Clinton for McCain!

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Clinton Says She and McCain Offer Experience
Hillary Clinton told reporters that both she and the presumtive Republican nominee John McCain offer the experience to be ready to tackle any crisis facing the country under their watch, but Barack Obama simply offers more rhetoric. “I think you'll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain will be able to say,” she said. “He’s never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002.” Clinton was referring to Obama’s anti-war speech he delivered in Chicago before entering the United States Senate.

"I will put forth my lifetime of experience". 

Put forth!

Oh, gives us a break you old fraud.



He may not have 'invented' the web but he knows how to use it.

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How the Barack Obama Campaign Uses Wikis to Organize Volunteers
The Obama campaign is using software from business intranet provider Central Desktop to manage "precinct captains" - volunteers who get out the vote and spread the campaign message in specific precincts across the state. The campaign started using the software during the run up to an earlier nominating contest in California - the nation's most populous state. "The Web-based collaboration platform combined with a strong organized grass-roots effort, created unprecedented public involvement that is revitalizing politics in America," said Patrick DeTemple, the California Data & Systems Manager for the Obama campaign. "Not since Bobby Kennedy has there been such an extensive Precinct Captain operation for a presidential candidate in California."

Central Desktop is a wiki-based collaboration tool that competes with 37Signals' Basecamp (to put it in some perspective). Though most users are business clients who utilize the software as a private intranet, the Obama campaign is using it to power a public facing wiki to organize information for precinct captains in Texas.  The campaign is using the software on their own without much input beyond basic support from Central Desktop - or in other words, the campaign has been savvy enough to figure out how to utilize an existing tool for a completely new use case.

You have one message

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Warning over celebrity drug use
Dealing too leniently with celebrities who use drugs sends out the wrong message to young people, the United Nations drugs watchdog has said.
Look you morons, you couldn't devise a better advertising campaign to put people off drugs than is provided almost daily by the media - showing celebrities staggering, dribbling, falling over and, often, dying, after using their favourite substance of abuse.

If you really want to give drugs a bad name fund a dealer to be on call 24/7 for Pete Doherty, Amie Winehouse et al and make sure you're there at the finale.





Looks like his bite is worse than his Bach

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What did Bach look like?
A modern reconstruction of Johann Sebastian Bach's head, using computer modeling techniques, shows the composer as a strong-jawed man with a slight underbite, his large head topped with short, silver hair. The bust, unveiled in Berlin on Monday, was created by anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson in her lab at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

Rather than use Bach's actual bones, which are buried at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany, Wilkinson worked from a copper replica of Bach's skull made for a previous reconstruction in 1894 by physician Wilhelm His and sculptor Carl Ludwig Seffner. Nonetheless, Wilkinson sees her work as the most realistic rendering of Bach's appearance to date.


He looks more like a bare-knuckle fighter than the greatest composer the world has ever known.

Pull the other one, cobber

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Blogging boosts your social life
Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new Australian research has found. The research, from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found after two months of regular blogging, people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog.


Drug policy headache

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Reason Magazine - Strip for the Principal

When drugs were found in a classroom a student ended up being taken to the Principal's office:
Savana Redding, an eighth grade honor roll student at Safford Middle School in Tucson, Arizona, was pulled from class.  Redding said she had never seen the [drugs] before and agreed to a search of her
possessions, (the principal) searched Redding's backpack and found nothing...the administrative assistant then took Redding to the school nurse's office in order to perform a strip search.

In the school nurse's office, Redding was ordered to strip to her underwear. She was then commanded to pull her bra out and to the side, exposing her breasts, and to pull her underwear out at the crotch, exposing her pelvic area. The strip search failed to uncover any drugs.
And what, exactly, were the drugs that were originally found and which led to this search?

Two Ibuprofen.


Defenestration

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The window fitters are in tomorrow to replace six windows, including the one in my office. That means I've got to disconnect everything and move my desk out so the guys can get to the window to do their job. I'm hoping to set up downstairs for the duration but I suspect things will be slow until later in the week.


I hope the weather doesn't turn cold and windy. When those windows come out it leaves a bloody big gap!


I'll be taking and posting a few snaps during the process. Wow, that'll pull in the readers!




UPDATE: Getting there...



(News)Fired up again

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NewsFire (for Mac OS X)



Newsfire has been updated and is now available completely free of charge. I have used NewsFire off and on for years and it is a lovely app. The main whinge has always been that the developer seemed uninterested in providing any sort of support. He would say, and has said, that he is too busy working and developing other applications to be able to provide any kind of response to users queries, which is fair enough but not really a satisfactory answer for paying customers. Well now it's free and so we can't expect anything from the developer beyond this (very fine) newsreader.

I've now migrated back to NewsFire from NetNewsWire, which was also made available free of charge recently. It seems that web based readers, in particular Google Reader, are dominating the market. I still like my desktop based reader and, for the time being at least, that is going to be NewsFire once more.


Getting there, slowly

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More Americans turning to Web for news
Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news, according to a new survey. While most people think journalism is important to the quality of life, 64 percent are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities. "That's a really encouraging reflection of people who care A) about journalism and B) understand that it makes a difference to their lives," said Andrew Nachison, of iFOCOS, a Virginia-based think tank which organized a forum in Miami where the findings were presented.

BUT:
Howard Finberg, of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, said the public often doesn't understand that the sources they are accessing online such as Google News and Yahoo News pull stories from newspapers, television, wire services and other media sources. "It's delivered in a non-traditional form, that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't traditional journalism underneath it," he explained.
There is still a long way to go before we get true, widespread, web based journalism. But it will happen.