March 29th, 2008
I am attending the Travis County Nomination Convention this morning. It is expected to be the largest convention of its type in Texas. It covers two State Senate districts and more than 12,000 elected delegates are expected to register betweeen 7AM and 10AM CDT. There are expected to be over a thousand alternates, although since all the alternates in my district have to go to work, either number might be a bit of a misnomer.
I will try to Twitter updates at http://twitter.com/pmcg
I am an elected delegate from Precinct 109. My precinct will elect 1 delegate to the State Convention and 1 Alternate (low by most precincts’ standards, some have up to 10).
I intend to photograph the proceedings in the Travis County Exposition Center.
If the cell network survives, I will upload pictures at http://gallery.mac.com/pmcgrane#100116.
The county conventions are a, let’s be frank, ridiculous process where those elected by their neighbors elect other more popular neighbors to go to the State Convention in June.
This said, the narrative could be that Obama gains delegates beyond what he got on March 4th. This seems likely since the rules of attendance are bizarre and interesting.
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March 29th, 2008
You heard it here first.
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March 19th, 2008
If you are, like me, attending a County Convention in Texas, then the Obama campaign has quite a web site for you.
And if you haven’t yet watched his recent speech in Philadelphia, I recommend it. I’m not yet aware of any online reproductions except on YouTube where they split it up and that’s BS. So I’ll work on that.
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March 7th, 2008
Well holy shit, it looks like we’ve all been carrying around 80% of a Macintosh in our pockets for half a year.
The Apple SDK for the iPhone exposes nearly all the guts of the system, as well as sophisticated integration with other apps, OS components, and hardware. Apple claims that my cell phone and my laptop are using the same kernel. (I guess we knew this but it’s nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth).
The jailbreakers will have their work cut out to compete.
The first “blessed” 3rd party iPhone app I’d like to see in June is a streaming MP3 player. I’d like to listen to DirtyRadio and my stack of various NPR stations whenever I’m bathed in WiFi microwaves. (Or, dare I dream, even an EDGE connection?). Based on what I’ve seen, this is plainly no challenge at all to someone competent to write any kind of media player. (by which I mean basically connect a network socket to an audio buffer and then go have a drink)
But Fuck! You could get fancy and use the iPhone to triangulate your geographical position and then present a list of regionally appropriate streaming radio stations. You could then animate an old-time tuning dial and probably even fade each one into the other with static overlaid in between. Literally you can do this on a god damn cell phone. Apple has videos explaining each component. You can go nuts!
The second app I’d like to see, I’ll try to write myself. Nothing too extraordinary but I’d find it useful about twice a week. It might even be easier to do as a web app, but I will endeavor to continue my Obj-C edumacation.
And have I missed something or is the Interface Builder half of this iPhone SDK still “Coming Soon”?
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March 1st, 2008
If you’re not sure who to vote for in the Democratic primary, you might watch this ad and vote for the other person.
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