Brandon Live!

PDC is only 26 days away!  While I don’t have a session of my own as I’d originally hoped, I will indeed be there.  The session representing my team’s platform work is already up on the PDC agenda.  You can find it by narrowing down to the sessions titled “Windows 7.”

Windows 7: New APIs to Find, Visualize, and Organize

The presenter is my good friend David Washington, who is my team’s platform and SDK PM.  The talk will cover a variety of really cool topics, including my feature area which we’ll be talking more about soon.

If you’re going to be at PDC this year please leave a comment and share a bit about yourself and what you’re looking forward to seeing there. 

I support Barak Obama for president.  Does that make me a “leftist?”  It seems that these days this is the only qualification necessary to earn that label.  It’s a label that gets tossed around as a derogatory and all-encompassing term but I can’t for the life of me figure out why.  Is anyone who supports John McCain a “rightist?”  Do all of those people believe exactly the same things?

Here’s an idea.  I’ll give you a few bullet points about me, and you can decide whether or not this label applies.

• I believe in minimizing the size of government.
• I think politics should be dealt with as locally as possible.
• I dislike the notion of “redistribution of wealth” and pretty much despise the welfare and the culture that tends to develop around it.
• I think balancing the budget is important and that our debt and its continued growth are out of control.
• My political ideal is that people are free to make bad choices and that they should be held responsible for the consequences. 

Those are a few aspects of my political philosophy that I consider to be “conservative” in nature.

But then there are these:

• I do not believe in God or heaven.
• I think science should be taught in science class.  In school I learned about the Greek and Roman gods like Zeus and Venus.  If you want to teach about creation myth in that context that is fine with me.
• I do not think the entire world should be like America.  I’m in Italy as I write this up and it seems perfectly great just the way it is.

Confused yet?  That’s just the beginning.

I do not “support abortion.”  I can imagine no circumstances in which one would be a part of my life, and if someone asked me whether they should have one there are very few circumstances where I would even pause to consider an answer other than “no.”

But I support abortion rights, or at least oppose any ban on them at the federal level.  I do not believe that anyone can conclusively determine “when life begins” and that giving an unborn fetus rights is a slippery slope that ends with banning contraceptives.  I consider this to be a “small government” position, and would prefer that such determinations be handled at the state level if necessary.

I support gay marriage.  Not just in that I support the right of gay people to be married, but much more – I think that a gay couple who are in love and planning to spend their lives together should get married.  I don’t think the law should say anything about it either way, but my core beliefs place a great deal of value on a societal commitment being he absolute goal of a romantic relationship.

Basically, I value monogamy and embrace our societies’ decision to formalize it.  Furthermore, I believe that gay relationships are as real, natural, and valuable as heterosexual ones.  Combine those two values and the result is that I support gay marriage.

Given the above, I never know how to answer if someone asks me for my political affiliation.  Right now I support the democrats, believing that they represent leadership more in tune with my values, including the conservative ones.

You may have noticed a “surge” if you will of politically-oriented posts on this blog.  I do apologize to those who feel I am polluting their newsreader’s technology folder, but ask that you understand this blog as being about my life and things that seem interesting to me.  I have done my best to categorize my posts, and each category does have its own feed available.  For example, if you want just my “Windows Shell” related posts, you may prefer to subscribe to this feed. 

I’ll look at adding a more generic “technology” category or an everything-but-politics feed, but doing that retroactively is probably going to be too tedious to be worthwhile to me.

On the other hand, these posts are entirely seasonal, and will most likely end completely after barely more than another month.  If you can bare with them, you may actually find value in my perspective, even if you don’t share it or agree with my political ideology.  I strive to make sure each of my posts has some unique value and is not just a link or “Go Obama!” cheerleading.  In fact, I greatly value the opinions and perspectives of others, so if you do disagree with what I write, my preference would be for you to respond!  Tell me how you see the world, and perhaps we can learn from each other’s perspectives =)

I realize I didn’t actually inform you, my readers, that I was going to be away for the last couple weeks.  Whoops =)

I spent the 11th through the 23rd in Europe, mostly in Italy, for my good friend Paolo’s wedding.  He’s from the beautiful city of Trieste, and decided with his bride Roxy to hold the wedding there in the same church where his parents were married some 49 years ago.

It was a fantastic trip, my first to Europe.  There was one rather nasty incident pretty much as soon as I arrived involving the theft of my passport and brand new laptop.  The Milan police were immediately informed and given a license plate number to track down, but so far they’ve been pretty useless and dismissive.

I wasn’t about to let that ruin my first European experience, though, and it did not.  Over just a few days I was in Milan, Monza, Bolzana, Munich, Venice, and Trieste.  If you’re a friend of mine on Facebook you were likely treated to a largely real-time photo blogging of my trip thanks to the iPhone’s camera and Facebook app.

Now I’m home and working to get back into the swing of things.

McCain’s people must be getting really desperate.  The American people are smarter than this.  You can’t lie about what somebody said in the age of the internet where transcripts and video recordings are readily available.  And please… you don’t get points for the irony in attacking Obama for “smearing” Governor Palin using completely and undeniably out-of-context quotations.  For reference, this is the quote that McCain’s ad says attack Governor Palin in a sexist manner.

“John McCain says he’s about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is, ‘Watch out George Bush — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics — we’re really going to shake things up in Washington,’” he said.

“That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

How you go from that to a “sexist” attack on Governor Palin is pretty mind-blowing, even for the McCain smear-mongers.

If you’re launching a start-up at Demo or TC50, you need to do better than any of these.

If your home page links to a PDF “info sheet” you fail.

Now, some of these suck for the sole reason that the start-up itself seems to be a pointless idea.  Some combine terrible company and product names with seemingly useless or redundant offerings.  Maybe they do have something compelling to offer, but they aren’t selling me on it.

Others, though, might be interesting but don’t even try.  Some of them look like they installed Community Server or something like it and forgot that you’re actually supposed to customize more than just the name.  One doesn’t even let you in.

Robert also linked to Quantivo, an example of a good website.  Maybe we’ll see more on Monday when the TC50 start-ups are revealed.  So far, though, I don’t expect to ever hear of most of the Demo companies again after this week.

I’m trying very hard to keep up with all the news, but it seems to be endless.  Let’s see what we have so far.

Governor Sarah Palin…

1) Was a member of (and still supports) the Alaska Independence Party, which believes that Alaska’s statehood is “illegal” and its admission the United States was made possible by “occupational troops.”

2) Opposes sex education and supports abstinence-until-marriage education. The same education that failed her pregnant unwed teenage daughter. The same education that has had disastrous effects in sub-Saharan Africa and has cost countless lives.

3) Cut funding for a group that helps teen mothers (like her daughter).

4) Sat in at a Jews For Jesus sermon two weeks ago, sponsored by her church, where the speaker said that anti-Israeli terrorism was “God’s Judgement.”

5) Was vetted over the course of almost an entire day for the position as McCain’s running mate.

6) Hired a lobbyist with ties to Jack Abramoff, and was for Ted Stevens before she was against him.

7) Thinks an oil pipeline is “God’s will”.

8 ) Has no experience with lawmaking or national government, but has misrepresented her experience with the national guard.

9) As mayor, increased government expenditures by 33%, and increased taxes collected by the city by 38%.

10) Is an alarming example of the kind of judgment that McCain and his people would exercise when choosing a Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense.

#11 Oh dear.  Just after I published this, another story broke.  Palin claimed last week to be a “reformer” who worked to end the “abuses of earmark spending in Congress.”  And yet, as governor she proposed 31 earmarks totaling $197 million - more, per person, than any other state.

To paraphrase a bit from Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

What her selection reveals about McCain is that he is a risk-taker who makes snap decisions “from the gut.” He liked Palin. She looked like a maverick and a bit like himself.  He didn’t invest the time or resources to look into her deeply. This isn’t about Palin’s readiness to be president, it’s about McCain’s readiness to be president. His first real executive decision, and he made it a shallow, incompetent, and reckless one.