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Category: Authored by digittante

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I got curious about the web technology choices the two candidate's campaigns have made. So I took a look at the source code behind their websites. You can do this by visiting http://www.mittromney.com and http://www.barackobama.com and then selecting "View Source" in any browser. Romney's campaign website reveals

  1. it runs on Drupal
  2. it's served from Amazon CloudFront (which I believe had a big outage tonight)
  3. the code is a mess

Obama's campaign website by contrast has clean code that includes a giant ASCII-art Obama logo at the top of the page spelled using the letters 'u', 's' and 'a'. Classy nerdy fun. Click the screen-shot above for a bigger view. Check it out!

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Clearly, Obama wasn't out in front during the first general election campaign debate this week. Some suggest he's just not that into it. Other's suggest he was giving Mitt room enough to hang himself with his own lies.

But maybe you hoped Obama would step out with more chutzpah, more pizzazz, more oomph? Well, here's what the man himself could say to those carrying such unmet expectations:

  1. "I shouldn't have to tell you that the best performance of my anniversary came later. And so did..."
  2. "Clearly, Mitt, spending all day preparing for the debate served him well. I'm sure all Americans can appreciate that I had other things to do..."
  3. "Wait, wait, I'm gonna let you finish, Mitt. Because the more you talk the more flip-flop videos we can make of you."
  4. "Now I recognize I've got 2 minutes to respond here, but I'd like to give that time to my opponent so he can answer one simple question about his tax plan: where's the math?"
  5. "I'm sorry about how I showed up last night during the debate. Truth is, there was a bit of a fire drill at the office, and in this job some fire drills I really can't tell you about. Just know that it's out, and I'm in for debate #2..."
  6. "Just think about it. He stood between me and my beloved on my anniversary. That could give a lot of guys performance issues."
  7. "I really thought Jim Lehrer was gonna called out for a lifeline because HE IS THE WEAKEST LINK."
  8. "I just have one remark about what you saw and heard last night. Lies are pretty, but the truth endures."
  9. "My opponent last night said he was in favor of teachers & education, coal miners and renewable energy, government regulations, helping the sick and the poor get healthcare, soldiers and college students, retirees and small business owners, and all the best parts of Obama/Romney-care." If he wasn't so white I would have thought it was me standing over there."
  10. "I got 99 problems and Mitt ain't one."

You can donate to Obama's debate training fund here.

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Dreamt last night i was working late at my laptop alone in the White House cafeteria (free wifi).

Obama walked in looking for a peanut-butter cookie snack, clearly still working himself in his shirt, tie, and rolled up sleeves. He sat down to chat, and I asked if he was open to some advice. He said, "Sure." I said, "When you debate this ass-hat in the election, just be clear and to the point about what you've done. All you need do is read off a list of your top ten accomplishments for America since you took office:

1. Stopped the economy from falling further off a cliff
2. Saved our automotive manufacturing heritage
3. Unwound costly war stimulus that sank trillions of our own much-needed money into other countries (Iraq and Afghanistan)
4. Sanctioned the worst of Wall Street for preying on Main Street , toughened  investigations & regulations (and individual prison terms are next)
5. Made quality healthcare available to +5 million more people, including those with pre-existing conditions or insufficient income
6. Replaced the funding your party's state legislators cut from proven local healthcare agencies serving women, children and the poor
7. Produced 3 years of federal budgets with the lowest average spending increases since Truman
8. Closed the gap further on the final civil inequalities of our society: equal status for same-sex couples and equal pay for women
9. Emptied Guantanamo of prisoners wrongfully sent there or who were someone else's problem, not ours
10. And finally, after the Republican President who started the 'War on Terror' gave up trying to find the man who killed 3000 of our citizens and friends on our own soil, I had Osama bin Laden found & killed.

I did all of this with half of our nation's two-party system working day and night in Congress, states, counties, towns, and in the court rooms of 'activist judges' trying to stop me from my first day in office.

Other than paying the minimum required taxes on the incredible wealth you've made here, what have you done to benefit Americans?

(I expect a short answer, so feel free to use all of your rebuttal time for the following:)

I've been working hard from day one to serve the widest priorities of Americans, while your party has worked to stop me and only serve the narrowest of partisan interests. The state of our union is strong,  I'm sure we all agree it's not as strong  now as we hoped it would be four years ago. So I think the question for every voter is simple: who can lead this great nation to where we want to be four years from now: a vague out-sourcer-in-chief or the "git er done" President already doing the job?

And for those of you working so hard to stop me by dividing your efforts from the progress of this great nation , I ask, isn't it time you tried working together with us? Because truly working together is the only way to build this great union."

Clearly this was more than 'just a little advice', and i thanked the President for giving me 45-minutes to tell him what he should say in four-and-a-half (dream-time is always distorted). He thanked me, said he'd consider it, and as he got up to head back to work he said, "You should take a break and try one of these cookies..."

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[ UPDATE: Aug 19 - Lifehacker.com has published their crowd-sourced Five Best VPN Service Providers post which doesn't include the one I used below. Check it out!]

The Olympics. A thousands-of-years old tradition, made modern since Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894. With the advent of television, what began as a global competition has become a global event. More than a billion people the world over were estimated to have watched the London 2012 Opening Ceremony live yesterday. Except in the US.

Fortunately, there's a VERY EASY way to watch the Olympics live online in the US: web proxies. A web proxy is simply a server that receives your web page requests and passes them on to the destination site as if they were it's own. By routing your web page requests through a proxy server in another country, you can very easily access online content available there.  Web proxies (if properly configured and used) can increase your online security and privacy. Web proxies are also perfectly legal for virtually all users in most countries.

Here's how to watch the Olympics live online as they happen on any device (suck it NBC!):

  1. Signup with a free or for-fee web proxy service. We like the Pro VPN service from HideMyAss.com for $10/month. $20 will get you two months of service, or enough to enjoy both the London 2012 Olympics AND Paralympics Games starting August 29.
  2. Download and install the Pro VPN client for the MAC, PC, or Linux computer you have
  3. Once installed, activate the Pro VPN client, login, and use the handy "Country Selection" menu to pick a country you want to connect through. We recommend a high-bandwidth/low-population country like Sweden.
  4. Watch the Olympics! Eurovision offers 12 live channels! Their broadcast schedule is here.

Know that you know how to do this, here's the why:

After paying the International Olympic Committee $1.18Billion for the exclusive right to broadcast the London 2012 Olympics in the US, NBC promptly botched it by broadcasting the Opening Ceremony on tape-delay during East Coast prime time. What's worse:

  • To watch the Olympics live via NBC in the US you'll need a television and a cable television contract.
  • To watch the Olympics live via NBC's official London 2012 Olympics website you'll need to tell NBC who you're cable television contract is with, your account id and password.
  • To watch the Olympics live NBC's Olympics apps for iOS and Android, you'll have do the same
  • Attempts to watch Olympics live on overseas websites like Eurosport and the BBC will fail because those sites will determine that you're visiting from the US (the region that only NBC has the right to distribute Olympic content). Go ahead and try.

And then there's the emphasis of NBC's live Olympics coverage: big US sports like swimming and basketball. Looking for the archer from Tuvalu or the sprinter from Trinidad? Maybe you're hoping to catch some Syrian equestrians and Slovenian judoists. Your access is governed by what events will maximize NBC's Olympics audience ad revenue.

Enjoy your London 2012 Olympics!