Debate time

Why are you taking notes on the debate? I thought you already mailed in your vote.

This was a quote from my wife a few hours ago as the Presidential debate was getting started. She was right of course in that it wouldn’t affect my vote. I did jot notes down for the first hour or so just so I’d be able to remember the debate later should discussion ever come up. :-)

Anyways I expected better from Obama and worse from McCain. I still think Obama won but he at least at first seemed to have trouble collection his thoughts at times. I’m quite pissed at McCain trying to say that the only way for the deaths of American servicemembers in Iraq to have meaning is to “win” the war as it discounts the very real effort of many of those servicemembers. The Navy Times had an article the other day describing a Marine put up for a Medal of Honor because he died jumping on a grenade to save nearby Marines. He may not have won the war but you’d better believe what he did meant something to those Marines that he saved.

If there’s any single thing about this campaign that scares me though, it is Gov. Palin potentially becoming President if McCain wins the election. I’m impressed enough that he is doing as well as he is doing at 72 (?) years old but he has melanoma, suffered for years as a POW in Vietnam and, judging by the change in appearance of Presidents Clinton and Bush over their time in office, I’m really not convinced that Palin wouldn’t end up as President sooner rather than later. I feel that would be disastrous for the nation given her current practices for picking executive staff (i.e. nepotism instead of meritocracy). Being completely silent on the investigations going on in Alaska isn’t making me feel any better what with having just gone through Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez…

However, that’s neither here nor there and all I can do now is hope that the best candidates win the upcoming election. In more exciting news, a friend of mine coerced me into joining a fantasy football team (for points, not money, don’t worry). I didn’t really put a lot of effort into the picks and I missed the draft due to other committments so my team (“Graphitar”) is basically the best team the Yahoo! Random Number Generator could provide. Against all odds though, the team put up an incredible performance in Week 1 thanks to career days by Donovan McNabb and Michael Turner. It’s looking like the 171 points or so put up in that game may stay a season record at this rate. 6/8 teams get to the playoffs so I should at least be good for that.

On a completely unrelated topic I see the topic of Phonon and gstreamer has come up again. I documented many of the reasons why KDE needs Phonon in a letter to the LWN Editors more than 2 years ago. Suffice to say I don’t feel like going over the arguments again, but let’s just say that Phonon keep the doors open for gstreamer 0.12 to be supported in KDE when the time comes.

Finally on a more depressing note a submarine sailor was killed almost a week ago. The linked article is about all the specifics I have except that it is unlikely that the sailor was cleaning the rudder since last time I checked it had to be in the water (where the crew is not located) to work. It is likely that any cleaning he was doing was in the area of the hydraulics controlling the rudder but I don’t see how he would have been caught up in the mechanism. At least on my boat it has a shield surrounding the mechanism although Murphy’s law being what it is…