??”…I promise you this: When I am President, any governor who’s willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that’s willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that’s willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America.”??????????

Video after the jump. (more…)

Since I rarely see advertisements, I hardly ever investigate contextual advertising.?? But given the sheer variety of products and services, I had to check out some of these:

• The Gold Cockerel Books company offers a chicken coop construction booklet at a mere $13.00.?? Except they call it a “poultry house” which is surely a major step up for any fowl who grew up in a lowly coop.

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My Badger 5 Plus garbage disposal seized up a few weeks ago after some mango peels made their way down into the drain. The disposal simply made this humming noise when it was on.?? It sounded like the motor was going but the blades were not turning.At first, I was ambivalent.?? “Maybe it will fix itself” I thought.?? But it didn’t.?? And then the sink stopped draining.?? So, I did the horror-movie thing and reached down into the bog of coffee grounds, lettuce and bloated cereal flakes to check if the blades were moving. (more…)

Peering into my Gmail history for the keyword ‘obama,’ I can see the first time I talked about him was in a chat session with my friend Ala on 10/16/06 at 10:35 AM PST:

me: goodmorning
Ala: good morning
me: how are you this morning?
Ala: fine, and you?
me: fine.???? obama huh?
Ala: made the cover of Time

And that’s how it started.

In November of 2006, I did phone banking in Portland for the Oregon Democrats, and took to the street like a crazy person, holding up my Vote sign on Burnside. About 11 months later, I was living in Boston, starting work on my MBA at Babson College.?? Politics are a little more interesting for Democrats on the East coast and by then I was looking to get a bit closer to the candidate, in an email to my brother on 10/19/07 I wrote:

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I had chosen WoW for as my topic for three reasons.?? One, it was among the suggested topics Professor Rao offered for the assignment, two, I love sci-fi and I played Magic in high school,?? and three, my sister has played some WoW and she’s cool.

After spending a few hours working on that paper I realized that I should really have a crack at the actual gameplay for the good of scholarship.?? Not because I have a lot of serious work to do that I’m trying to avoid.?? Not that at all.

With a 10 day free trial, I couldn’t go wrong, so I started the download of the game and it was 3.6 gigs of data streaming over some type of resumabale http stream.?? Oh well, I thought, I’ll let it go over night and try it out in the morning.

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Since I got the iPhone, I’ve been leaving iTunes open more and more. ??And since version 8 was released, I’ve been trying out the Genius play list.?? The genius can be good, but sometimes it sticks an odd track in there and you need to skip.?? The bummer is that iTunes doesn’t support global hot keys.

I can’t listen to music on a computer and work if I have to flip back to the media player just to change tracks , so I finally got around to searching for a solution and came upon Jacob Hickman’s??iTunes global hotkey project. ?? I like it so far–it adds a “toast” or little roll-up/roll-down status display when you skip tracks and has a fun??Domo-kun??tray icon. ??Check it out, if you’re a PC iTunes user.

Developers working on emerging software platforms are a flexible bunch.?? They’re used to having theirapplications break so long as the platform overall is being improved.?? A better platform means more users, which means greater opportunity for 3rd party developers.?? One thing developers do not like, however is having their software tools gobbled up an encorporated into the core of the platform.

I wrote about how this was happening in my blog post, Nationalization or Expropriation? Independent Facebook Application Developers Continue to Face Uncertainty.?? Something entirely different is happening right now on the Touch platform, however.

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Neutrinos just wrapped its second iPhone application, it is a 20 questions trivia game called iQ.?? It is great step from our first app, TipTotaler.?? For iQ, I took on the user interface design for the application in addition to my normal website design and marketing.

The amount of graphic design and image handling in iPhone development is extensive and I’ve already blogged about a tool to assist in the 3d iPhone application icon design.?? But the most interesting stuff is happening in Interface Builder and in xCode that I’m not supposed to talk about here.

Apple has an NDA up with all developers that they can not talk about their experience with the SDK.

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One of my tasks with the release of our recently submitted iPhone application, TipTotaler was to select an icon for our app.?? As you may be aware from Apple’s iPhone application submission guidelines, you must include a flat 57 x 57 pixel and 512 x 512 pixel image for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch home screen and for the iTunes store.

There are a couple of challenges for iPhone Application icon graphic designers:?? First, it isn’t always easy to tell what will look good at both 512×512 and 57×57.?? Second, having the developer rebuild and send updated screenshots is laborious as is monkeying around in Photoshop to eyeball how the images look at lower resolution with 3D effects.

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