Obama Keeps His Blackberry: There was a big debate over whether or not Obama would be able to keep his Blackberry. Score one for gadget geeks! Warning: C-Span video at bottom of page auto-starts. Stupid Engadget.
How Should President Obama Use Twitter?: I use Twitter, and it's true that Obama's feed isn't very exciting. He should read this and follow the lead of some other leaders.
Obama Aide: Going from Xbox to Atari: Obama's aide notes that going from working his campaign to working in the White House is a huge change in technology (not in a good way) due to national security.
I mentioned a while ago that I wanted to go to Obama's inauguration. After emailing all of my Oregon congressman, I got an email back from Earl Blumenauer telling me that I got one ticket. Yay! Apparently there was a lottery; 6,000+ requests for 198 tickets.
Today, I went down the Rayburn House of Representatives building. I had no idea there would be so many people getting tickets today. Apparently, other states gave out tickets over the weekend, and it was much easier. This is versus today, which involved me waiting over two hours to get into the building.
Again, congratulations. You had my vote. You also had a couple (small) campaign contributions from me. However, you are no longer Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, you are now President-elect Barack Obama.
As such, I will no longer be giving you money. Why? Because you will very soon be my president, and I will be paying you taxes. You want to raise my taxes, and spend money on things I approve of? Great!
But again, I will not give you any more money directly. I have receieved many emails from you and David Plouffe, and maybe one or two from Michelle, since election night. During the campaign, they were understandable, and from time to time, I would cave, and pull out my credit card. Now they have become a nuisance.
The new position President-elect Obama is adding to the White House is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). I love that we now have a President who embraces technology and doesn't think that the Internet is a series of tubes.
Seriously though, the CTO of the United States is going to be a big deal as they will in charge of a mulititude of issues from the growth of technology, to keeping the internet network neutral. You can check out this list of what people think are the most important issues the CTO will confront upon taking this position.
Who is the lucky technological genius that will taking this position? We don't know as of yet, and Obama has been pretty quiet about the CTO since he announced its addition in October. One article shares rumors of possible candidates, ranging from Google's Vint Cerf to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer.
So I ask you this question. Who would you pick to be the CTO of the United States? What single person do you think is the most technological-savvy and business-savvy that would be able to handle all things relating to technology all throughout the United States? And no voting for Will, cause that's cheating.
Sorry for the lack of pictures and such. The internet here in Cairo is pretty slow and I'm going to run off to see the Pyramids today, far away from any technology.
Yay technology! Please pick a good CTO Barack Obama
Now that I'm living in DC, I would really like to go to the Capitol for Inauguration Day. I looked into how it works, and apparently they give out tickets (250,000), and if you don't get a ticket, you can go, but you'll be behind about 250k people.
Saw: November: Hahaha; kinda scary. Here's a related, and less scary image.
Election Maps: These start out really basic, by state. Then the states are skewed by population. Next is to break the states down into counties, then do another population skew (that's the one you see below). It's taken another step and going beyond red/blue, since some counties are more mixed than others. Good stuff.
Sarah Palin Porn: I first saw this here on Design You Trust, then discovered it was from the movie. I haven't seen it (...yet?) but it looks entertaining. Along the same lines...
Obama Grabs Headlines: More than 700 newspaper front pages on November 5th, once the election was called. Crazy stuff.
The Onion: Nation's Worst Job: I do love the Onion so. "African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America." Read the whole article, it's short and entertaining.
Sinfest: I was torn between showing the comic pictured, or this one, but the first one's smaller. Sinfest had some pretty entertaining political comics this election season.
Measuring an Internet Election: The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on measuring the presidential candidates online presence (official website, YouTube views, Facebook friend, blog mentions) as well as poll results. Shows a real difference between McCain/Obama's base.
Election season Has come and gone. I'll miss it, but I'm glad it's done
I'll write more later, but congratulations to President Barack Obama. I predicted it would be closer, and get called a little bit later, but bravo sir, bravo.
Want to keep up with the election results, but don't have and/or want to watch them on TV? Here are streaming links for CNN and MSNBC.
From BarackObama.com, both Vermont and New Hampshire have been called for Obama. From what the news is looking like, it's not going to be as close as I thought.
Here's a current electoral map from CNN:
There are oodles of places you can be checking to keep up with all of this; I'll be sticking mostly to Twitter, MSNBC, and CNN for now.
Election streaming
No need to pay for cable
Yay for Internet
The fact that we have peaceful free elections is great, and it's sad when people don't exercise this right.
Voter turnout's expected to be really high this year. I've been doing some reading, and here are some great articles: Yahoo, NYTimes, and the Boston Globe.
If you did go out and vote today (or earlier), make sure you get your free Starbucks and Ben & Jerry's; you've earned it. If you didn't, don't try and trick them; they'll know!
High voter turnout?
Don't misinterpret "Don't Vote"
See past sarcasm
Expect more updates today than usual. I voted a while ago, since I'm still registered in Oregon, and they do mail-in ballots. The plan has been to switch after this election, since Oregon is more swing than DC.
Polls start to close at 7pm EST, and keep closing until 1am. I think it's going to be a late night until we know the winner, but I'll be awake and immersing myself in the media until then.
I'm looking forward to seeing this website change. If I wasn't so lazy, I would have put change into gotham. The typeface matters you know. That site also reminds me of a couple LHCsites. I really like that all three of these sites have RSS feeds.
