A Gauge of the Electoral College Totals

I’ve been look­ing for some­thing that will enable me to see, at a glance, just how the com­plex­ion of the US Elec­tion is turn­ing. Is it really, despite what one hears, pre­dom­i­nantly Red or Blue? Because the num­ber of del­e­gates in the Elec­toral Col­lege is in no way related to the size of the states (in land area, that is), sim­ply look­ing at a colour-coded map gives you a skewed view of who’s actu­ally ahead, at least at a glance. Rel­a­tively small New York is dwarfed by Mon­tana, even though it has over 10 times the delegates.

The polls only tell you the pop­u­lar vote, and as we all know by now, that is only a par­tial indi­ca­tor of how the Elec­toral Col­lege will go. With so many states ‘in play’ as the news media puts it, pay­ing atten­tion to the Elec­toral Col­lege totals makes more sense.

I was deter­mined to find a view of the Elec­toral Col­lege totals, by state poll, effec­tively giv­ing you an fairly effi­cient and under­stand­able view of the cur­rent pre­dic­tions. I found it at vote2008.thetakeaway.org, and here is what it looks like:

You can mouse over areas to get a poll-by-poll pre­dic­tion, but the impor­tant point is that you can see at a glance, the like­li­hood of one can­di­date win­ning over another.

There’s a smaller ver­sion (with­out the inter­ac­tiv­ity, but it is dynam­i­cally updated) as well:

This is an inter­est­ing con­ver­gence of my inter­ests! (pol­i­tics and infor­ma­tion design, that is).

A Life In Motion

One of the rea­sons that I haven’t been post­ing as often this month as last month, is that it seems that I’m always in town, busy attending/watching/participating in some­thing. You’d think that being on the job hunt and not tied down with a 9-to-5 com­mit­ment would mean that I have tons of free time to spend on blog­ging, clean­ing up my office, and doing all of those other ‘things I’d do if I had time’. No such luck.  It seems my calendar’s clut­ter increases to fill the allot­ted time. I do want to at least men­tion, and pro­vide a snap­shot or per­haps a snip­pet of video (because I can) of some of what’s been going on for the past 2 1/2 weeks or so:

Sep­tem­ber 13^th: To cel­e­brate my (and my brother’s) birth­day, we took a week­end trip down to visit him and the rest of the fam­ily down in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton. This included a trip to the Sculp­ture Park:

and a cel­e­bra­tory Din­ner out at Wild Gin­ger, a favourite Seat­tle restau­rant of theirs:

Sep­tem­ber 16^th: I had lunch with a friend and attended the Mol­son Brew 2.0 event, which I had writ­ten about a lit­tle earlier.

Sep­tem­ber 17^th: Met with sev­eral peo­ple dur­ing the day and attended Launch Party 5 at UnWined.

Sep­tem­ber 20^th: Attended Bar­Camp­BankBC, a real eye-opener about the con­cerns of the peo­ple in the Bank­ing and Credit Union busi­ness (Ques­tions included: “If increas­ingly, every­body does most of their bank­ing online or at ATMs, what’s the new design/experience of a Bank branch sup­posed to be?” ):

Sep­tem­ber 21: Made it to the first Annual Canary Derby in Gas­town, a fundrais­ing race of soapbox-style rac­ers, mainly to cheer on the team of Web­names, who regard­less if they won or not (they didn’t), still had the classi­est look­ing race car of the day. Here’s one of the ear­lier tri­als that they won:

Since that was mov­ing pretty fast, here’s what the car looked like stand­ing still:

(Note: The child at the wheel in this shot is not the dri­ver in the race)
Sep­tem­ber 23: Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of a dear friend, Pam and I were able to get to one of the Pre-Season games of the Can­nucks. They were play­ing Edmunton, and despite that team’s (appar­ently well-known) speed, the Can­nucks won! Here’s a snip­pet:

Sep­tem­ber 26: The Party for Bar­Cam­p­Van­cou­ver 2008, the yearly uncon­fer­ence, took place at Work­space. This year I helped out in the plan­ning as well as the food prep (and even played bar­tender a bit).

Sep­tem­ber 27:We lucked out, and the weather was gor­geous, which helped since Bar­Camp was held on Granville Island, at 3 sep­a­rate loca­tions includ­ing the Revue Stage, Emily Carr Uni­ver­sity, and the Playwright’s The­atre. I had pre­pared a talk on Ubiq­uity, the fas­ci­nat­ing Fire­fox plu­gin that extends some of the ideas about inter­act­ing with infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net. Unfor­tu­nately, I was bumped because the con­tract for the room had us there until 5PM, not 5:30 as we had been led to believe. Moral of the story: Never resched­ule your ses­sion to what you think is a bet­ter time (orig­i­nally I was early in the morn­ing and oppo­site sev­eral other ses­sions that I wanted to attend myself!) I am work­ing on refor­mat­ting the pre­sen­ta­tion and slides so that I can put them online on my other blog and will try and let folks know when it’s done. Here’s me pitch­ing my ill-fated presentation:

Sep­tem­ber 28: Word on the Street, the Annual fes­ti­val of books, writ­ers and other things lit­er­ary took place down­town, around the library. Pam and I man­aged to make a talk by the enter­tain­ing and inspir­ing Colin Moor­house, a free­lance speech­writer that Pam had man­aged to hear at a BC Edi­tors Meet­ing last year.

That brings me to today. I nearly feel out of breath just recount­ing this. And it doesn’t include a cou­ple of job inter­views, meet­ings with friends and col­leagues, and the usual day-to-day stuff. It has been a busy month, to say the least.

I think that what’s been going on is a grad­ual accrual of yearly events. We noticed a cou­ple of years ago that there seems to be a tacit agree­ment that in Van­cou­ver, any­thing worth doing is worth doing annu­ally. Our year is get­ting busier, which is prob­a­bly OK, but soon we’ll have to pick and choose what we can or can­not make and say instead that we’ll catch what­ever we miss ‘next year’.

Brew 2.0: Molson Throws a Sudsy Event for Bloggers in Vancouver

The event: A 50^th Anniver­sary Cel­e­bra­tion of when the Mol­son Com­pany pur­chased the ‘6^th’ Brew­ery in Van­cou­ver (that would be in 1958). The crowd: Van­cou­ver Blog­gers. The pro­ceed­ings: Well, we got to taste a lot of great food, took a tour of the brew­ery, met some of the top peo­ple within the com­pany, and even downed glasses of some spe­cial 50^th Anniver­sary Beer cre­ated just for the occasion.

I under­stand that most of the atten­dees also got a deliv­ery of a case of beer from Mol­son (Mine never came; I sus­pect there was a bit of a snafu since I entered by a dif­fer­ent door than most — even though I was fol­low­ing the instruc­tions of the invi­ta­tion to the letter).

Update: The case of beer, with a hand­writ­ten thank-you note for attend­ing the event, came about a week or so later. Mol­son def­i­nitely sweats the details. Colour me impressed.

Post­ings include:

Miss604, who cov­ered the event with some nice pho­tos by her hus­band and also fel­low blog­ger, John. Arieanna of Blo­ga­holics also got some great pics from her hus­band, Ianiv. Tanya (aka, NetChick), Ryan, new blog­ger Danny Dang , Tris Hussey, Colleen Coplick, Duane Storey and Hummingbird604 all did a fine job describ­ing most of what went on, and took tons of photos.

So what do I have to add? Ah, I do have a video of some of the begin­ning of the event, thanks to the Flip Video Cam­era:

Je pense, donc je suis un nerd

I saw this begin­ning to CBS’s sit­com ‘Big Bang The­ory’ the other evening and absolutely cracked up in a fit of self-recognition. I’ve been mess­ing around with X10 con­trollers and the Inter­net for years.

Yes, when­ever any­one asks me why, ‘Because I can’ was the answer I gave as well. I never did any of the radio-controlled car/webcam cre­ations, but that would be cool, too. Because I could.

Rogers About to Get Something they Didn't Want: Competition

I got a news-flash email from the CBC today (I’m no one spe­cial; I’ve signed up for alerts like this):

The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is $4.2 bil­lion richer with the con­clu­sion of the cell­phone spec­trum auc­tion on Mon­day, while cus­tomers stand to win as five new com­pa­nies are now well posi­tioned to launch ser­vices over the next few years. The wind­fall is con­sid­er­ably larger than the orig­i­nal $1.5 bil­lion many indus­try ana­lysts had pre­dicted before the auc­tion began on May 27.

I linked to the related story on the CBC web site, and 3 pas­sages caught my eye. (in all cases, bold and ital­ics are mine) First:

The big win­ner — and biggest spender — among poten­tial new entrants was Toronto-based Glob­alive Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc., which cur­rently sells home phone and inter­net ser­vice under the Yak brand. The com­pany has emerged from the auc­tion posi­tioned to launch a national cell­phone ser­vice with 30 licenses broadly dis­trib­uted across the country.

Sec­ond:

The new entrants are widely expected to build third-generation net­works based on global sys­tem for mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions (GSM) tech­nol­ogy, which is what Rogers and its Fido sub­sidiary use, or its newer fourth-generation off­shoot, long-term evo­lu­tion (LTE).

and Third:

Iain Grant, pres­i­dent of the Seaboard Group telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions con­sul­tancy, said a national car­rier could be up and run­ning by Easter at a cost of $500 mil­lion, although other esti­mates say a launch could take a year or two. The trick­i­est part of start­ing up will be nego­ti­at­ing rights for trans­mis­sion sites, many of which will either be on top of tall build­ings or on tow­ers owned by Rogers, Bell and Telus.

So here we are, look­ing at a Spring of 2009 roll-out for at least one com­peti­tor to Rogers/Fido Wire­less, and did Rogers posi­tion them­selves well for such a sit­u­a­tion? In my hum­ble opin­ion, absolutely not. Any­one in Canada has seen this com­ing (any­one who was not in Rogers man­age­ment, that is). In the past years, months and weeks, Rogers has made so many Cana­dian con­sumers so angry that they can count on no cus­tomer loy­alty what­so­ever. Their brand may very well be dam­aged beyond repair. Any new cell­phone ven­dor who sup­ports a GSM 3G net­work will be able to grab a large pool of cus­tomers ready to switch imme­di­ately, or when their con­tract with Rogers is up (and you can bet that they’ll put that date on their calendar!)

How did Rogers screw this up so badly? The recent his­tory of Rogers, par­tic­u­larly with respect to pric­ing and mar­ket­ing tells some of the story. If you live in Canada and have had any deal­ings with Rogers, you’ll know much of this, so feel free to skip to the end…

First, over the past 3 or 4 years, Rogers charged some of the high­est data and call rates in the world. Then, in 2007, con­sumers and tech watch­ers crit­i­cized them for being slow to bring the iPhone to Canada after it was avail­able in the U.S. for a year.  In April of 2008, Rogers chief exec­u­tive Ted Rogers told investors the iPhone would arrive in Canada some time later in the year. In June, Rogers set the iPhone’s debut for July 11 (along with sev­eral other coun­tries through­out the world), but were quickly met with harsh crit­i­cism about the data pric­ing plan, which was per­haps the sec­ond high­est in the world (with Swe­den being the high­est) . Some high-profile tech per­son­al­i­ties in Canada went on tele­vi­sion to announce that they were going to jump ship (in some cases pay­ing a siz­able penalty). Only after thou­sands of cur­rent and prospec­tive cus­tomers signed online peti­tions protest­ing these rates,  encour­ag­ing Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs to put pres­sure on the com­pany, did Rogers relent with a drop of the high­est rate to a rea­son­able level ($30 per month with a usage limit of up to 6 GB per month), but this rate is avail­able only until the end of August. On the day of the roll-out, Rogers’ reg­istry net­works crashed simul­ta­ne­ously with Apple’s iTunes reg­is­ter­ing sys­tem after the new iPhone was unveiled. The Out­age lasted into the after­noon at some loca­tions and it wasn’t until the next week before some cus­tomers could acti­vate their phones. Rogers rep­re­sen­ta­tives said they expected record first-day sales, but declined to dis­close how many phones were shipped to stores or how many they had expected to sell. As I write this, Rogers (through­out Van­cou­ver, at least) is still sold out of the iPhone.

All in all it was a highly vis­i­ble fiasco. Rogers utterly botched the iPhone roll-out in just about every way it could be botched. They could have finally made many cur­rent cus­tomers happy with a new device and would be seen today as the sole provider of one of the most sought-after tech gad­gets. Instead, they gen­er­ated sev­eral days of bad PR, dis­played poor plan­ning, and missed immea­sur­able mar­ket­ing and sales oppor­tu­ni­ties. There have been numer­ous spec­u­la­tions that the rea­son they ran out stock is that Apple was so peeved at the high data rates that they actu­ally diverted iPhone ship­ments from Canada to more rea­son­able Euro­pean car­ri­ers. Whether or not this was true, Rogers’ lack of can­dor regard­ing avail­abil­ity, lack of under­stand­ing of the prod­uct, and com­plete screw-up of logis­tics and net­work vol­ume on the day of the roll-out is some­thing that will not fade quickly from the mem­ory of most Cana­di­ans (and prob­a­bly not by this com­ing Easter).

It will be inter­est­ing to see if the mass exo­dus from Rogers to what­ever new car­rier Glob­alive will fund will be as swift and mas­sive as I expect it will be. Rogers has run their busi­ness ‘like there’s no tomor­row’, but in the Spring of 2009, ‘tomor­row’ will arrive.