Obama is the Real Deal: I just watched his keynote at the Democratic National Convention; it was one of the best political speeches I have seen in many years. This young 42 year old man running for US Senate in Illinois is definitely someone to watch. He outlined a vision for America that was better than anything I've heard from any national candidate. ¶10:07 PM; digg

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was another typical over-the-top anyone-in-power-is-evil documentary. Here he guns for Bush as the leader of an immoral war sold to the country on outright lies. One notable trick was Moore's attempt to ask pro-war congressmen on the street if they would signup their children to fight? Imagine if we had a law which required congress's own participation in any war to match that of other populations; I don't think we'd have many wars in that case. I watched this documentary in a small local theatre in Nova Scotia which was an interesting way to see it. ¶9:14 AM; digg

Google Gmail is awesome; I just got my account setup. (It is still in beta by invitation only.) I can't believe there has been so much negative speculation about this service. Why are people so cynical and so enjoy taking shots at successful entities? There have been many privacy complaints about Google serving ads based on your email content. I don't care. (1) The ads are text only, which is much better than hotmail and yahoo. (2) The ads are relevant to me, which is much better than hotmail and yahoo. (3) There is no forced banner on my outgoing email, which is much better than hotmail and yahoo. (4) I get 1gb free disk space, which is much better than hotmail and yahoo. (5) I get Google indexing of my email, which is much better than hotmail and yahoo. Am I missing something here? ¶4:38 AM; digg

Typing Test: Free On-line Typing Test by TypingMaster, Inc. is a fun site. Computers everywhere probably make for much more typers now than ever before. So is this making it more or less likely for Dell or some major vendor to do a better job really supporting QWERTY vs. DVORAK physical keyboard layouts (vs software layouts)? I'm not sure I'm proud of my typing speed (over 100 wpm) from all my years of programming. Sometimes I'd prefer to be able to be really good at hitting a baseball. (Thanks to Christine P. for the link.) ¶4:52 PM; digg

Men who require trophy ladies need not apply: ha ha ha ha, I bet this ad gets tons of responses (not). But seriously, isn't it annoying how much of boston.com (and similar) papers put personals all over their home pages? Sure, it is nice that some of them let me choose the gender of the ads, but how about letting me make them go away altogether? You'd think these online newspapers would have heard of a thing called RSS and gotten the hint that the real value is customization ala My Yahoo and so on. ¶5:59 PM; digg