i.justrealized

Back in September, McCain’s top economic advisor, Holtz-Eakin, held up a Blackberry and announced that the device won’t be around if not for John McCain. “He did this,” Holtz-Eakin flashed the Blackberry. The internet (represented by Digg, Reddit and 4chan) ridiculed the statement. The McCain camp then clarifies the senator’s involvement in Blackberry.

This reminds me of Civilization IV where the internet upgrade icon as Al Gore’s head which I thought is just brilliant.

Carly Fiorina, a McCain advisor, was asked if she thinks Sarah Palin is ready to lead a company like HP. To which Fiorina responded, “No, I don’t, but you know what? That’s not what she’s running for.” Fiorina then clarifies that running a company is different from running a country.

It’s okay, ahem, the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

I love to see what the McCain camp has to say about technology. They haven’t exactly been the tech guys in politics and, if anything, they’re rather anti-Internet. McCain himself confessed he couldn’t do these techie stuff.

Then, oops, yesterday morning, a couple hours before the event began, the McCain camp emailed to say that, actually, no, sorry, Holtz-Eakin can’t make it for the 12:30 debate. Apparently he had very important meetings to attend. Right. Apparently, though, he stepped out in the middle. At 1pm he was on MSNBC attacking Obama, trying to tie him to George Bush’s economic policies. Meanwhile, Reed Hundt ended up talking about complicated tech issues alone. The event was still fascinating (and you can see video here) but a huge opportunity was lost.

In short: the McCain camp chickened out. Spinning is easy; debating is hard. And defending John McCain’s record on broadband deployment, spectrum issues, and net neutrality is particularly hard. “If I was voting on technology issues only, even I wouldn’t support McCain,” said one Republican who I interviewed while researching the scorecard. (Source: Wired)

But no. McCain camp won’t be doing tech talks. Gobama 2008.

It’s funny that after Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama, Powell is less talked about as a war criminal. He played a key role in the invasion of Iraq after all. His endorsement of Barack Obama appeared to have gained him some karma points or something. The internet loves him again.

To the question whether Obama is a Muslim, Powell stressed that Obama is not, but highlighted the real answer to the question is – so what if he is. Powell then publically endorsing Obama and expresses discontent toward the Republican party, that is his Republican party.

It is courageous of him to be able to stand up for what he believes in (and that meant the opposition). Unfortunately much of these were not shown back then when he presented the case for the invasion of Iraq. Powell later claims he spent 2 hours convincing Bush not to invade Iraq but what’s done been done.

Wow dial up is still around:

Access Plan	Free Hours	Monthly Subscription Personal/Business	Monthly Subscription Student
I	13	$10.17	$8.03
II	35	$26.70	$21.35
III	90	$64.15	$51.31
IV	135	$90.90	$72.23
Unlimited	Unlimited	$107.00	-

(Source: SingNet) (more…)

TechRepublic asks Ian Hickson, “It’s been nearly 10 years since HTML 4 was published as a spec, about the same amount of time that it took to get to HTML 4. How do you think that this timeline affects HTML 5?”

HTML 5 Editor Hickson outlines:

• First W3C Working Draft in October 2007.
• Last Call Working Draft in October 2009.
• Call for contributions for the test suite in 2011.
• Candidate Recommendation in 2012.
• First draft of test suite in 2012.
• Second draft of test suite in 2015.
• Final version of test suite in 2019.
• Reissued Last Call Working Draft in 2020.
• Proposed Recommendation in 2022.

Hickson explains, “This may look ridiculous (2003 to 2022 is 19 years!), but it’s worth considering how this compares to HTML4, DOM2 HTML, and XHTML1, the three specifications that HTML5 is intended to update and replace.” (Source: TechRepublic)

Read more at the article “HTML 5 Editor Ian Hickson discusses features, pain points, adoption rate, and more”.

Wow that sure take long. But that’s okay, if it takes too long, browsers would begin their premature implementations anyway.

By the way I just realized I have a tag erroneously named ‘bowser’. Above is Bowser.

SingNet doesn’t like Slicehost too much. I’ve been having some troubles connecting to the host. There’s a 20% chance that the request would time out. It’s like 1/5 of SingNet systems aren’t working.

Other Singaporeans like pkchukiss and Jeremy encounter similar problems with we earlier discussed in Slicehost forums. Both of them mentioned they mailed the technical support so I guess I’ll just wait and see.

Basically, there’s some problems with the internet backbone (probably the C6 cervical vertebrae or something). After randomly tracerouting and pinging here and there, it appears SingNet’s machines aren’t properly configured to a SingTel node.

When with Media Temple, this blog takes ages to load, but at least it loads. With Slicehost, this blog loads quickly and that is if it actually loads.

Are there any other Slicehost users in Singapore?

[The problem appears to be resolved.]

• @uzyn: the last time i had no internet, i had anxiety, spasm and insomnia #
• @miccheng weekends are slow days, haha #
• just discovered TwitterFox, it’s a great firefox extension, i found Twirl a little too intruding and Twitter web a little too much a hassle #

A simple story that illustrates the forces shaping social media. CommonCraft tells you what it is.

Social Media in Plain English

I like CommonCraft’s presentation method. You can’t say it’s another tech video. It’s well done. (via Unique Frequency)

“Social”, today, is one of the most overuses Web 2.0 words. The investors must have totally dig this word or something. The bigger blogs mention that all the time: social bookmarking, social news, social media and social networking. In Singapore there’s social escort too, alright that’s slightly different.