Well, today is my 30-and-one-half birthday, and next week I leave Australia's territorial waters for the first time. I'm spending 3 days on a junket in Austin, Texas for SXSW. Then I fly to JFK airport, New York — the city I've spent ten thousand words describing in variousessays — and check into the Chelsea Hotel (yes, that one) on March 10th for ten nights.
On St Paddy's Day, I'll be drinking and singing in Boston.
But the rest of it? I haven't really planned anything. Being a free software advocate, I thought I might try open-sourcing my New York itinerary. Where should I go? What should I do?
I know this blog doesn't have a huge readership anymore, so this exercise might be a flop. But if you could, help me fill in the blanks. I probably need to finalise this by Saturday.
The plan so far:
Mar 10: Texas to NYC.
Mar 11:
Mar 12:
Mar 13:
Mar 14:
Mar 15:
Mar 16:
Mar 17: Lucky Star bus to Boston, 7am, St Paddy's Day (drinking venue suggestions welcomed)
Mar 18: Return to New York, 8am, and sleep
Mar 19:
Mar 20:
Mar 21: NYC to MEL.
Notes:
I'm there to see America, not prop up her economy. Let's keep this cheap.
Somebody get me the hell to Katz's for a pastrami on rye!
How did I do? Why thanks for asking! Click on the image below for a comparison — my prediction on the left, the apparent final result on the right.
I didn't see the caucus states of Alaska and Minnesota ending up in the Obama column. He might still get up in New Mexico, in which case I misjudged that too. In the other 20 states I picked the outcome, and occasionally nailed the margin. Massachusetts and Arizona were not as close as I imagined, and I under-estimated Obama's support in the predominantly caucusing Mountain region. That goes some way to explaining how I think Obama won the day in both states and delegates.
What about my other prediction though — that any win for Obama on delegates would be a famous victory? The US media has not yet tallied the delegate counts, and they might come up with marginally different numbers by factoring in the district-level results. But the verdict is already delivered: it's a draw. This is based largely on Clinton's solid numbers in Massachusetts, New Jersey and California, and I don't expect they'll revise it as the delegates are known. So I was wrong on this count. But that's good. The media has been hostile to Hillary's front-runner status, and this is a realignment that better reflects the reality of a race between two well-matched candidates.
With 15 hours until the first polls close in the States, these are my final predictions. About seven states have no reliable, recent polling data — in these cases I've tried to go on demographics and media/advertising exposure, but my numbers could be, you know, way out.
I've definitely factored in an Obama surge, expecting he will pick up a lot of the undecideds. So if you're looking for a way to contextualise my prediction, I would say it's slightly (but reasonably!) optimistic for Obama.
The two states to watch, I believe, are the ones where I've indicated a dead heat: Missouri and Arizona.
These states will report results well into the day, so if you're looking for early indications, watch the two eastern strongholds for Hillary: New York and New Jersey. (Update: actually, Missouri begins reporting at 12noon, and New York not til 1pm — so disregard the whole 'early' thing!) If Obama is a couple of points higher than my predictions after at least 30% of the vote is counted in these states, the surge is bigger than I expected, and he might well carry the day in delegates. If several points lower, the day is Hillary's — although how the US media will spin that is anyone's guess. She could win by anything up to 150 delegates and they might call it a photo-finish. Obama only needs one more delegate than Clinton for a famous victory.
My calculator for predicting the outcome of Tuesday's Democratic primaries is now available: Super Tuesday Calculator.
Play around with it. There's some good poll data available at Pollster.com. Send me your predictions (using the "Share" link) or leave them in the comments. I'll be posting mine here closer to the date.
I have a nerve ending somewhere, probably in my brain, that is hypersensitive to certain spellings and sayings. There's always a few on my hit-list. "Irregardless" is an evergreen, but several others are less clearly wrong and more a matter of taste. I am going to list a few in the hope that you might never subject me to them again.
begrudgingly: yes, it's a word according to some authorities. But just say "grudgingly", please.
quite the: as in, "I had quite the weekend". You know you sound like a dickhead.
I beg of you: no, just beg me. And get down on your goddamn knees.
dependant: (see also, independance, etc). Again, it's a word. But it's a noun, and only in British-English anyway. The noun you might be thinking of is "dependency". But usually you're looking for the adjective anyway.
I think that will do for now. We'll see how we go with those four.
(And though you might contend that I'm falling off the crest of the wave of change, I would counterpose that this is simply a proper crusade against a sub-trend of unintentional linguistic recidivism. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just telling you to stop.)
Patriotism often dismays me. Sometimes it angers me. There is also a thread of it I believe in, which holds out that our best hopes lie in the love of homeland. Belonging to something good means that we can venture out and do good, without the sanctimony of altruism. Rather than hide and shrink away, clutching at the skirts of our imagined betters.
I am no enemy of England. I love their losing streaks in sport, and their unparalleled capacity for good humour. But there won't be many times in my life I rejoice like the day Australia claims its place among equals in the game of nations.
And not because I'm suffering delusions that much will change. We'll still be a small country of 20-odd million people, confronted with challenges made no easier for our formal autonomy. Still I reckon this change in legal status will lend wind to our backs, let us aspire to something more than we've done so far. Our ability to influence the oscillations of our region will increase. Our debate, our art, our cogency, our empathy — each of these things will gain room to emerge from their chrysales. Not immediately: imperceptibly, but significantly.
This is the core of my politics. The rest is padding.
I wonder if that's why I'm so moved when I listen to Barack Obama. I sat on the fence for a long time, but perhaps a few weeks ago it occurred to me that I'd never heard a politician so clearly articulate my standpoint. It is one thing, and an important thing, for politicians and bureaucrats to take action and get things done on our behalf. That's much of the reason we take time to elect them. But it's another and better thing to have a figurehead with a vision, who can put fire in the bellies of a nation, and by raising their spirits give the people room act in their combined best interests.
It's easy enough to believe in a promise. For those of us inured to modern politics, it's even easier to suspect a dissemblance. That's good and proper, but this time I think the former is the better route. Now's your chance, Americans. Yes you can.
Some people say I should give up my bachelor lifestyle. You know, lock in the good thing I got, embrace the bliss of co-location, sink my money in a mortgage, get with the procreation program. But from here, on this buzzing summer evening with only an imported beer and some badly deformed papadums to interrupt my quiet reverie? Those folks seem more loco than ever.
In the last post, I wrote somewhat at length about my new note-taking system. I mentioned something about the possibility of synchronising these notes with the Notes application on an iPhone or iPod Touch.
Here's a script that does that.
For it to work, you'll need to meet a few prerequisites:
Ruby 1.8.5 or so, and a couple of generally very useful ruby gems:
gem install net-ssh net-sftp -y
As usual with this sort of thing, download the file to a sensible location, make sure it's in your path (by placing it in /usr/local/bin, perhaps), and chmod it to 775.
Then run it, passing in your iPhod's IP address. For example:
sync_notes 192.168.1.15
Hint: I've added my iPhod's IP to my /etc/hosts, which means I can do:
sync_notes zaphod
If a note title isn't found on one machine or the other, the note is added. If two notes of the same title have different file modification dates, the older one will be overwritten with the newer one. I decided not to sync deletions, so you'll need to delete a note in both locations if you really want to scrub it from existence. This just seemed prudent.
The sync_notes script is released under the WTFPL. I presume you're not harbouring delusions about your rights, but for the record: I take no responsibility for any files you may clobber using this script. Or for anything else. Making a backup first would be very logical. But it seems to work just fine for me.
There are several pieces of software I yearn for, and occasionally go on wild goose chases across the Interwebs looking for. A note-taking application that fits my brain is one. My criteria aren't exactly demanding; in fact, they boil down to two needs and two desires.
Need 1: It must appear and disappear immediately.
I don't have the screen real estate for little knick-knacks like side-docks or drop windows, et cetera, and I don't have the patience to go hunting them when I need them. Nor do I have the patience for a complex GUI. I either want to take a note, or read a note, and I want to do it while the slippery little gremlin of inspiration is still trapped in the fragile jaws of my brain.
Need 2: Powerful search.
I'm not going to go tagging or coloring my notes. I'm not going to drop them into a neat folder hierarchy. I mean I'd love to, but I know from experience that it's just not going to happen. So let me have a big stinking haystack of notes, and use search to find my needles.
Great search lets me use the application as a scratchpad, dumping ideas and discoveries down and getting back to work. I know I'll find them later.
Desire 1: Let me repurpose my data.
I take a lot of notes, and over the years my jottings accidentally became a treasure trove (another man's trash, etc). So I don't want them in an opaque or proprietary database. I want to be able to move them around between various machines, archive them from the command-line, sync them with my iPhod, write a script to build a wiki out of them, whatever.
Desire 2: It should work the way my text editor works.
I'm switching between my text editor and various terminals 12 hours a day. My text editor is vim, which works rather differently to most GUI-based text entry widgets. I'd like to be able to enter and edit my notes like I do my code.
A bashful solution
On Ubuntu, Tomboy satisfied my two needs. It was simple and delightful. When I moved to Mac OS X, I searched high and low for a replacement, and eventually found the charmingly quirky Notational Velocity. It also satisfied my two needs, sort of. I had it bound to F4 in Quicksilver, so it was easy to invoke, and I could just Cmd-Q to dismiss it. But startup became very sluggish after I'd accumulated several hundred notes, and inevitably my patience ran out.
So this time, I researched just enough bash to be dangerous, and wrote a short script to do what I needed and what I desired. Here it is in full:
note() {
if [ -n "$*" ]; then
vim "$HOME/.notes/$*.note"
else
printf "Name of note is a required argument.\n"
fi
}
findnote() {
ack -ia $1 ~/.notes
}
copynote() {
cat "$HOME/.notes/$*.note" | pbcopy
}
alias note:='note'
alias notes='vim $HOME/.notes'
_notes() {
local cur names IFS
cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
names=`ls $HOME/.notes | sed 's/.note$//g'`
IFS=$'\t\n'
COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${names}" -- ${cur}) )
return 0
}
complete -o nospace -F _notes note
complete -o nospace -F _notes note:
Put that in a file (mine is in ~/scripts/bash_notes) and source it (ie source ~/scripts/bash_notes). Then mkdir ~/.notes.
That's it. Now you've got a few tools at your command-line disposal:
note Guitar tabs
Will create or open ~/.notes/Guitar tabs.note in vim. It's aliased to 'note:' too, so you can use note: Guitar tabs if you prefer.
notes
Opens your notes directory in vim, allowing you to browse, rename, delete at will.
findnote thurston
Shows excerpts from every note in which the string 'thurston' is found. This is just a simple wrapper around ack, the wonderful grep-alike. You'll need to have that in your path somewhere (/usr/local/bin being the logical place in Mac OS X).
copynote Guitar tabs
Copies the contents of the 'Guitar tabs' note to your clipboard on Mac OS X.
But the exciting bit is the custom tab-completion. Type note and hit Tab to list all your notes. Type note Gui and hit Tab to complete the "Guitar tabs" title at the command line. Fast!
If you're not yet won over to the way of vim, you can use this script with TextMate too — just replace all the references to vim with mate.
Try Visor if you want to keep your notes a keypress away. Remember to source the bash_notes script in your .profile so it's available in all your Terminal sessions. And let me know if it fits your brain too.
It's not unreasonable to say I take more than a passing interest in the popular manifestations of democracy. That is, the official soundings of public opinion. You know, elections and all that. I'm neither a political scientist nor a statistician, but I do very much like numbers when they cloak such passion within the regimental columns of a spreadsheet.
In the United States, they are about to commence their eleven month odyssey of political quantification, culminating in the promotion of someone to a position that has become increasingly irrelevant to the rest of us. Still, they take it seriously, and so do I.
The wee mid-western state of Iowa enjoys its quadrennial moment in the sun -- buried though it is in snowfall -- this Friday morning our time, when it convenes its cute little custom of party caucuses. We are spoilt enough to have both Democratic and Republican contests this year, and both parties will host their opening gambits in Iowa.
Nationally, opinion polls suggest that Hillary Clinton holds sway over Barack Obama for the Democrats. John Edwards (vice-presidential candidate to John Kerry in 04) is providing some intrigue in outright third place. None of the other Democrats are really viable, and are interesting in as much as when they pull out, and to whom they hand their baton when they do. For the Republicans, Rudy Guiliani (sometimes written as 9ui11ani) has long possessed the mantle of front-runner, but in a development that only the American political dynamic seems capable of throwing up, he suddenly has a right-of-field challenger in Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governer and television evangelist with some mildly odious ideas. Mitt Romney (a Massachusetts Mormon) and John McCain (GWB's also-ran in the 2000 GOP primaries) round out the field of serious potentials for the Republicans.
I feel obliged to make some predictions from this very distant vantage point. Firstly, I know the folly of attempting to divine outcomes at this stage, because both Iowa and New Hampshire are influential, and another 48 states will respond to the changing winds that swirl right through primary season. So I don't have a victor for either race. With that said, I feel foolhardy enough put a few assertions down:
Only a few dejected Republicans will even remember Mike Huckabee's name in four months. He will have exited the race in Dean-like ignominy.
If Romney takes Iowa, New Hampshire becomes a microcosm of the wider Republican contest between he and McCain. If he doesn't win Iowa, the Republican race splits three ways between he, Guiliani and McCain. Guiliani's strength is on the coasts, but they may not have much say. His role is more likely spoiler than victor, despite his war chest.
Watch out for Edwards. January is his little roller-coaster. There's really no way of knowing, but my intuition is that he may well claim Iowa despite running third in most polls there. If so, the fifth of February will be extraordinarily interesting. He has a charm peculiarly resonant with the American palate.
