I just finished watching it on a bit of a delay… Obama just kept his cool the whole time. Clinton kept trying to get in punches, but none of them seemed to take hold, and certainly none got under his skin and got him to respond hottly.
Clinton did nothing to help herself here. I stand by my earlier prediction that she will lose Texas… probably by a decent margin, and that she will possibly lose Ohio as well… but even if she pulls out a win in Ohio, it won’t be enough. And I don’t think she’ll try to push forward further if that happens. If she does she’ll start looking like Huckabee (even though the margins won’t be nearly that large) and only further damage her Senate career. She will know it is time to cut her losses.
She will drop out within 48 hours of the polls closing Tuesday. Probably on March 5th.
She can go on to be the Senate Majority Leader. That will be a fine spot for her.
Apple today updated its popular MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook lines with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn processors, larger hard drives and 2GB of memory standard in most models.
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In addition, MacBook Pro includes the latest NVIDIA graphics processors, now with up to 512MB of video memory, and Apple’s innovative Multi-Touch trackpad, first introduced in MacBook Air.
The new MacBook Pro features the latest Intel Core 2 Duo technology with up to a 2.6 GHz processor with 6MB of shared L2 cache; up to 4GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory and up to a 300GB hard drive, plus NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics with up to 512MB of video memory.
Every MacBook Pro now includes a trackpad with Multi-Touch gesture support for pinch, rotate and swipe, making it more intuitive than ever to zoom and rotate photos in iPhoto or Aperture 2 or browse web pages in Safari; an illuminated keyboard that makes it ideal for dimly lit environments such as airplanes, studios or conference halls and a built-in ambient light sensor, which automatically adjusts the brightness of the keys as well as the brightness of the display for optimal visibility.
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We have been waiting for this update. 2008 is Brandy’s scheduled year to replace her laptop. Her existing Dell laptop is barely functional. The built in keyboard doesn’t work any more, so she carries around a full sized external keyboard with it. The power cord connector is flaky, so it has to be held JUST RIGHT to work, the battery lasts almost no time, and it is of course slow and has a tiny hard drive. We got it in early 2006 as a “temporary” bottom of the line option which has now way outlived it’s useful life.
We’ve been waiting for the MacBook Pro updates before pulling the trigger though. As soon as I move the cash for this from one account to another (which will take a day or two) we’ll make the order.
On the Dem side this should be Democrats Abroad and a few superdelegates who have expressed a preference in the last week or so. (I don’t however actually see the Democrats abroad listed in CNN’s state by state breakdown, so maybe they have forgotten them, but that would be stupid… it is a small number of delegates of course, and they have that whole fractional delegate thing, so maybe their system choked on that. :-) )
Anyway, the net results of today’s changes were very small. 13 new delegates were added to CNN’s totals. 8 for Obama, 5 for Clinton. We went from Obama 50.8%, Clinton 48.2%, Edwards 1.0% to Obama 50.9%, Clinton 48.1%, Edwards 1.0%. Like I said, tiny change.
We are mathematically still a long way from the end. Obama needs 1281 more delegates to win. Clinton would need 1353 more to win. Of course, the big question is will one of them give up at some point. (I’m of course guessing Clinton will do just that if she loses Ohio and Texas.) Otherwise, we could certainly go straight through to the convention.
69 delegates were added on the Republican side. 20 of these were from the Republican caucuses in Puerto Rico. Like the Democrats abroad on the other side, CNN doesn’t list this on their state by state breakdown. I’m not 100% sure where the other 49 come from. I suspect they are from CNN finally getting around to adding up final delegate results from Wisconsin and Washington State. In any case, McCain gains 53 more delegates. Also for the first time since my February 10th update, Huckabee gains some delegates… a whole 16 delegates.
In any case, McCain is closing in on the magic number. 220 delegates left to win.
A lot of people believe [Lieutenant General Stanley A.] McChrystal will be the next Iraq commander after David Petraeus finishes his tour. The horserace—and this is pure gossip here, to be clear—has it between McChrystal and Lt. Gen. Pete Chiarelli, who was corps commander under George Casey.
I never met Stanley. Just his brother whom I worked for and another brother who I worked with. Of the two brothers I knew, one was OK. The other… well, let me not talk about that here. And of course none of that likely has any relevance to Stanley.
But I still find it interesting to note when I see new news about General McChrystal.
Just looked at my dashboard and saw this in the weather forecast. On Sunday (the day that just ended) the sun is raining. What the hell does that even mean?
I note however, there is a lot of sun in this forecast, and the highs are in the 50’s. I think Spring may have arrived in the Pacific Northwest. All weekend the kids were out on the street riding their bicycles and such. And it was quite nice out when I walked Roscoe. There may yet be a relapse to winter, but for now… it is very nice!
As of this podcast, I’m adding the directly embedded podcast to the announcements of each week’s podcast. If you don’t feel like subscribing in iTunes, you can just hit play. Quicktime required.
Just as I was at the climax of the Harry Potter book last night some horrible animal screaming started happening from right outside my window. After a couple of minutes I went out onto the deck outside the bedroom to investigate with a flashlight. At first I could not see anything. The howling and crying was coming from the trees. And there was much rustling of leaves. Things were fighting. Things were not happy.
I eventually saw a raccoon. Not all the noises were raccoon though. I’m sure there were also squirrels fighting the raccoon. And there were a bunch of birds yelling too. And there may have been more than one raccoon.
This went on for more than an hour. They would not stop if I went and flashed the light at the trees. Dogs in the neighborhood started barking. The back door had been open when this started, but I made sure Roscoe was in and closed the door.
The entire time I was finishing the Potter book, the background noise was the angry screaming, howling and hissing of a variety of animals in my back yard. It was… interesting.
No signs of anything at all come daylight of course.
Author: J. K. Rowling
Started: 17 Feb 2008
Finished: 24 Feb 2008
759 p / 8 d
95 p/d
So, back in January I read Book 6 and commented that it was a little slow. In the comments to my post Matt offered that Book 7 “moves much faster”. And that is definitely the case. The book starts and then BOOM you get to page 55 and there is massive action and tension which barely ever lets up from there until the end of the book. It sucked me in and this book is one of the major reasons I didn’t get a lot done this last week. I had hoped to get lots of stuff done, but no, each time I had an excuse, I’d go read for a chapter or so instead. I did have the discipline to not just sit and read the whole thing without stopping, although it was tempting. Even so, I ended up averaging almost 100 pages a day, which is rare for me. Not because I can’t read 100 pages a day of course, but because normally I’m busy doing other things and only end up reading for a few minutes a day, which of course slows things down.
One of the things that made a difference here I think, and which sets this book aside from all the other Harry Potter books, is that Rowling almost as soon as the book started ditched the structure which governed all the other books. That structure basically being the structure of the Hogwarts school year. That had provided a certain amount of predictability to all the other books. This time that was out the window. Now, you still had the bit at the end where everything that had gone on is explained and comes together. But that wasn’t too bad.
There are a few bits of how it all came together than I was expecting long before it happened. (Trying to be vague so as not to spoil anyone who has not read it yet.) But there are other things that did indeed take me by surprise. And other things I expected to happen which did not.
All in all a good mix though, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.
It is a shame the series is over. But things did get wrapped up nicely, so I actually hope Ms. Rowling sticks to her guns about it really being over, rather than coming back for another dip and diluting the original seven books.
Having said that, bring on the rest of the movies! This last one will be a doosey if they do it right!
OK, so the primary season is not over yet, and even McCain doesn’t have it wrapped up officially, let alone the Democrats. But I am going to start looking at the Electoral College anyway. Since I think Obama is going to come out the winner on the Democratic side, and McCain will be the Republican nominee barring something catastrophic, I will be assuming a McCain vs Obama general election. If something happens to change this, then I will revise things.
As before, I have started a wiki page to track this. The link on the image goes to the full page, including a larger image of the graph and explanations of my methodology and a breakdown of the numbers by state. Basically I’m looking at the last five McCain vs Obama polls in each state, and then classifying them as Strong or Weak Obama or McCain states, with the lead needing to be at least 10% to be considered “Strong”.
At the moment there are actually not that many state polls of this sort. I don’t actually yet have five polls in any state. And many of those polls are more than a month old, which is forever in terms of how things are moving. And the states for which there are no polls at all still account for more than 50% of the electoral votes. Presumably as the nominations become final on both sides, this will rapidly change and we will get polls in more states. Hopefully eventually all of them.
Weak McCain: Pennsylvania (21), North Carolina (15), Virginia (13), Massachusetts (12), Minnesota (10)
Weak Obama: Missouri (11), Washington (11), Wisconsin (10), Oregon (7)
Strong Obama: California (55), New York (31), Iowa (7), Rhode Island (4)
Unless I missed some (which is possible) there have been no other states with McCain/Obama general election matchup polls (since 5 Nov 2007) yet.
So to start with we stand at 283 electoral votes with no polls, 136 electoral votes leaning Obama, 119 electoral votes leaning McCain counting both strong and weak states. With only strong states we have 97 Obama, 48 McCain. Of course, the huge number of states with no polls yet makes it very hard to tell anything from this yet. And I am refraining for putting states in one category or another based on 2004 results or any such. I’ll wait for actual polls in those states.
I will of course continue to update the 2008 Presidential Delegate Graphs when there are changes there. But I will now also be updating this general election prediction page whenever there are new polls that change the category of any state.
And of course, if either Obama or McCain ends up not being the nominee, then I’ll have to redo the whole page. But that’s OK. I can do that.
I should also note that the way I am representing the overall race in the one chart only applies if there are only two candidates with an actual shot of getting electoral votes. If some third party candidate enters and looks like they are actually strong enough to potentially get electoral votes, I will have to revisit how to represent things.
