Author: mark

We went to Beaver Lake High School and Caucused today. It was jam packed and old timers were telling us this is the fullest they’ve ever seen it. The table next to us got 50 votes for Obama and only 4 for Clinton. Our table (or precinct) got 25 for Obama and 14 for Clinton. That resulted in 4 delegates for Obama and 2 for Clinton at our table. Kerry was elected as a delegate for Obama so she has to go to the regional caucuses in April and then maybe county and national.

It sounds like Obama took WA by storm today which is really great news and it was awesome getting together with our neighbors and chatting about how much we think Obama rocks.

I think one of the big differentiators with Obama is that he gets you thinking about how you can get involved and how you can help your country. It’s a very Kennedy-like approach to politics (…ask what you can do for your country) rather than Clinton who simply tells you what she’s going to do while she’s in office. It’s the people in a country that make it great, not the politicians and Obama gets that.

Based on the passion of the people I was seeing today, if for some reason the Democratic party superdelegates intervene and elect Clinton as the nominee, it will shatter the party like never before. The folks who support Clinton aren’t as passionate and as vocal as those who support Obama – at least here in Washington and in many other states from what I gather – and my guess is that we’ll all hit the streets and make a lot of noise if something like that happens.

This is a very exciting time for the United States and it reminds me of South Africa in the early 90’s when the ANC came into power and Nelson Mandela was released from prison and took presidency. I was in the Cape Town city center when Mandela spoke for the first time and one senses the same kind of enthusiasm at Obama rally’s that we had back then for someone new and a great change in the direction of our country.

Kerry and I hit the Obama Rally at the Staples Center today at 11am. We got there late and it was already full to capacity – which is 17,000 people. So we decided to hang around outside with a crowd of around 5,000 other folks in freezing rain. The buzz was awesome and when Barack showed up he did a little impromptu speech on the stairs with nervous secret service agents behind him with an SUV with the door open and the engine running. Then they broadcast the speech from inside on the speakers outside. It was more like a rock concert than a political rally.

The message that resonated with me was “We don’t need a disease care system we need a health care system” – talking about preventative maintenance in health care rather than treating illness once they arise.

A few years ago drug companies started moving their focus to ‘lifestyle drugs’ like Lipitor that provide a constant revenue stream for the entire life of the patient. Lipitor is the worlds top selling drug incidentally. Keeping people healthy is not very profitable but treating sick people for their whole lives is very profitable.

The NY Times had an article yesterday on Lipitor and how it is being investigated by a congresional committee. There’s an interesting follow-up article today about how the congressional committee is trying to track down the stunt double that actually did the rowing that Dr Jarvik was supposed to be doing in the Lipitor ads. The NY Times says the rower is from Seattle and is a member of the Lake Washington rowing club and it was filmed locally.

A friend took this photo inside the staples center (right-click and view image for a much larger version)

Our morning walk took us past two bald eagles sitting in a tall tree with no leaves so we had a great view. The NW Rocks!

I spent some time with Marc Andreessen and Naval Ravikant yesterday which was a lot of fun. They’re both Apple converts and Marc is a recent convert. So today I decided to take the jump. I’ve had a macbook lying around for a while that I use as a dev server but my dev server is now sitting in a cosy hosting facility so I grabbed the macbook, bought Office:mac which was surprisingly cheap at about $150 and – what the hell – bought an iPhone while I was at it.

So I’m all Appled up. Of course I’m waiting for my iPhone to activate – I got a lot further than Kerry did before she got stuck, but based on her experience I’m expecting the worst so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Update: I was pleasantly surprised. The trick is to enter a ZIP code that is in the same area code as the cellphone number you’re trying to transfer. That’s what caught Kerry and I didn’t make the same mistake and my number transferred without a call to AT&T. SWEET!!

Not to give widgets a bad name… (ours are FAST!!) but a friend is on the front page of Delicious and his facebook widget has just slowed his site to a crawl. It looks like badge.facebook.com is down right now.

Dell’s fiscal year ends Feb 2nd. If you want the best deal on servers negotiate with a Dell sales person at the end of a quarter. This one ends in a few days so you’d better hurry if you’re going to place an order. If you want slightly cheaper prices and same day shipping (Dell takes 2 weeks to ship) then email me – I’m trying out a guy who resells “previously ordered new” 2950’s in Florida.