A friend of mine emailed me asking why I’ve been flying the Obama flag as of late. She’s been sitting on the fence.

It’s a great question because my first impressions were based on gut but since then, I’ve filled in the blanks and am more compelled than ever.

Well Spoken
I saw Obama on the Daily Show sometime last year and was really impressed by the way he carried himself. To me he came across incredibly well spoken, but more importantly, intelligent and with a refreshing look at politics. For example when discussing his vs. Hillary’s ‘experience’ he said:
Obama: “Let’s take the example of experience. We try to remind people, nobody had a longer résumé than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and that hasn’t worked out so well. When people talk about experience, what they really want to know is, does he have good judgment? And you hope that if somebody has more experience, it gives them better judgment. Of course, everybody knows a lot of 50- and 60- and 70-year-olds that don’t have good judgment; they keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. So what we want to do is start talking about judgment, how do we get things done, what’s common sense.”

Depth and Experience
While he is incredibly well spoken, sometimes people assume this is all he has to offer. However, if you look at his history, his experience and record runs deep. The LA Times has this to say:
LA Times: “The U.S. senator from Illinois distinguishes himself as an inspiring leader who cuts through typical internecine campaign bickering and appeals to Americans long weary of divisive and destructive politics. He electrifies young voters, not because he is young but because he embodies the desire to move to the next chapter of the American story. He brings with him deep knowledge of foreign relations and of this nation’s particular struggles with identity and opportunity. His flair for expression, both in print and on the stump, too easily leads observers to forget that Obama is a man not just of style but of substance. He’s a thoughtful student of the Constitution and an experienced lawmaker in his home state and, for the last three years, in the Senate.”

The Issues
I like that Barack’s clearly and transparently laid out his position on all of the key issues including healthcare, Iraq, and poverty.
Barack Obama – Issues

On Healthcare
Obama and Hillary aren’t terribly far off in their proposals for healthcare, however Obama appears to have a clearer plan to me. Rather than just saying, “We need to mandate everyone have healthcare”, he’s trying to get to the bottom of the problem which is cost. He’s been criticized a bit for his plan not ‘mandating’ healthcare, but I think he explained his point of view well in the last debate:
Obama: “Let’s take health care. About 95 percent of our plans are similar. …explains similarities blah blah blah…

Senator Clinton has a different approach. She believes that we have to force people who don’t have health insurance to buy it. Otherwise, there will be a lot of people who don’t get it. I don’t see those folks. And I think that it is important for us to recognize that if, in fact, you are going to mandate the purchase of insurance and it’s not affordable, then there’s going to have to be some enforcement mechanism that the government uses. And they may charge people who already don’t have health care fines, or have to take it out of their paychecks. And that, I don’t think, is helping those without health insurance. That is a genuine difference.”
Watch the debate or read the transcript via CNN

Additionally, Hillary had 8 years to get this taken care of the last time around and couldn’t get it done. Maybe it’s time to give someone else a try.

Iraq
On Iraq I think it’s pretty clear. Hillary voted to authorize the war. Obama fought against it time and time again over the last 6 years. In 2002 he spoke out against the war saying it would result in “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs and undetermined consequences.”
From his website:
“In 2003 and 2004, he spoke out against the war while campaigning for the Senate.
In 2005, he called for a phased withdrawal of troops.
In 2006, he called for a timetable to remove our troops, a political solution within Iraq, and aggressive diplomacy with all of Iraq’s neighbors.
In January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008.
In September 2007, he laid out a detailed plan for how he will end the war as president.”

And as the LA Times mentioned in their endorsement, and I’ve heard from plenty of folks over here in the UK… Obama would give a fresh new face to American politics.
LA Times: “No public relations campaign could do more than Obama’s mere presence in the White House to defuse anti-American passion around the world…”

On Technology
Here’s one near and dear to my heart. Obama is by far the biggest proponent of improvements to the US’s technological infrastructure out of all the candidates. He’s outlined open access for the internet, using technology to make government more transparent, and improving communications infrastructure on his site, which by the way is consistently rated the best designed election site on the web.

This BusinessWeek article sums the difference between Hillary and Obama’s sites:
BW: “…Hillary sees her supporters as a series of constituents with individual interests that she needs to meet and Barack sees his backers as members belonging to a mass movement. One is a traditional political model. The other is a more modern engagement model.

…the two sites differ radically. On Obama’s I received “points” for creating a profile, making my profile public, logging in, befriending a link in my social network – which all told, puts me at 96,044th place in the my.barackobama.com universe. In contrast, the Clinton web site gave me an identification like TzQ$, so I could make sure that any donations were tracked back to me – sounding just like old style “frequent purchaser” numbers that everyone from CVS to American Airlines uses.”

Ars Technica also provides a nice summary and review of his technology proposals.
ArsTechnica: “Barack Obama’s campaign has now released a relatively comprehensive and extremely ambitious technology document that lays out a whole slew of general and specific proposals for doing everything from reforming the patent system to implementing a national broadband policy. In releasing this “technology and innovation plan,” Obama is the first major presidential candidate on either ticket to release a technology policy document that’s this comprehensive.”

LA Times Endorses Obama
This was a big one today and sums up Barack more eloquently than I ever could. Plus they haven’t endorsed a candidate in 36 years!
LA Times: “Democrats preparing to vote in Tuesday’s California primary can mark their ballots with confidence, knowing that either candidate would make a strong nominee and, if elected, a groundbreaking leader and capable president. But just because the ballot features two strong candidates does not mean that it is difficult to choose between them. We urge voters to make the most of this historic moment by choosing the Democrat most focused on steering the nation toward constructive change: We strongly endorse Barack Obama.

An Obama presidency would present, as a distinctly American face, a man of African descent, born in the nation’s youngest state, with a childhood spent partly in Asia, among Muslims. No public relations campaign could do more than Obama’s mere presence in the White House to defuse anti-American passion around the world, nor could any political experience surpass Obama’s life story in preparing a president to understand the American character. His candidacy offers Democrats the best hope of leading America into the future, and gives Californians the opportunity to cast their most exciting and consequential ballot in a generation.”
Read the Article – LA Times Endorses Barack Obama

In the last 20 years we’ve seen only 2 family’s in the white house. Isn’t it time for a change? You bet it is.

Further reading:
Barack Obama – Official Campaign Site
Wikiipedia Article
Obama’s Iowa Victory Speech
Yes We Can Music Video on YouTube

Just a quickie to say that I am so digging Rails.

I’ve been working on my first ever rails app, macForecast, for a few weeks now.

I originally launched it mere days before MacWorld which was later than I had wanted to go but for just moving 4,000 miles, not too bad.

The ‘launch’ was fraught with deployment issues… trying to get my host configured exactly as needed, load the site into subversion, setup capistrano, etc proved to be more than a 1 evening job so I ended up just ftping the files in place and figured I’d handle the rest later.

I’m happy to say that the last week has seen some outrageous progress. Thanks to a slew of tutorials and troubleshooting tips found via Google I now have a subversion repository on the webhost that I can commit my changes to from my iMac at home. Better still is Capistrano! Thanks to it, a single command deploys the version in my subversion repository to the production environment.

Bottom line is after screwing around with my site on my iMac a single command checks it in to the online repository:
svn commit
And a second command deploys the revision from the repository to production:
cap deploy
Or if there are changes to the database structure or other migrations:
cap deploy:migrations
The two commands take around 60 seconds to execute in total and presto chango everything is live and updated online!

I still have a ton of things to take care of but this lets me focus so much more on the app instead of housekeeping version control / deployment issues!