Category: Uncategorized

As of today John McCain is trailing Barack Obama in almost every measured poll, and his electoral count looks grim.  What’s more, Obama is raising considerably more money as McCain, which gives you a pretty good idea where the bets are from a corporate standpoint.  And so the smear campaign has begun in earnest.

Last week Governor Palin accused Senator Obama of consorting with domestic terrorists, a charge based on a New York Times article that reported that Obama had known a member of the Weathermen.  The problem with this is that the article also went on to state that their ties were very limited to several business meetings and an occasional chance interaction in the neighborhood in which they both lived.  Other media have similarly debunked this charge.

Now the Republicans are claiming that Obama is taking money from overseas, only that have not produced a single shred of evidence to support their request for an investigation by the Federal Election Commission.  Here’s the problem for the Republicans with both of these charges: they’re baseless.  When people repeatedly make baseless charges, we are reminded of the boy who cried wolf.  Just how many times can one get away with it without hurting his reputation?

In Governor Palin’s case, since she has very little going for her already, it’s a short trip to the bottom, from which she will not return.  She did herself a disservice by accepting this nomination and being McCain’s bulldog.  Had she not done so she could have probably slipped right into a U.S. Senate seat.  Now she’ll have a difficult time running for dog catcher.

For nameless GOP operatives filing lawsuits, it won’t be so bad for them as it will their entire party.  The mud must stick somewhere, and if it won’t stick to the target, and it won’t stick to a nameless flinger, it will stick to who they represent.

Republicans should be pretty frustrated with such tactics because as 1992 demonstrated it is perhaps better to lose one election and attempt to hold the moral highground, and then come back two years later and try again.  For John McCain it’s just sad.  I view the man as a hero from Vietnam, one who stood as a sometimes lone voice for veterans of that mess, and who has now authorized behavior that should be beneath him.

Dear friends in Charlotte,

I recently read in the New York Times that right now many of your residents are suffering because of the near failure and impending purchase of Wachovia, one of the two major banks in town.  Apparently friends know friends who have been laid off, probably through no fault of their own, but through, as someone who works at the competitor said, a bad decision.

It sounds like times are tough because either of the new owners will probably move the headquarters out of Charlotte, the two contenders being Wells Fargo and Citibank.  And those of us who have lived in a town where such a large business has pulled out know that many other businesses close, and many others must shrink, and the economy must absorb all of that.

The reason I mention this is that I lived in San Francisco, the former home of Bank of America, former home of the Bank of America Building, where Nations Bank bought them and removed the headquarters to, guess where?  Charlotte.

We wish you a speedy recovery, particularly if Wells Fargo gets the gig.

Sincerely,

(some former) Californians

Here’s my recipe for blueberry banana pancakes:

• 1 egg
• 400 ml whole milk
• 375 ml flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 ripe bananas
• 400 ml blueberries
• 25ml vegetable oil and whatever else you need to grease the pan.

Heat a griddle (or a flat pan of some sort) between medium and medium-high.  Mix baking soda with egg and whisk.  Add milk, oil, and salt and stir.  Add first 200 ml flour and stir.  Add remaining flour until the consistency is not too soupy (it should be most of the rest).  Slice bananas thinly and cut into smaller pieces.  Rinse and mix in blueberries.

Pour 1/4 cup portions onto the griddle.  Cook on first side for about four minutes, or until brown on the bottom.  Bubbles may or may not appear, due to fruit.  Flip and cook on other side for three to four minutes or until brown.  If the pancakes are raw in the middle, turn heat down a bit and cook a little longer.

Serves 2 adults, one child.

This past week Google released a new browser called Chrome.  Google has been a principle and driving donor to the Mozilla Foundation, the people who brought you Firefox.  Why, then, would they abandon that work in favor of starting from scratch?  There are any number of reasons I can think of, putting aside what they in fact wrote:

• One of Google’s interests is to be able to compete with Microsoft in the applications space.  Google already has a spreadsheet and a document editor available on their web site for free.  However, the browser interface itself gets in the way of the user experience.  By way of an example, if you wish to save documents to your desktop, something everyone does, one has to invoke a download function, which might in fact cause the document to be displayed in the browser, rather than being saved.  Otherwise it might bring up the download windows, which is rather clunky.
• To take this a step further, it is equally possible that Google is unsatisfied with the semantics to be found with the combination of HMTL, Javascript, and Java.  One thing we do not see in the announcement, for instance, is a discussion of standards adherence.  Google has a history of attempting to set de facto standards.  The problem with this is that people moving from Microsoft could end up exchanging one evil for another.  Don’t get me wrong- EVERY company wants to play this game.  However, in Microsoft’s case, they are supervised by at least two government bodies to see that their interfaces remain (at least somewhat) open.
• There is perhaps a more obvious reason.  Firefox in particular is one of the most complex pieces of code in the world, making use of nearly every C++ construct that exists.  Few on this earth are really qualified to make changes to the code because of the level of sophistication.  Sometimes, in such circumstances, starting from scratch is easier.

Is there room in the market for Chrome and whose market share will it take?  My guess is that Firefox will bear the brunt of the loss, but sometimes hype is sufficient to steal from others as well.  If there truly are new capabilities in Chrome, they will quickly find their way into other browsers.  Unless Google encumbers the work in some way, Chrome will end up being a demonstration project.  Of one thing we can be assured: the hackers are still out there, and they will be among the first to use Chrome, to find its weaknesses, and to exploit them.  We can say that the other browsers are well vetted (yes, even IE).  Here is another opportunity for PCs to be 0wn3d.