Jesse says...

We got a little write up in the Rake a couple of days ago. Yes, we really are a sexy, sexy agency.

I’m glad to see that John Gruber picked up on this:

In the same way that Apple took Mac OS X and Cocoa and shrunk them to serve as a handheld device OS, I think Google could take Android and grow it to serve as a PC OS.

I’ve been having similar thoughts lately, and I won’t be surprised if, when Android is fully open sourced later this year, we begin to see the system become the OS of choice on netbooks and eventually generic PC laptops and desktops. It will, as Gruber also points out, be a nice alternative desktop environment to Gnome and KDE, even though I have some alternative desktop environment allegiances of my own.

The New Yorker has a beautiful and insightful endorsement of Obama:

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

Since I decided to get a G1, I’ve been really getting into Android development. All forays into new programming languages necessitate good reference materials, and I’ve been attached to The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development by Mark Murphy. The book is really well written, with lots of good examples and source code, and in the few email chats I’ve had with him, Mark seems to be a really great guy who knows his stuff.

One other thing I like about this book, and Mark’s company, CommonsWare, is the business model behind the book. In addition to a regular dead-tree version, they publish PDF and Kindle versions, free of DRM. These versions are available via their “Warescription”, which, for $35 per year, gives you access to all of the updates to the book (as well as any other books they release) throughout the year. They also offer a bug-bounty program, which allows you to extend your subscription for 6 months for every bug you find.

If you’re looking to get into Android development, definitely check out this book. I highly recommend it.

The Republicans are desperate.

The choice of Palin as VP could have initially been seen as an appeal to the evangelical base, to women voters, to small-town America. That argument could have been made, and while she was kept in a tightly-controlled, scripted environment, one could have almost been convinced that McCain and his party made a surprising, but effective choice of VP. Almost.

But now that they’ve let her into slightly less-controlled, slightly less-scripted environments—like news interviews—it’s obvious the lack of vetting and preparation that happened. The choice of Palin was a desperate move. It’s readily apparent to even the few Republicans I know that she’s just not that knowledgeable about the issues at the core of this contest. She comes across as entirely unable of thinking on her feet, only capable of parroting the script she’s already been given.

I would feel bad for her, for being so out of her league, but she did say “yes” to the job offer…

I resent being called a white-collar worker. For me, it conjures up the image of a starchy accountant or lawyer. So, I’ve come up with a better term, for those of us who do “professional” jobs, but happen to work in the creative industry (like designers, or writers, or programmers, or people who work with video or audio).

We’re the black-collar workers.

And lo, The Great Googley One said unto me, “I bring to you a phone, a phone powered by open source, which you will still pay through the nose for, because the telecom companies are greedy, greedy bastards, but nevertheless, a phone that will let you easily add new applications, and share those applications with the world, in a share-y, share-y, love-y, love-y, socialist-y sort of way, and it will not be an iPhone, but it will at least provide a decent alternative, and it will not force you to switch to Ma Bell.”

And thus, I bought said phone, and I will patiently wait until October 22nd, when it appears at my door, as if delivered from the loving hands of The Great Google itself. And in my waiting, I will learn the SDK and develop applications. And it will be good.

So much has been happening in my world. So much, in fact, that I haven’t even had time to touch my blog. Here are just a few of the major events for those interested in what I’ve been up to lately:

• I saw Barack Obama speak at the Xcel Center in Saint Paul the night he cinched the Democratic nomination. He is truly an amazing speaker and his intelligence and ability to inspire really does give me a sense of hope for this country. I’ve never been so in awe of someone in political office in my lifetime as I am of Obama.
• I’ve taken a few trips out to Chicago, for both work and pleasure, managed to make my way about as far north in Minnesota as it’s possible to go, and even ventured into Winnipeg (which was a pretty depressing city, from what I saw).
• I moved in with the love of my life, Hannah. Things have been going so wonderfully, and I am really, truly happy with where I am in my life. Hannah and I are perfect complements to one another, and we both encourage each other to be better people. I could ask for nothing more from a partner than what she offers me.
• Ali celebrated her 5th birthday and started kindergarten. I can’t believe how much she’s grown over this past year… or even over this past summer, for that matter. She loves school, and is doing very well there. I’m so, so proud of her.