jcole’s weblog

There’s a lot of news traffic today about the Vice Presidential Debate last night. Quite a few interesting stories. I’ll go through a few of them…

Oops, Wrong Website

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally told everyone to check the facts at factcheck.com instead of factcheck.org. That little mistake means that everyone looking for proof that Cheney is a good guy was greeted by “Why we must not re-elect President Bush” at GeorgeSoros.com, where factcheck.com redirects to.

Reported by fcw.com, ABC News.

Haven’t I met you before?

Cheney said:

Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session.

The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.

Which is funny, because, as many news sites are now reporting, of course they have met before, and in 2001, they even sat next to each other at an event.

Various sites are kind of scarce on the polls today. I’d like to see a few more interesting polls…

MSNBC Poll: Who won the debate?

Vote.

CNN Poll: Who do you think won last night’s vice presidential debate?

See the results.

Update: Who really won? CNN apparently had a poll up right after the debate, in exactly the same format as the poll about the Presidential Debate but at some point they took it off the main site. The original poll is still available from their site. Compare that to the new one.

Last night I watched the Vice Presidential Debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator John Edwards at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland on C-SPAN2. I wanted to write a bit about the debate.

Overall the debate was actually much better than the Presidential Debate last week. I felt that it was a lot less controlled, and a lot more real to life. My impressions of the candidates were:

Dick Cheney came off as a real asshole overall. He kept throwing out unnecessary “zingers”, kept smirking, and kept showing entirely too much with his facial expressions. He avoided a lot of questions, kept fidgiting with his chin and his hands, and continuously talked down to John Edwards. Overall he made me feel uneasy.

John Edwards seemed very down to earth, had a slightly southern accent, and overall seemed like a “nice guy”. Even though you know he doesn’t care for Dick Cheney or the Bush administration, he didn’t talk down to Cheney or seem condescending. He acted very professional throughout the whole debate, took a lot of notes, and stayed very much on-topic. He seems young, and in touch with reality. Overall he made me feel good, made me like him.

As the debate went on, Cheney constantly smirked, strayed way off topic a few times, and seemed to avoid a few questions. He kept throwing out “zingers” like:

Cheney: With respect to the cost, it wasn’t $200 billion. You probably weren’t there to vote for that.

and

Cheney: Your rhetoric, Senator, would be a lot more credible if there was a record to back it up. There isn’t.

One of the biggest and most interesting things that was discussed was Cheney and his relationship to Halliburton. This topic came up several times, and I felt that Cheney was trying desperately to avoid the subject. Halliburton is a huge, corrupt mess, and Cheney knows it.

I think, overall, in my opinion, John Edwards won by a huge margin.

During tonight’s Vice Presidential debate, Dick Cheney said the following:

There’s no better antidote to poverty than a good well-paying job.

Really?! Hmm, I thought the cure to being poor would be a low paying job!

This is kind of old news, but I wanted to put it in my blog anyway, as perhaps some of you haven’t seen it, and so I won’t lose it.

On June 15, 2004, LinuxWorld interviewed Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling regarding their new book, High Performance MySQL. They asked the following question:

LinuxWorld: You must have experienced lots of different databases of information over the years – what was your favorite use for a database system?

Jeremy Zawodny: That’s a tough one. I (Jeremy) really like the aviation database that Jeremy Cole (MySQL AB’s training manager) has been building. He’s combined freely available information from the FAA and NTSB with MySQL and a simple Web interface in a way that brings together previously separate and hard-to-find information. If you want to know which airports or airlines experience the most delays, it’ll tell you. If you want to know what types of planes American Eagle flies, it’ll tell you.

He is of course referring to my project, FlightStats.

SpaceShipOne from Scaled Composites just successfully completed the 2^nd flight above 328,000 feet, returned to the ground, and they have now won the X-Prize!

They flew to over 368,000 feet, so they cleared the mark by 40,000 feet. There didn’t appear to be ANY problems at all in the entire flight. The flight was perfect, the landing was perfect. Amazing!

SpaceShipOne from Scaled Composites is currently making its second try for the Ansari X-Prize.

I am watching it live on The Science Channel. They are doing a pretty decent job of it, although I would really prefer that they didn’t have commercials during it. It’s really quite sad that there is a privately funded craft, going to space, and the only channel that is covering it live is this kind of unknown channel that most people don’t have. Where’s CNN? Oh yeah, CNN doesn’t even care about NASA‘s Space Shuttle launches. Fooey.

In a few hours I’ll be speaking in Columbus, Ohio, at Ohio LinuxFest 2004.

Apparently I’m a Guest of Honor. Cool.

Slashdot Poll: Who won the first presidential debate?

See the results, or vote.

CNN Poll: Who do you think won the first U.S. presidential debate?

See the results.

Update: It seems most sites have declared victory for John Kerry, and it looks like a pretty steep one. 70-20 or so.

I watched the first presidential debate last night. It was quite entertaining overall, as I fully expected it to be. I think, overall, John Kerry is much more professional than George Bush.

While Kerry was speaking, Bush was fooling around, making smirks, chuckling to himself, or just looking annoyed. While Bush was speaking, Kerry was just rock solid, occasionally nodding his head in agreement with a point, or acknowledging something Bush had said.

Bush spent a lot of time saying “uhhh” or just in dumb silence searching for words (sometimes up to maybe 4 seconds, after which he’d always burst out not with some complex word, but something like “group of folks”). Kerry seemed to be really on target and sharp, and knew what he was saying, why he was saying it, and it seemed to come from himself, not from some writer or advisor.

On the actual issues, I felt that Bush spent a lot of time just avoiding issues instead of facing them, and especially instead of explaining them. His repeated confusion of Iraq and Al Qaeda, and especially his reference to “they attacked us” as justification for the pre-emptive Iraq war was really telling.

Kerry seemed very humble and even once outright said “I made a mistake”. Kerry seemed to really know how the US is looked upon in the World view today, whereas Bush’s ideas of that made me chuckle. Amazingly I think Bush really does think that the World’s opinion of the US is “just fine”. I particularly loved how Bush made many references to “the terrorists” and how they “hate freedom” and they’re upset that if Iraq and Afghanistan become free, then they’ve lost… right.

Bush really made me laugh when he said: “I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is.”.

Once again, watching Bush on TV, I am embarrassed that he is my president.