right now.
• There was a free CoDe magazine in my DevTeach bag back in November with a fascinating article on where LINQ goes from here - LINQ 2.0 if you will. One of things the article discusses is tier-splitting, which has seen the light of day in Volta. Will Volta also deliver External Relationships, Reshaping Combinators and Join Patterns or will those come from different projects?
• I had to pave my workstation yesterday. I was running an interim build of Vista x64 SP1 and I couldn't make Virtual Server work with it. As part of the repave, I discovered I needed to update the firmware of my SCSI controller, but the update had to run under DOS. Freaking DOS? My workstation doesn't even have a floppy drive to boot DOS from! However, I was able to boot from a USB thumb disk instead. That's damn useful.

Morning Coffee 135

• Congrats to Barack Obama for walking away with the Iowa Democratic Caucus, which set turnout records. Frankly, I'm pretty cool with any of the democratic front runners but I think Obama has the best chance of winning in November. I'm not sure Edwards second time around will be any more successful than the last and I believe Clinton would drive the GOP GOTV campaign better than any of the actual GOP candidates would.
• Obviously, I like to play M-rated games like Bioshock and Mass Effect. But I also like games I can play with my kids like Lego Star Wars. There are two new Lego games coming out this year: Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman. I can't wait.
• Speaking of gaming, Xbox LIVE had some issues over the holiday break, due to record setting sign-ups and concurrent users. Record setting numbers is a nice problem to have if you're on the business side, but a not-so-nice if you're a customer or work in operations. The XBL GM announced they're offering a "token of appreciation" for everyone's patience - a free XBLA game. Assuming it's not a crappy game, it's a classy move.
• I watched Transformers on HD-DVD last night. Fun movie with lots of action, but man is it dumb. John Turturro is the only real stand-out.
• Dustin Campbell implements cons, cdr and car from Scheme in C# and VB. While of limited production value (Dustin specifically warns readers not to use any of his code), it really demonstrates how different the functional world is from the object/imperative one, right down to the concept of type. Cons doesn't return a tuple, it returns function with two bound variables. (via DNK)

Morning Coffee

• Libor Soucek continues our conversation about durable messaging. We still don't agree, but he says he "fine" with durable messaging. He does go out of his way to differentiate between *enterprise* and *supporting* systems. But when you're building connected systems, does that differentiation still matter?
• After taking a few months off, John deVadoss is back at the blog. Check out his Big SOA/Little SOA post. I especially like his snowball analogy "How do you build a big snowball? You start with a small snowball.") though he's also on this "middle out" bandwagon. Do we really believe "middle out" works, or are we just saying it because we know top down and bottom up don't? And John: You're welcome!
• Anyone coming to the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference this fall? Maybe we can have a shindig / blogger dinner / unconference / something?
• Remus Rusanu writes about SSB's dynamic routing. One of the (many) cool things about SSB is that all the addressing is logical, not physical. Routing is what binds logical addresses to physical addresses, and it's extensible.
• Martin Fowler discusses the value of sticking to one language. I agree with his points about large frameworks being as difficult to learn as a new language. I've said for a long time "If you build a framework, build tools to make it easy to use your framework". Language is obviously a core example of a tool. Another interesting point Martin makes is the traditional "intimate relationship" between scripting languages and C, but that the rise of JVM & CLR makes them impossible to ignore. Does the need to play well in a managed environment hinder a C based language like Ruby when compared to a natively managed scripting language like Powershell? Finally, Martin's "jigger of 80 proof ugliness" quote made me laugh.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: EJ Dionne says that DailyKos is doing for Democrats what Rush Limbaugh did for Republicans almost twenty years ago: mobilization. Josh Marshall points out that "what's happening today is vastly more participatory and distributed...than anything happening back then."

Morning Coffee 100

• The big 100. This puts be 1083 posts behind Iron Link Poster Mike Gunderloy. As his .NET skills deteriorate, maybe I can catch up...but I doubt it. I'm only 77 posts behind Sam Gentile, so maybe that's a bit more feasible. 
• The ADO.NET Team blog announces the new Entity Framework CTP. Looks like there's also a new .NET Framework 3.5 CTP and new Visual Web Developer "Orcas" Express CTP as well. (via Sam Gentile)
• Speaking of "Orcas" VS 2008, it launches with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 next February. (via DNK)
• Scott Guthrie continues is LINQ to SQL series. This time, using LINQ to SQL to update the database.
• My friend Arvidra Semhi recently moved and rebooted his blog. Among his many accomplishments, Arvindra started the Architecture Journal. I'm particularly interested in his recent Service Capsule work. Subscribed.
• Last night was the Microsoft E3 Briefing. Gamerscore blog has the news rundown. Didn't seem to be any HUGE news. Last year's E3 was the first Halo 3 showing and X06 featured the Halo Wars announcement. Nothing that earth-shaking this time, though the XBLM keeps on rolling, now featuring Disney movies. (Major Nelson has a list.) I'm thinking that the whole HD-DVD vs. BluRay war is going to be eclipsed by direct download before it's over, though I'm still waiting for PC support & all-you-can-eat pricing.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: Clay Shirky has a great blog post on modern-day Luddites. As he points out: "A Luddite argument is one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfort the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys." How much inefficiency is there in our modern political system? And more importantly, who benefits from that inefficiency? We've already seen the dramatic effects blogs can have on political news, media and reporting. What happens when users citizens are no longer satisfied just writing about the political process and want to get their hands dirty in the policy-making process itself?

A Tough Fourth

As Americans prepare to celebrate the birth of our nation tomorrow, what is arguably the most corrupt administration in a generation - certainly the most corrupt administration that I can remember by far (I was four when Nixon left office) - has provided yet another stark reminder of just how unfathomably corrupt it is by commuting Scooter Libby's prison sentence within hours of Libby losing the appeal to remain free while the original guilty verdict is appealed. It's not a full pardon, but I would expect that's coming sooner or later.

True patriots like myself will have a hard time celebrating America tomorrow. But I will, because America is bigger than this festering administration and the damage it has wrought to our safety and our reputation. I take solace in the landslide Democratic victory last November and the long-term negative effect this rouge lawless president and his freefall approval ratings is having on the Republican party.

As far as I'm concerned, Jan. 20th, 2009 can't come soon enough.

Early Afternoon Coffee 81

These morning meetings are really cramping the "morning" style of these posts. But better late than never, I guess.

• Politics 2.0 Watch: Democrats pwn Republicans online. (via Balloon Juice)
• Roger Wolter writes about integrating SSB with WF, something I've experimented with myself. I didn't find the integration quite as natural as Roger did - transactions are a real PITA, and Roger apparently he hasn't looked into that yet - but I agree 100% with the idea that "most SSB programs end up looking a lot like a workflow." Looking forward to seeing your code, Roger.
• Pat explains his Newton vs. Einstein view of distributed systems and then rants about Consistency, Availability and Partition-tolerance. In particular, he discusses the evolution of what consistency (and to less extent availability) means in the face of loose coupling. Do yourself a favor and give up on distributed transactions now. Also, Pat points to another paper from CIDR dealing with isolation in services. Haven't read it yet, but I've added it to "the pile".  
• David Chappell writes about Service Component Architecture vs. Service Oriented Architecture. Since I don't "do" evangelism anymore, I don't spend much time watching what our competitors are doing. According to the SCA website, SCA is supposedly a "a model for building applications and systems using a Service-Oriented Architecture." But according to David, SCA 1.0 focuses on "portability, not interoperability, and so they don’t fully define the interactions between components necessary to create composites that cross vendor boundaries." I realize that we don't industry agreement on all the details of what SOA means, but I think we all agree that it's cross platform and cross vendor. Or maybe we can't even agree on that much.

Morning Coffee 67

• Beta 1 of VS "Orcas" and .NET Framework 3.5 has shipped. Get it here. Besides LINQ, I'm most looking forward to experimenting with some of the new WF/WCF integration work. However, I don't think this beta includes DBPro functionality. Not surprising, given that DBPro only shipped a few months ago, but disappointing since I've moved all my database dev work over to that model.
• Korby Parnell introduces Claimspace, part of the Microsoft.Community family. While the other family members are retreads - blogs, forums and tagging - but this seems like something fundamentally new - or at least new to me - and therefore interesting. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman updates the new version of Notepad2 to re-enable Ruby support originally built by Wesner Moise. Ruby is nice, but where's the PowerShell love?
• After his performance in front the Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Gonzales is grossly incompetent, lying or both. What does it say about President Bush that he was "pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony"? It says Bush values loyalty over competence, is hiding something or both. Given that his approval ratings can't get much worse, I guess standing by Gonzales even in the midst of bi-partisan calls for his resignation isn't going to affect Bush much politically. On the other hand, confirming a new AG with a Democratic congress and low 30% approval rating might be devastating, depending on the bodies buried over there.

Morning Coffee 54

• The black Xbox 360 Elite is official. Details on Gamerscore and Major Nelson.
• Jamie Fristrom of Torpex Games writes about XNA and the approval process for making an Xbox Live Arcade game. At the end of his post, he confirms that his team is using a "pre-pre-alpha" version of XNA Game Studio Professional. I wonder how long before that's widely available?
• Politics 2.0 Advice: When building your MySpace page, don't use images hosted on other peoples servers. John McCain found out the hard way. (via Balloon Juice)
• Speaking of Politics 2.0, you can check out the Roots Project, described as "a social networking site for people with progressive values, allowing them to form their own groups, sharing information and best practices nationally while acting together locally." (via firedoglake)

Morning Coffee 50

• Nick Carr on net neutrality: "Protocol is neutral. Infrastructure isn't." This is a more complicated issue than it appears on the surface.
• Nick Malik on enterprise architecture: "Enterprise Architecture is not about 'building solutions right'. Enterprise Architecture is about 'building the right solutions'.
• If there had been a good quote on Nicholas Allen's blog today, then I could declare it "Quote a Nick" day. Alas, his posting on how to respond to GetProperty isn't very quotable.
• Hot on the heels of the new GAT CTP is the new Software Factories Toolkit CTP from Clarius. Among other new features is a Recipe Designer. Having mucked around in the Recipe XML, this is A Good Thing^TM (via Larkware)
• Politics 2.0 Watch: Phil de Vellis - the guy that made "Vote Different", the Hillary Clinton/Apple 1984 video mashup - said he made said video in part because he "wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process". Furthermore, "This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens." Personally, Bush as Big Brother would have been more appropriate, but I think the video got more attention becuase it cast Hillary in that role.

Morning Coffee 34

• Old news, but Reflector 5.0 is out. W00t! Not sure when Scott Hansleman became chief Reflector cheerleader, but he's got the rundown on the new features.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: OpenCongress. Sort of like Wikipedia for government. If we can disseminate information on bills and resolutions via the Internet, couldn't we collect votes on them as well?
• I got my hardcopy of Powershell in Action while I was on vacation. Highly recommended.
• Sam Gentle is starting to dig into WF, and he posts about the difficulty getting data in and out of workflows. He's using the ExternalDataService infrastructure which I don't like very much. I recommend getting friendly with the WorkflowQueuingService which is the low-level communication infrastructure that ExternalDataService builds on top of. The WQS docs are severely lacking, but it's fairly straight forward to figure out.
• Speaking of WF, Tomas Restpro reviews Programming WF. Sounds fairly introductory. Personally, Essential WF is one of the best tech books I've read in a long time, so I'll be skipping this book.
• My teammate Dale is continuing his daily posts on his blog.
• Joe McKendrick wonders if EDA is the new SOA. Frankly, both terms are so poorly defined that it's hard to determine exactly what each term means, much less how they're related. If you're an IT industry analyst, you probably can make a ton of cash describing the differences between them. Maybe it's me, but I don't see that much value in SOA without EDA. In fact, I'd go so far as to say service orientation without events isn't much a new architecture paradigm at all. It's just the Same Old Architecture with better support for interop.

Morning Coffee 19

• I find Jim Kobielus' "SOA as 50 square miles of fungus" analogy funny and strangely compelling. The "keep in the dark and feed it shit" jokes practically write themselves. (via Joe McKendrick)
• Politics 2.0 Rising: The number of Americans who got "most of their information" about the 2006 midterm elections was double the number from the 2002 elections.
• Do you use external/flash drives? Do you have issues when you try to "Safely Remove Hardware" with said drive? I do, all the time. Apparently, unlocker is the answer. (via Paul Andrew)
• How come there's no information about LogToTraceListeners in the WF documentation? As far as I can tell, it's not in the Windows SDK docs at all and the only reference to it on MSDN is this year-old article and this year-old blog post. I only discovered because someone on the internal WF discussion alias asked about it. I've added In my SSB/WF work, I subclassed the built-in SQL persistence service in order to add tracing support. If you're developing a WF host, you need to turn this on. I find it mind-boggling this isn't included anywhere in the official WF docs.
• Nice to see Soma bragging about Software Factories. As he writes, our current solution - consisting of the Guidance Automation Toolkit and the DSL Tools - are really just a first step. I'm just starting to experiment with the Web Service Software Factory (WSSF). Aaron Skonnard introduces both the ASMX and WCF version in his two most recent Service Station articles.
• Michael.NET makes Programming Promises and Ted Neward swears the Oath of the Conscientious Programmer. Why stop there? How about the Architect's Affidavit to actually implement the shit we draw on the white board? The Technologist's Testimony of understanding and belief in all things geeky and gadget? Come on, isn't this just called "doing your job"? Do we really need to make promises and swear oaths to take it seriously and do it to the best of our abilities?

Morning Coffee 17

Yesterday's Morning Coffee was canceled on account of barfing. For all the gory details (you have been warned), check out my wife's blog.

• Only 12 responses to the State of the Union were posted as I write this. Dunno why, but I was expecting more. Maybe this whole Web 2.0 thing is overblown a bit! :)
• Speaking of the State of the Union, is it just me, or did anyone else find it odd that the Scooter Libby trial started the same day?
• Atlas ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is done. Lots more on this from Scott Guthrie's blog. While I'm not personally that interested in ASP.NET AJAX itself, two things strike me as interesting in this release. First, we're shipping all the code for this. The client side JavaScript library, the Control Toolkit, even the server-side components. Second, it's nice to see the Developer Division shipping something this significant without waiting for the next release of Visual Studio. Here's hoping that both of these two trends continue.
• Rich McCollister pointed me to the XmlProviderLibrary. Bad on me for not looking harder.
• Windows Live Writer is pretty cool, but it is missing one feature that I needed twice Tuesday. While embedding images in a post is cake, there doesn't seem to be a way to embed non-image files. You know, like the ColorConsoleTraceListener Project or the Live Search for Chartity Search Providers. I'm guessing the infrastructure to post images and files would be identical, but there's no UI interface for it. I checked out the WLW SDK online and found the ISmartContent.Files.Add method, so I'm guessing it's doable. But there's no such animal on the Live Gallery. I wonder why nobody else has built this yet? Is this really that unique a request?

Quote of the Day

"Having a family member who is in politics, I've learned that whenever you see what seems like a religious fundamentalism there usually is a quest for money and/or power behind it."
            -Dare Obasanjo, What is Rob Weir (and IBM's) Agenda with the OOXML Bashing?

Morning Coffee 16

• Forgot to say this yesterday, but I'm happy the Colts are in the Super Bowl. Well, I guess I'm more happy that New England isn't in it. They've won it enough lately. I wish the Saints has made it, but at least this way I have no question who to root for on Super Bowl Sunday.
• My Gamerscore cracked 1000 over the weekend. I got 60 points in Dead Rising and 100 points in NHL 07. I have played ten games + three arcade games for a maximum possible Gamerscore of 10,600 and a Gamerscore "conversion rate" of 10.28%. I wonder how good that is? All the leader boards I've seen rate purely on Gamerscore.
• Speaking of games, Obsidian (of Neverwind Nights fame) is working on an Aliens RPG! Check out this post by Chris Avellone of Obsidian on Game Design Research (via Game Tycoon).
• Richard Grimes' .NET Instrumentation Workshop rocks. Richard also has extensive workshops on .NET Security and .NET Fusion (aka runtime binding). If they're as good as the instrumentation workshop, they're worth a read.
• In my SSB/WF prototypes, I've simply been writing to the console. The lo-tech brute force works okay for a console app, but not at all when I move my code into a shared library. So I decided to bite the bullet now and translate the Console.WriteLine calls into TraceSource calls. My prototype isn't that big (yet), but it went pretty smooth nonetheless. I currently have three TraceSources in my solution - one for the host, one for my SSB activities & workflow service and one for the persistence engine (I just inherited from SqlWorkflowPersistenceService and added the trace calls). I'm sure in time, I'll wish I had set up my TraceSources differently, but for now it works.
• The one feature I lost moving from Console.WriteLine to TraceSources was color support. Since I am creating voluminous tracing data, I used color coding to indicate which part of the application the trace information was coming from. Of course, the OOB ConsoleTraceListener doesn't have any mechanism to color code the output. I hacked up a ColorConsoleTraceListener in a couple of minutes that worked great. I say "hacked" because my color choosing code is currently hard coded, rather than being stored the config file. If I get the time to change that, I'll post the code here.
• While researching ASP.NET's Membership system, I found this Scott Guthrie post with links to ASP.NET providers for MySql, Oracle and SQLite. I've wondered about the lack of a simple file-based ASP.NET role/membership provider and even started hacking together an XML based one. But the availability of a .NET SQLite data provider makes that an interesting option. XML would be human readable, but porting the existing SQL providers to SQLite would probably be easier.
• Politics 2.0 in action: Talking Points Memo is enouraging you (aka Time Magazine's Person of the Year) to record your own response to tonight's State of the Union. Basically record your response via camcorder, webcam or cellphone. Then upload it to YouTube and add it to the TPM SOTU group. With President Bush's approval rating at all time lows, I'm guessing these videos will be venting some of the pent up hostility towards this administration.

Morning Coffee 3

I'm living in a tinder box, hosing down the roof
It's raging all around me, and I still refuse to move
There's a lesson I'm desperate to learn
And I'm willing to burn
     "Willing To Burn" by Maia Sharp

• A warm welcome goes out to the 110th congress. Between the Democratic majority in both houses and Republicans looking to distance themselves from President Decider and his abysmal approval ratings, maybe we'll actually get something accomplished in the next two years.
• Not as nice as USC trouncing Michigan, but I like seeing Notre Dame on the receiving end of a 41-14 beatdown from LSU in the Sugar Bowl. That's the 9th consecutive bowl loss for the Irish.
• Actually started getting some work done yesterday. Today I'm doing some WCF STS work, but yesterday I focused on SSB and WF.
• I need to better understand WF's faulting and compensation model. I got sidetracked yesterday when I realized that when a WF instance faults, the built-in SQL persistence service deletes the persisted instance from the database. That doesn't seem right to me, but I was wrong last time I called out the WF SQL persistence service so I want to do more digging before I open my trap.
• I dig WF persistence. I wrote a few weeks ago about shipping a WF instance to a developer for debugging. Yesterday, I thought about having a persistence service that kept a history of the WF instance rather than overwriting it. I wonder if that would help with production debugging?
• Great quote yesterday by my boss, speaking ill of a project that will remain nameless:
  "Basically, they've spent the last month building an executive presentation to say we're screwed"

Us the Inclusive

With the real and serious problem we face in this country - the civil war in Iraq, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, rebuilding New Orleans, etc. - it boggles the mind that we waste any time at all on faux controversies such as the so-called "War on Christmas". Getting Wal-Mart to use "Christmas" instead of "Holiday" in their marketing seems like a dubious accomplishment at best.

But where I rail against such stupidity, my brilliant wife writes poetry. One of Julie's conservative friends sent her an insipid poem that's been making the rounds on the Internet called "How The 'Left' Stole Christmas". I must have missed Wolf Blitzer changing his name to "Wolf Blitzen" or the Senate passing legislation to take away Christian's faith and forbid them to speak of salvation and grace.

My response would have simply been "Read the First Amendment, idiot!". My wife, however, wrote a poem of her own in response. Check it out.

Thoughts on Election Day

I've had a few days to savor the Democrat landslide victory this past Tuesday. I was half right about the razor thin majorities. Democrats have a slim two seat advantage in the senate, but a fairly significant thirty-four seat majority in the house (with ten races undecided). Given that the Republicans had a twenty-eight seat majority in the last congress, that's a pretty significant turnaround for the Democrats. Frankly, I'm pretty excited.

Here are a few short takes on the election:

• We can close the book on Rove's "permanent republican majority" pipe dream. America isn't a conservative country. It isn't a liberal country, either. It's a moderate country. Liberal and conservative are the words we use to describe the direction one diverges from the middle ground. This election was decided by the moderates in this country, which isn't surprising as the bell curve tells us that it's the moderates who are in the majority. Political parties ignore the middle at their own peril.
• Democrats didn't win the election on Tuesday, the Republicans lost it. Hard working moderate Americans have limited tolerance for ineptitude and corruption, as the Democrats found out in '94 and the Republicans found out this week. There are those on the left howling for elephant blood, but spending time exacting revenge on the Republicans won't solve any of America's hard problems. The Democrats are talking like they realize this, but actions speak louder than words.
• Speaking of actions and words, President Bush talked a good talk Wednesday, but I'll believe President "The Decider" Bush honestly wants to "work with the new Congress in a bipartisan way" when I see it. Trying to push John Bolton's confirmation as well as retroactive authorization for the warrantless wiretapping program through congress before Democrats officially take control isn't a promising start.
• There's no such thing as a political party that actively works for limited government. It isn't that surprising, as it violates my Numero Uno theory. Individuals may want limited government, but there's no way a government entity like a political party will actively work to reduce their own importance. Republicans claim to be for shrinking the federal government, but their actions contradict that claim. Republicans like Reagan and Bush cut taxes, but they never actually cut spending to match. As such, the Federal Debt / GDP ratio has about doubled in the past 18 years, with the only reduction coming while Clinton was in office. Claiming to cut taxes without cutting spending is like claiming you're making more money because you're not paying your mortgage. Republicans aren't cutting taxes, they're deferring them. It's time to realize that you can't starve the beast and move on to more pragmatic policies. Better a tax-and-spend liberal than a borrow-and-spend conservative.

Update: In the interest of bipartisanship, here are some less than reputable Democrats poised to take key positions in the new Democrat controlled congress. Making someone with a congressional impeachment or under FBI investigation the chair of a congressional committee isn't a promising start to "draining the swamp".

Common Ground with My Conservative Teammates

I came in this morning to discover my boss and next cube neighbor Rick had decided to spruce up his cube with camo netting. He's ex-Army, so it's not like it's out of character for him. Of course, the camo netting has the exact opposite of it's indented effect, making Rick's cube very easy to find in the farm.

Unlike my last team, most of my teammates are conservatives. But apparently we can find common ground in our opinions of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Rick called him an abysmal failure. I couldn't agree more. Dale joked that Rumsfeld was joining our team and moving into Rick's newly camo festooned cube. Rick countered that Rumsfeld was actually joining the Enterprise Architecture group. Heh.

Update: Dale points out he made the joke about Rumsfeld joining EA, not Rick. My bad Dale.

Certainly Not Politics As Usual

Today is the Midterm Elections here in the United States. If the pre-election day polls are to be believed, it looks like good news for the Democrats and bad news for the Republicans. The big question is whether the news is good/bad enough for Democrats to take control of one or both houses of Congress. I guess we'll know by tonight.

But this post isn't about the midterms. Don't get me wrong, I hope the Democrats take back both houses of congress. But whoever ends up controlling Congress will have a thin majority at best, which will limit their ability to accomplish much. Frankly, the only area that I would expect to see much traction is on issues where moderate Republicans can reach across the aisle and vote with the Democrats in order to distance themselves from President Bush's abysmal approval ratings.

I'm much more interested in the 2008 presidential campaign. For the first time in over 50 years, it will be a wide open race for both parties. Neither the sitting president nor the vice president will be running for president in 2008. The last time this happened was in 1952. President Harry Truman (D) dropped out of the race after losing the New Hampshire primary and Vice President Alben Barkley never had enough support to win the nomination. The Democratic nomination went to Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson who lost to General Eisenhower in a landslide. Since then, the incumbent president or vice president has always been his party's nominee for president.

Until now. Well, until two years from now at any rate. So while not completely unprecedented, this is the first time we've had a completely wide open race since the start of the Information Age. In other words, it's the first time we've had a wide open race since the advent of cable TV, personal computers, 24 news networks, Rush Limbaugh, the Internet, weblogs, Wikipedia and YouTube. I'm sure some have already started calling this Politics 2.0. And while I'm tired of the "2.0" moniker, certainly big changes is underway in the political arena.

So what happens when you combine the harsh sunlight of a decentralized and demassivied media with a wide open race with no clear favorite from either party? I'm guessing a very ugly race, especially from the Republicans. Both parties do negative ads, but they have become a "key strategy in the Republican political arsenal". (The NRCC apparently spent "more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget" on negative ads this year.) I expect 2008 will be even worse. And not just the presidential race itself, but also the race for each party's nomination. In some ways, the nomination race will be worse, since you expect politicians to have bad things to say about candidates from the opposing party.

If the next two years are filled with party infighting with every detail chronicled in the blogosphere and/or the mainstream media - and I fully expect that's what will happen - we are in for a very ugly campaign ahead. Brace yourselves.  

Numero Uno Theory of Sociology

My wife Julie has a degree in sociology. Furthermore, she has a knack for sociology, the way I have a knack for computers. It's part of what makes her such a great mom and teacher. Anyway, Julie once told me that sociology is easy because everything you need to know about a given theory is in the title. Not sure how true that is in sociology in general, but it certainly is true of my own personal sociological theory, the aptly named "Harry Pierson's Numero Uno Theory of Sociology", which states:

Everyone Looks Out For Numero Uno.  

This applies not only to individuals, but also to organizations. When forced to choose between what is "right" (as defined by the organization's core principles) and what will protect the organization's long-term survival, the organization will always choose to protect itself and sacrifice its core principles.

I first came up with this theory several years ago, when the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal was in full swing. The Catholic Church - like pretty much all religions - has very rigid definitions of what is right in the way of values and morality. Yet when their own priests violated these very principles and acted immorally, the representatives of the church chose to "look out for numero uno" and protect the organization by suppressing the evidence rather than doing what is right by their own definition.

Now we're embroiled in a similar scandal, this time in politics. Last week, Congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla) resigned when it came to light that he had sent sexually explicit emails and IM's to underage male Congressional pages. While criminal, what makes this a Numero Uno scandal is that Republican leadership has known these messages since late last year but decided to "look out for numero uno" and try to cover it up. Even as late as last week, Congressman Tom Reynolds' (R-NY) chief of staff Kirk Fordham tried to cut a deal with ABC "not to publish the raw, sexually explicit messages".

The fallout from this scandal has already been massive. Liberals and conservatives alike are appalled by both Foley's predatory behavior and Republican leadership's attempt to sweep it under the rug. While other recent scandals on Capital Hill - such as those involving Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham - have been further reaching, Foley's scandal is more likely to be covered at length by the mainstream media. To quote Kevin Drum, "It involves sex, it involves coverups, it involves powerful players turning on each other to protect their own skins, and it involves lots of documentary evidence." Like it or not, that's the kind of scandal that gets eyeballs and ratings.

The timing couldn't be worse for Republicans, as this comes barely a month before the mid-term elections. Most political analysts give the Democrats a decent chance to take back the majority in one or both houses of Congress, and that was before this scandal broke. We won't know how big an impact the Foley scandal will have until after the mid term elections.

However, if Republican leadership had dealt with it last fall or even last spring, the election impact would have been drastically reduced. Of course, it would have gotten wall-to-wall media coverage, but it would have lacked the coverup angle and it wouldn't be taking up so much pre-election airtime now. Foley wouldn't be on the ballot in Florida. And I wonder what this will do to Republican voter turnout across the board, given that a significant percentage of conservative voters are anti-homosexual.

But that's the thing about Numero Uno, you're always looking out for it, regardless of the potential consequences down the road.

Lip Service on Long Term Planning

Long term readers know my liberal political leanings. So it should come as no surprise to them that I read liberal blogs like Washington Monthly. But this isn't a post about politics, it's a post about planning:

This kind of long-term planning — in politics, in business, in nearly every walk of life — is something that nearly everyone says they support, but when push comes to shove very few people are willing to back it up. There's always something this week, or this month, or this year that seems uniquely crucial and demands our attention. Next year there will be something else, and the year after that something else again. The long-term stuff simply never gets done unless someone like Dean is willing to go to the mat for it.
[Building a Better Movement - Kevin Drum]

I don't have much to add to this, except that planning is a big part of architecture, especially architecture in the enterprise (which may or may not be "Enterprise Architecture"). Who "goes to the mat" for the long-term stuff at your company? Or does the long-term stuff simply never get done?

Thank You Stephen Colbert

(Quick reminder, this is my personal blog. Standard disclaimer applies.)

I'm guessing the White House Correspondents' Association didn't run their choice of dinner entertainment past the actual White House. Last year, Stephen Colbert had this hilarious bit on Laura Bush's "after hours" show @ last year's dinner.

I wonder who thought "Let's get the guy that made the joke about President Bush bathing in a bucket of horse semen last year to appear at this year's Correspondent's dinner." Actually, I don't have to wonder. It was Mark Smith from AP Radio, the President of WHCA, who admitted to being responsible for signing Colbert while introducing him Saturday night. This guy considered "Colbert: AP is America's #1 threat" a "pit-in-my-stomach, career-in-flames moment". I'm guessing he's in full barf-o-rama mode after Colbert's stunning performance. This administration isn't exactly known for forgiving and forgetting. I wouldn't be surprised if Mark Smith could get to the White House in the future was the online tour.

You can get the transcript from Daily Kos and the video from Vast Moderate Conspiracy. The video is also up on YouTube (in parts). Check out Thank You Stephen Colbert for links. And while you're there, you can join the nearly 14,000 people who have said thanks in just under 24 hours.

Partisan Hackery

A few people took issue with me calling Dennis Miller a partisan hack while also expressing relief that the new season of Real Time with Bill Maher was starting. I finally got to watch last Friday's episode. Sure, they made fun of Dick Cheney's hunting accident and had a round of negative things to say about this administrations handling of Iraq (one of the guests was Dan Senor, Advisor to the U.S. Presidential Envoy in Iraq) but he also grilled Democratic Senator Russ Feingold on the effectiveness of campain finance reform and came out as pro-wiretapping:

[I]f they need to listen to keep a dirty bomb from going off in Long Beach, then I say, "Listen away."

<snip>

Oh, please, Americans don't want privacy. They want attention! They'll put a camera in their shower and show it on the Internet! To get on television, they'll marry strangers and eat a cow's rectum, and ice dance with Todd Bridges. They're trying to get on a show called "Big Brother"!

We are a nation of exhibitionists from "me" to shining "me." And what we really fear isn't that someone's listening; it's that no one's listening. This whole country is one big desperate cry for somebody to listen to "listen to me, photograph me, Google me, read my blog! Read my diary; read my memoir. It's not interesting enough? I'll make shit up!"

<snip>

I tell you, this country gave the finger to privacy a long time ago.

[Bill Maher's New Rules for 2/17/2006]

Seems like quite a difference to Dennis Miller calling out John Kerry and Howard Dean a year after the election and having nothing at all negative to say about the Bush administration.

Out of curiosity, I'm wondering what people think of Jon Stewart of The Daily Show fame. Partisan Hack or Not?

Dennis Miller Has Jumped the Shark

I was so excited to see the Dennis Miller's latest HBO special, but it was such let down. He spent the first half sucking wind and the second half sucking up to the Republicans. I mean, he used to have such a sharp policital wit, but now he's just another partisan hack. It's pretty sad.

At least Bill Maher is back next week.

The Plain Folks Elected a Downright Moron?

I've gotten very familiar with the Urban Legend Reference Pages. I often get emails from close friends or family of supposed news stories and quotes that a quick search on the site demonstrate are false. Today, I hit one of the rarer "true" pages on the site. I received a quote in email by H. L. Mencken that has apparently been making the rounds on the political blogs that I am not currently reading due to my personal media blackout. The quote making the rounds is:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron

Mencken actually did say this, though the above quote is cut down and taken slightly out of context. Here's a larger version of the quote:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

[Henry Louis Mencken, "Bayard vs. Lionheart", Baltimore Evening Sun, 26 July 1920. Quoted from Snopes.com]

I like the longer version much better. The cutdown quote reads like an indictment of "the plain folks of the land". The longer quote is more a cynical commentary on the process itself. He still predicts (accurately IMO) the election of a moron to the White House, but Mencken seems to lay the blame more on having to campaign "second and third hand" than on the people who elect said moron. Either way, you still have a moron, but the longer quote gives much more insight on how to deal with the issue going forward.

 I wonder what Mencklen would have thought of the modern media?

Democrats Lost Touch? Not Hardly.

While I've started my self-imposed temporary media blackout, I had to make one last post after discussing the election with my parents. Apparently, someone on the news had said that the Democratic party had lost touch with the American people. Frankly, that bullshit - the exit polls tell a very different story.

First off, Bush didn't win in a landslide - he won the popular vote by just over 3.5 million votes which translates into a safe-but-still-narrow 3.1% victory margin. In comparison, Clinton won the first time with a 5.5% margin and the second time by 8%. Furthermore, according to the national exit poll, Kerry won both the liberal and moderate vote. The election swung to Bush becuase of the high percentage (34%) of conservative voters. I'd love to compare those percentages to actual population ideology distribution, but I have no idea what those actualy distribution numbers are. Interestingly enough, the 1996 exit polls had an almost identical heavily-conservative ideological distribution and Clinton still won easily.

Kerry lost because he's had no connection with the conservative voters of the south and mid-west. He stengthed the democratic lead among liberals by five points and among moderates by one point over the 2000 exit polls (mostly due to the Nader non-factor this year) and yet still lost because Bush improved both the republican lead among conservatives and the conservative voter turnout by 5 points each.

You can safely say that the Democrats lost touch with conservatives in America this year, and that it cost them the election. But to say that Democrats have lost touch with America as a whole is simply not true. This electorate doesn't look that much different than the ones that elected Clinton to two terms.

At Least It's Over

While I was driving into work this morning, Kerry conceded. While he hasn't made his speech yet as I write this, I'm assuming he'll be magnanimous though in reality he's being a realist. Not enough provo votes to overcome the current Bush lead. Maybe it's better for Kerry anyway - as I wrote last night, even if he won Ohio and the election, he'd be facing an impossible task of uniting the country, fixing Iraq and digging the country out of the economic tarpit that it's currently mired in all without the mandate of the popular vote.

Secondly, according to MSNBC, turnout estimation is 59%. That's still a failing grade. Rod commented that in Australia, voting is mandatory. I like that idea, but he also pointed out that it would "never fly" in the US. Never say never...

With the result no longer in doubt, I'm imposing a personal media blackout for the next month or so. The closest I'm willing to get to politics for a while is is The West Wing.

Can't Sleep - Long Election Analysis Post

I'll be honest - I started Election Day feeling cautiously optimistic. Obviously, that feeling as been proved way, way wrong. Now, its 2:30am, I can’t sleep so I’ve been futzing with Excel and written a following long piece on voting tendencies of different age groups.

Regardless of the eventual outcome in Ohio (which I am most certainly not optimistic about) Bush has won the popular vote hands down - by a significantly larger margin than he lost it in 2000. Any way you slice that, it's bad for Democrats. Even if Kerry wins Ohio - and the election - he faces a hostile Republican majority in the Congress without a national mandate and an increasingly conservative media ready to crucify him at any turn. On the other hand, if Bush wins Ohio - as I expect will happen eventually - then we get four "more of the same" years - and the last four year were no picnic. And either way, the likely two week delay in processing Ohio's provisional ballots further divides what is an already polarized electorate.

Right now, going back to blissful ignorance of politics is looking mighty tempting. But I won’t do it. Instead, I want to get more involved in issues I care about in order to affect change. For example, one thing I'd like to see in the coming years is the election reform. I'm not talking about abandoning the Electoral College - which isn’t going to happen w/o a constitutional amendment that has almost zero chance of passing. I’m talking about the changing the low voter turnout that has plagued American elections for decades. Final results won’t be in for a while, what with provisional and absentee ballots, but according to CNN’s current numbers, around 110 million votes have been tabulated, with 95% of the precincts reporting. That means there were around 116 million votes cast (plus the absentee and provisional votes that haven’t been counted yet). However, the US population is estimated by the Census Bureau to be around 295 million. Excluding the estimated 25.7% of the population that is under 18, that leaves nearly 219 million potential voters. Even with this year’s record turnout, we’ve only managed to include 53% of the country in the voting process (maybe low 60’s after with the yet-to-be-counted ballots). While I understand it’s every citizen’s duty to vote, it’s the government’s duty to enable the citizens to do their duty. We should treat the turnout as a grade, and 53% is a failure.

I don’t expect election reform to be a priority of a Republican administration or congress, as conventional wisdom states that larger turnout favors Democrats. Of course, this election’s results fly directly in the face of that idea. However, there are those blogs I read that have suggested that Kerry lost the popular vote because the “much-ballyhooed youth vote simply did not show up”. I thought this too – until I ran the numbers.

The most underrepresented age group in the election (according to the national exit poll) was 18-29 years olds – 22% of the voting age population yet only 17% of the voters in the exit poll. And that group overwhelmingly favored Kerry 54%-44%. By comparison, people 60 and older are also around 22% of the voting population but represented 25% of the voters. Not surprisingly, that group favored Bush 53%-46%. However, it’s interesting to note that if the voter turnout age distribution had matched the actual census distribution, Bush would still have won the popular vote 49.6% to 48.8%. In the census-adjusted model, Kerry is negatively effected by the 30-44 age group, that favored Bush by four points and were under represented in the exit polls – 32% of the voting population but only 28% of voters.

(In fairness, the exit poll isn’t completely accurate – based on the voting turnout age distribution, it estimated a 50% - 48.5% Bush popular vote win and we know Bush won by a wider margin than that. Furthermore, as we are accutely aware, popular vote doesn't win the presendency and given the closeness of several state races, the youth vote might have shifted the Electoral College in Kerry’s favor.)

I’d like to do more analysis of this exit poll data. There were certain questions that I think are fascinating. For example, 43% of people thought things are going well in Iraq, and 90% of them voted for Bush. 52% of people thought things are going badly, and 82% of them voted for Kerry. Given that people perception of Iraq is directly effected by the media reporting, it becomes fairly obviously the dramatic role that the media plays in our elections. So there’s another issue for me to get involved in – undoing the damage of media consolidation.

But for now, I’m going to try and sleep.

The Definition of "The Media"

I said I wasn't going to blog any political reasoning (for now), but there is one quasi-political subject that I want to address - the media. Not to steal Bill Maher's shtick, but we need a new rule: Members of the media can't talk about the media as if they aren't a part of it. I occasonally listen to as much talk radio as I can without throwing up (usually about five minutes). But beyond the obvious partisanship, the spewing hatred and the outright lying that goes on, there's this thin veil of bullshit that somehow these radio shows are telling you "truth" that "the media" won't. When Rush Limbaugh says something along the lines of "Here's something the media won't tell you" he is outright lying because he's part of the media:

Media: A means of mass communication, such as newpapers, magazines, radio, or television.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Note the use of the word "radio" in the definition? Radio is, in fact, part of the media - go figure.

There's this myth in this country that the media is liberal. Maybe it was back before consolidation, national syndication and 24-hour cable news networks, but it sure ain't now. Rush and his cronies distance themselves from the concept of "the media" in order to keep that myth alive. The reality is that most of what passes for news and opinion in the media these days is more like carefully scripted partisan theatre intended to further their host's own agenda rather than tell any of the actual truth.

Major kudos to Jon Steward for pointing this out to the staff of CNN's Crossfire.

UPDATE - In the second to last paragraph above, I changed “host's own conservative agenda” to simply “host's own agenda”. I was momentarily guilty of the same type of partisan manipulation that I am accusing others of. It isn't only conservatives that have an agenda. For example, Michael Moore has a pretty obvious liberal agenda and, as a filmmaker, is also a part of the media. Of course, Michael's media efforts aren't masquerading as the supposedly unbiased evening news.

Waking Up

My father recommended I not blog politics, under the mistaken assumption that this is a "technical blog". For the record, this isn't a technical blog, it's my personal blog and I blog about what I'm interested in. Usually, it's technology, development and/or architecture. Sometimes it's hockey. Sometimes it's movies. Right now, I'm abnormally interested in politics - go figure. I'm a week behind on tech blog reading, but I'm currently reading over a dozen political blogs every day.

This political "season" has had a significant effect on me. Call me a slow learner, but I'm beginning to figure out that politics isn't just something to think about once a year at election time - or worse, once every four years when at presidential election time. I'm sure regular readers can guess who I support for president, but I haven't quite figured out how my new-found-interest in politics will effect my day-to-day life after Election Day. I won't bother you with any political reasoning (yet) since you've either made up your mind, in which case nothing I say will make a difference either way, or you haven't, in which case you're getting bombarded on all sides to make a decision and anything I say will be lost in the cacophony. But I do want to share one quote with you, which I found doing a little research:

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."

- George Washington

Regardless of who wins in November, I will never turn my back on this troublesome servant and fearful master again.