"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Outlandish Josh

Published on Sat, 2008-09-13 23:44

The Kids are Coming Up From Behind

Quick meta-notes: my prestigious google ranking for the keyphrase "authentic experience" is not long for this world, methinks. Couldn't be eclipsed by nicer folk though. ;)

I did some good work today on the Drupal for Firebug project, which my colleague Matt has been rocking. It's interesting getting into new technological territory in terms of writing extensions for Firefox. Still following reliable trailblazer John Reisig, one of the real shining lights of the internet. Big ups and terrorist fist-jabs for him.

It's got me thinking about how much I'm over this old Dirtstyle website. Coming into the Autumn, I feel the need to start living the dream a bit more, even if that means experimenting around the margins of what the dream might entail. Fortune favors the bold, and I think it might be fun to work on my own website as a project. My entrepreneurial activities of the past two years have sucked a lot of the joy out of the web for me, and that's a real shame. Doesn't have to be like that.

This might also a good way of getting back into a regular writing pattern. I've realized that this (writing) is something I'd like to keep up, and that in the longer-run, maybe I can have some of my career based around writing english rather than writing code. That or I'll hit the high grade one of these days and can start living that charmed boho life that suddenly becomes possible when you've got a pile of cash on reserve. Ah, dreams.

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Published on Sat, 2008-09-13 14:59

Power In Numbers

Just wanted to back up my previous post about the upcoming election w/a quick look at polling numbers. These are from the current national averages where internal demographic breakdowns are publicly available.

Age McCain Obama
Research 2000
18-29 32% 61%
30-44 50% 43%
45-59 46% 47%
60+ 55% 39%
Gallup
18-29 32% 60%
30-44 46% 46%
45-59 48% 45%
60+ 49% 41%

It's interesting to see the continuation of the work I did last cycle, watching the Millennial wave grow. It makes me wonder how much of a generation gap we're seeing, as it's hard not to think about how differently media-savvy kids see the back-and-forth that goes on vs. Gen X'ers and Boomers.

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Published on Thu, 2008-09-11 02:12

And the Race Is On

So I was out of the world for the Democratic National Convention, and experiencing re-entry for the Republican shindig, so it's been catch-up on the politics front. It's definitely game-on at this point, with McCain taking his first ever national polling lead (slim, but statistically significant) and the state-by-state electoral college picture shaping up to look a lot like 2004, except perhaps with Colorado and Virgina as alternate "keys to the kingdom" from Florida and Ohio.

I've got a number of thoughts on the VP choices, so I thought I'd give a run-down of those before my take on the overall scene as it shapes up for the home stretch.

Vice Presidents

It's clear that Sarah Palin's selection shook up the campaign, something the McCain campaign needed badly, and they took a risk to get. While I doubt she'll peel off any meaningful numbers of Hillary Clinton fans from Obama -- they're not stupid -- she serves a much more important purpose for Republicans: as a devout Pentacostal Christian with strong socially conservative bonafides, she brings home many of the evangelical voters who put Bush over the top in 2004.

Palin also shook up the scene by virtue of her novelty, both in that she's relatively unknown, and in that she's a telegenic woman. It's a story, and conservatives are excited again. Paradoxically, while she brings home a devout demographic, she also gives more secular red-meat Limbaugh-lovers something to get excited about. VILF is the term, which sounds silly, but the anecdotal evidence is strong.

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Published on Fri, 2008-09-05 00:31

BARTBlogging

Another glorious time-compressed post from under the Embarcaderro.

It now looks like I'll be in SF through early next week. Got some important meetings to handle. I'm more or less dust-free now (though the back of my pickup is a hazard zone) and I'm enjoying being out and about on my Mission Bike here in the watered-down SanFranSwelter of summer part two. We slung out 41 bikes in August, and got ourselves on Current TV. Pretty neat!

It's back to the grinder though out here, and looks to be that way for some time. We're sort of at a critical make-or-break point with the biz: can we get our process solid enough and score enough high-quality Drupal work to last through the winter, or will we be the proverbial Grasshoppers of the internets, starving and shivering our way through the cold and dark.

Time will tell. Hard work until then. Here's comes the train again.

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Authentic Experience

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Nerding Out

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