Archive for October, 2008

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The Economist Endorses Barak Obama

October 31, 2008

The Economist is endorsing Mr. Obama.

Amusing quotes:

Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

Which feels like an understatement, but I digress. My two favorite quotes, however, are:

He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

and

He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

And the presidency deserves Mr. Obama.

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The Informercial

October 30, 2008

I watched the famed Obama Informercial this morning before work (I luv the net; time zone differences would have meant I needed to be up at some ungodly hour to see it “live”, and I’m grateful the big Intertron was at the ready position to deliver it when it was more convenient for me to watch it, although I was dissapointed I could not find it on Mr. Obama’s official site). It is a fine piece of work on many levels, and I did watch it from beginning to end (minus the “live from Florida” bit at the end). Clearly, it was engineered (yes, designed) to deliver a strong punch days before the election, with enough time to spread and give people time to think about it and digest it.

There are no earth shattering revelations in the video, but there are quite a few worthy elements to it, starting with Mr. Obama’s role as the chronicler (noted far more eloquently by Eve Fairbanks at The New Republic; James Fallows at The Atlantic also wrote a brief piece), which was the very first thing that caught my attention. Mr. Obama’s oratorial skills are well documented, but this role gave him the added benefit of reporting in the first person: he went, he saw, he’s reporting, he will act. If anything, Mr. Obama looks both approachable and, more importantly, engaged based on the input he has collected. There may or may not be a lot of approaching when he becomes president (he will have his hands full), but as long as he remains genuinely engaged, it is welcomed engaging change.

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Whassuup?! Change.

October 27, 2008

Priceless:

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Colin Power Endorses Barak Obama

October 19, 2008

It’s a slow Sunday after a night out celebrating a friend’s birthday, and I just wanted to give the news a cursory look, more out of habit than anything else. It turned out anything but cursory as news outlets report on Mr. Powell’s endorsement of Mr. Obama. He was already an outcast in Republican circles, and the usual outlets will go onto the offensive and set the spin wheels in motion: from race to redemption, vengeance and bitterness, in whatever array of colors, shapes and sizes anyone cares to add. I have always respected Mr. Powell, and I am glad to see that there is a shred of decency in him that seems to have survived his tenure in the first Bush term. I believe he hit rock-bottom as he stood in front of members of the United Nations on February 5, 2003 to defend the indefensible, and his replacement has essentially been a lame duck all throughout the second term (and I don’t particularly mind that state of affairs).

Is his endorsement redemption? Perhaps. Is there an agenda behind it? Maybe. Might he get to be, serving under President Obama, the Secretary of State he could never be under President Bush? Not unthinkable, and not necessarily undesirable. Regardless, it is undeniable that he has stepped up to the plate, and I’d like to believe he has done so in following a core set of beliefs that are able to distinguish right from wrong.

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Management 101 in the U.S. Election

October 14, 2008

I wrote the first two paragraphs of this post in early September:

A friend asked me last week if I was following the circus of the election in the States (paraphrasing). Having formulated that question right after a week of vacation, blissfully disconnected from anything not related to the task at hand, i.e., enjoy sun and roller-coasters with my better half, the only event of significance I could come up with was about Mr. McCain’s choice of Mrs. Palin as a running mate, and mostly because it was all over the news: impossible to ignore.

Ever since Loudcloud days, I’ve been interested in the science (and art) of management. Without going into the details of Mrs. Palin’s background, I found one rather interesting point of comparison between the choices of candidates for VP. One of the more resonant criticisms of Mr. Obama has been his so-called lack of experience, and, in particular, his lack of exposure to foreign relations. This stroke me as odd given his background, but let’s for a minute say he is unable to drive decent foreign policy (decent as in effective and human). He demonstrated that he can build (and quite possibly manage) team of people that can run stuff. If he was lacking foreign politics exposure, he went and found himself a running mate with said experience (as Mr. Biden’s tenure in the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations would attest). Thus, Mr. Obama seems to have approached his choice of VP as a management choice of creating a team to run the country than for political motivations.

It’s mid October, and I am yet to figure out what Mr. McCain’s choice in Mrs. Palin brings to the table in terms of building a team.

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Vista: a pleasing view?

October 14, 2008

The word vista, which was probably imported into English from Spanish, means a pleasing view, esp. one seen through a long, narrow opening. This is most ironic in the context of the latest offering from Redmond, which I had seen here and there but never actually used.

I recently picked up a no-name (well, it does have a brand, and a popular one at that, but the hardware manufacturer has nothing to do with this particular gripe, and I will appreciate being spared the install Linux diatribe) for a friend. This friend, who is not a computer whiz, speaks Spanish, so I wanted to switch the language in the OS to Spanish. Sounds sensible, right?

Asides from the horribly busy interface (discerning input boxes and even windows on the screen was a challenge, and giving up something like 35% of the browser’s useful real state, i.e., actual content, in the name of title bars, menus, plugin messages, search bars, tabs and frames annoyed me in extremis), I was unable to configure the thing to display menus and such in Spanish. In the process, I learned about LIPs and MUIs, I read a few [useless] threads on how to activate the Spanish translation (I apparently needed to install an undownloadable LIP, but only if I’m using something or other edition), and ended up nowhere. Ironic as well the whole Genuine Advantage gig. I gave up. Time’s valuable.

Compare this to the PowerBook I gave my Mom a while back: System Settings -> International -> Language -> Spanish. Log out. Log back in. Heck, I’ll trow in a reboot just to try and even things out a bit. Done. Move on with life.

I’m glad a lot of people find Vista useful (and pretty, I suppose) enough to endure it. I’ll spare you the expletives. Perhaps I’m getting too old to tinker like in the good old days, tho language installation (really, it should simply be activation) doesn’t qualify as tinkering in my book. When I tell people I last used Windows in the mid 90′s (I did use NT for about 4 months at Systemhouse), they sometimes look at me funny. But then again: I don’t have to endure my operating system. I use it and be done with it.

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