Tom: September 2008 Archives

It has been a long week and a half since I got back from the eastern Sierras and western Nevada. I've been working a lot (more on that later), but I did get the photos from the trip posted here. Enjoy!

Timber, Wookie, and I made it back from the Eastern Sierras. While we were over there we did 3 main things:
1. Hiked Bishop Pass.
2. Camped at Laurel Lakes
3. Attempted and failed to summit Boundary Peak (tallest mountain in Nevada).

I'll post more information about the trip later in the week.

I recently messed up my blog after I installed a wiki and it took a while to hunt down the right files to change.  Hopefully this fix works.

I was planning to do other things yesterday evening, but I ended up watching McCain's speech instead. For full disclosure I have not decided who I am going to vote for yet. In the past I have voted Republican but this time I am not so sure, partly because the Republicans don't seem to have any new or interesting ideas and they seem intently focused on abortion and banning gays from getting married. I think both of those issues are non issues. But back to McCain's speech.

First I was glad to see that McCain was not as harsh toward Obama as the other Republicans that spoke were. I'll talk more about this in another post that covers the GOP convention, but I thought Rudy Guliani's laughing at Obama's having been a community organizer was condescending and mean spirited. Second, I was glad to finally hear some specifics on what he plans to do if elected. Third, I got a really good laugh out of the part where McCain talked about hybrid and electric cars and then did an eyebrow raise, which was unintentional, which I took to mean that he either didn't know what he was saying or he didn't believe what he was saying. Either way it was not genuine.

Overall I think McCain's speech was a little long winded and he didn't didn't seem to have much of a set direction for his speech because it seemed to jump all over the place. He is not as good a public speaker as Obama, but he did talk about some of his experiences that I had not heard about before. There is no question that McCain is a hero with vast amounts of experience as a public servant. I think he serves for the right reasons, and I know that if elected he will uphold the honor and discipline of the Presidency. My biggest question is how tightly his hands will be tied by the rest of the Republican party? Will he, once in office, do only what he thinks is best for the country as a whole or will he continue to push forward the agenda of the worst parts of the Republican Party? I am going to do a lot more research on both candidates before I decide.

Today Google announced its own web browser, named Google Chrome. I haven't played around with it yet, but I have read through some of the comic book. Without having actually played around with it I am kind of being uninformed while talking about it, but my opinions at this point are:

1. Yet another browser? We already have IE, Firefox, Safari, and a host of other browsers.
2. Yet another browser that deals with javascript differently. I've learned while working on my last few projects that different browsers sometimes handle javascript differently. It can be a real pain, and you also have to test your web application against all of the supported browsers. So I could potentially have more work as a result of this.
3. Will selenium support Google Chrome? If I actually have to do some testing against Google Chrome I sure hope so.
4. Will regular users download and use Google Chrome? What are Google's targets for penetration?

Overall I am skeptical, but anything can happen.