February 2008

We've driven over 28,000 miles with our car now, and this afternoon it's in the dealership for a maintenance service.

The dealership has a "customer lounge" which is pretty comfortable with nice leather chairs, CNN in the background and Starbucks coffee. And, of course, wireless internet.

I'm working on some Ruby on Rails code to generate an RSS feed. I like the framework, and it's great that I can run everything on my Windows laptop, even though in production we use a Linux distribution. In that sense I now have the platform independence of Java, but with the productivity benefits of a language and framework tailored towards web user interface applications.

Most of you will by now have seen the popular Yes We Can video by will.i.am about Barack Obama. The format of the clip is powerful but fairly straightforward, and it lends itself well to parodies. Here's on about John McCain for example: John He Is.

Of course, anybody can make these videos but there is now an official response by the Hillary Clinton campaign: Hillary for you and me.

From a public relations point of view this video is a remarkable failure. The comments on the video are all negative and the comments on YouTube have now been disabled after a flood of negative feedback. Even The Economist wrote: "Unfortunately, no one with any musical talent appears to have been involved in the effort. I must warn you, the following video is very creepy and probably shouldn't be watched if there are kids in the room.". Strange that a generally well-run campaign would release such a bad video.

Since a few days Google has enabled "street view" for the Durham/Raleigh area.

In the summer of 2007 this feature of Google Maps started with 360 degree photographs of New York and other cities, and now our region has been added. It's nice to see pictures of our neighborhood on-line.

(Thanks to Bull City Rising).