Election Resources

so I'm supporting barack obama for president.  some of my friends are supporting mccain.  i respect their opinions and i think that there are many substantive differences between the candidates.  i believe the policy distinctions along with some basic character judgements are enough for most people to make a decision.  i tend to get frustrated when anyone misrepresent candidate positions or history of either side, because given the previous point about substantive distinctions being so clear, it's really unnecessary to make stuff up.  so what ever side you are on, please, just get the facts.

one thing i've heard a lot about (conservative emails, pundits, candidates, etc) is how obama wants to raise taxes in an extreme way.  i think there is a pretty simple way to illustrate the positions here.  just look at this chart - click it to enlarge it.  i believe it was from the washington post originally.  it's pretty clear that mccain gives the biggest tax cuts to the wealthiest and the smallest tax cuts to the poorest.  it's pretty clear that obama's plan favors the poorest americans over the wealthiest.  just look at it, it's easy to visually process.  no need to jump into nuance here.   you've got to be making over $600K per year to see a tax increase under obama's plan.

more tax policy detail: http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates_taxproposals_tpc/

you'll also get emails claiming all kinds of things like obama is a muslim, or obama wants to tax home sales, etc.  whenever you hear something hard to believe, just look it up on a non-partisan website like factcheck.org.  and if you find out it is incorrect, you should consider the trustworthiness of the source in the future and confront them with the facts.

life insurance - not optional anymore

when it was just emily and i, we considered supplemental life insurance as something that we didn't absolutely need.  but with the baby on the way, it's time to cross another one of life's thresholds and be prepared for unforeseen circumstances to protect our family.  cnn - money has a nice overview of life insurance in general and i've had a decent experience thus far using insure.com to quote from several different providers.  i'm currently waiting to hear back from some trusted advisors before i commit, but i'm finding that this life insurance thing isn't quite as hard as i expected it to be if you stick with the basics.

a bundle on the way

come the end of july, our family is expected to grow.  we're very excited and know that our lives are about to change dramatically.  it's already changed my perspective on many things.  whenever i'm not having a great day, seeing this on my phone's wall-paper puts a smile on my face.

 

driving green

well emily and i took the plunge into the green world with a 2008 toyota prius.  our 1998 chevy malibu need some significant repair work, and we didn't necessarily want to throw too much money at it.  i didn't really want to buy a new car at first, but after looking around at the used market for awhile i got a little disenchanted with that option.  i really like the car and the features.  it drives great, obviously gets great mileage, has good visibility, and it comes with some pretty neat features like:

• smart key - you don't have to insert a key into the door or the car to start it, just being nearby is good enough
• backup camera - when you put the car in reverse, you can see what is behind you via a camera on the back of the car
• great driver controls on the steering wheel for radio, climate control, etc
• good storage for a small car

we also took a look at some of the other hybrids out there like the civic, camry, altima, etc, but the prius was the most efficient, affordable, proven, and fun out of all the options.  this is my first new car, so i'm enjoying that.  i hope more people jump on the hybrid band-wagon.  there's really not a good reason not to for most people in my opinion.

iPhone post-activation bliss

i had a terrible experience getting the iphone to activate.  it turns out it was a defective unit and i got in touch with a manager at the at&t store that sold me the iphone the day before, and he agreed to waive the 10% restocking fee and replace my unit.  that was after 5 hours of pain and 3 trips to at&t.  worst case i would have had to send the phone to apple for a warranty repair, even after never successfully being able to activate it!  so one word of advice, if you are considering buying an iphone, you're probably better off doing it at an apple store, which was the conventional wisdom i knew before.  i just never expected it to be an issue still in october, so i ignored what i had heard.  the brand new replacement unit i received worked perfectly out of the box.

now that i've been an iphone user for 5 days, i'm really smitten with it.  it's been great to have on several occasions to kill time where i was forced to wait.  i know have lots of music and several podcasts always with me and a good browser experience and push yahoo mail.  i'm also encouraged by the announcement to open the platform to developers.

i still have had a couple of minor pain points.  i don't like being limited to 200 text messages with the default rate plans.  how silly.  unlimited data, but limited text messages?  i'm just going to start encouraging everyone to send me email instead.  i've had one or 2 instances where the phone has become unresponsive to my screen taps momentarily, but it's too early to say what that was all about.  overall, i'm extremely happy now that i'm up and running.

iPhone activation hell

so i bit the bullet and got an iphone today.  what i expected to be an absolutely painless and easy activation experience has been absolutely terrible.  itunes does not recognize that i need to activate my iphone and i've been on the phone with at&t and apple for 3+ hours tonight.  the current assertion is that the sim card may be at fault and that i need to get a new one from at&t.  i'll have to wait to try that until tomorrow.  i must say that once you finally get a person on the phone, both at&t and apple did try to troubleshoot and were friendly.  however, given that i started this journey at 8:00 pm CST, i'm disappointed that i spent so much of the time on hold.  it's also very apparent that there are two distinct companies involved in my experience, each one referring me to the other at various times in the night.  i finally got to the back-line specialist from apple who assured me that this is extremely rare and something she hasn't seen since the launch.  somehow that doesn't make me feel much better.  i'm frustrated, aggravated, and angry that i've wasted an entire evening on the activation and it is unlikely that i'll see any compensation for my poor experience.  if it were june i'd understand, but part of the reason i waited for october was to avoid something like this.  let's hope this gets better.

record companies optional?

i bought radiohead's new album this week and got it delivered as a 40-something megabyte zip file full of DRM-free mp3's.  and now madonna, nine inch nails, oasis, jamiroquai and others are following the trend.  this has to have the industry in a state of panic.  if they aren't then, they should be.  i'm sure that they still feel like they have a stranglehold on a lot of typical distribution control (radio+mtv), but imagine if social networks start flipping that on it's head.  there's been rumors of a big new set of features for music on facebook.  just imagine if/when radio becomes less relevant towards artist discovery, and it's based on recommendations from social networks.  that time is almost here and it's going to get very interesting.