DaveTraynor.com

A lot of Canadians are interested in the US election results today. But some are more interested than others.

Today, my daughter, Jaime, is in Chicago to help get the vote out for her favourite – US President Barack Obama.

Jaime has volunteered for the Obama campaign after spending the weekend visiting her sister, Kelly, who lives in Edwardsville, Illinois, about four hours west of Chicago.

Today, she’s been bussed over to Iowa to help in that battleground state. But the best part, for her, is that she’ll be able to go to Obama’s victoria rally (she hopes) in Chicago tonight.

This morning, Jaime was a guest on CBC Regina’s Morning Edition, hosted by our friend, Sheila Coles.

I grabbed a copy of the interview and I’ve posted it for anyone who wants to hear.

Link to Jaime’s interview.

On Wednesday, Jaime will be back on CBC to talk about the results with Sheila and I hope to get that interview as well.

Much more to come.

I didn’t watch the American Presidential Debate the other night. But I did see the coverage and I was struck by how shallow most of the commentary seemed.

The first debate was about domestic issues but I didn’t hear anything about poverty. It may have been raised, but it didn’t grab the attention of the commentators or those writing about the debate.

It struck me as strange that a topic for which the President was so passionate about in his first presidential campaign – the plight of inner city children living in poverty – was not on his agenda any longer. But why not? Are the problems that were so prominent four years ago all better now? I doubt that.

This morning, I remembered seeing an article a few weeks ago about Chicago’s inner city neighbourhoods – specifically two that Obama worked in as a community organizer. I had noted the article then, but sent it off to Instapaper without reading it and hadn’t gotten back to it. So I went and looked it up.

The article is What Does Obama Really Believe In? from The New York Times Magazine.

It shares the tale of a youth worker who lives in the same area as Obama once worked in, and who is trying to help the children in his neighbourhood escape the poverty cycle they’re trapped in.

It’s not a happy tale. Along the way, we learn a lot about the nature of extreme urban poverty and about how American thinking about helping the poor has evolved since LBJ’s famous War on Poverty in the 1960s.

It’s a fascinating, well-written piece, well worth the time it takes to read through. I still don’t know why poverty is never mentioned these days on the campaign trail. But at least I know there are some very good people who are still dedicated to finding a way to alleviate it. There are no easy answers, which is probably why we don’t hear more about it. Sound bites and extreme poverty don’t go well together.

Link to What Does Obama Really Believe In?

A hilarious – if somewhat disturbing – look at how American conservatives view their own history. Perhaps they haven’t heard about the Internet or Wikipedia…or perhaps they’ll create their own once they get control.

A Conservative History of the United States : The New Yorker

I love Wikipedia. I use it every day, often many times a day. And when I have some time to kill, I often search it for interesting stories.

It is perhaps the best example of what some would call the “true” web – or the kind of web that was envisioned by those who created it. It’s open source for information.

Last week, there was an interesting story in the Guardian about Phillip Roth’s frustration with Wikipedia because the editors wouldn’t make a change to an article about him on the site that he felt was wrong. Simply put, they said that Phillip Roth wasn’t credible enough to make changes to an article about Phillip Roth.

So he wrote a letter, which was published in the New Yorker about the correction. And lo and behold, that letter was accepted by Wikipedia as credible proof of his identity and the change was allowed.

That incident is being used by some as an example of why Wikipedia is not a credible source. But in his own Guardian article, Cory Doctorow puts the issue into perspective and tells us why Roth needs a secondary source.

Great stuff.

Link: Why Philip Roth needs a secondary source

I’m late to this particular item, but in the wake of the horrific shootings in Aurora, Colorado, Jason Alexander has written an exceptional, common-sense essay in response to those who say that there can be no compromise on gun control.

As others have said, this is the best thing I’ve read since the shootings.

Jason Alexander:(Via Daring Fireball)

This is a wonderful essay, written by Amanda Katz, commentator for NPR Books and the deputy editor of the Boston Globe Ideas section. While I don’t usually quote from the end of a piece, her concluding paragraph is wonderful and I can’t resist putting it up here, for those of you who might not read that far into her piece. But you really should read the whole thing.

But what do we lose as we bid farewell to what may turn out to have been a brief period in which common people owned physical books? I think of my own already excessive book collection, with its books that I have loved and worked on (as an editor and translator) and received as presents. Though I hope someone in the generation after mine will love living with them too, it doesn’t really matter to me: I won’t be there to see it.

But when I think of sorting through the boxes of my grandmother’s books — even the ones we couldn’t keep, or didn’t want — and what we found there, I am grateful not to have been handed her Amazon password instead. Among all the gifts of the electronic age, one of the most paradoxical might be to illuminate something we are beginning to trade away: the particular history, visible and invisible, that can be passed down through the vessel of an old book, inscribed by the hands and the minds of readers who are gone.

Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?: “”

I just upgraded my edition of Evernote to Premium, which seems like a pretty good idea.

I use Evernote a lot as a note capturing tool, because I can easily format the notes to work as a mini-outliner, as well as capture pictures, pdfs, screen-shots, etc. I have plenty of other alternatives on my iPad and Mac, but I do like the convenience of Evernote and the fact it synchs all of my various devices effortlessly.

So I was surprised when I upgraded and discovered that something had caused all of my notes to duplicate themselves during the upgrade. I ended up with a lot of duplicates. I searched around for someone else who had run into a similar problem but I didn’t find anything.

I ended up manually sorting through and deleting all the duplicates. But the job was tedious and annoying because you can’t highlight multiple notes for deletion. You have to highlight the note, choose delete, then confirm, for each note. It took awhile.

There might be an easier way, (there probably is) but I didn’t have time to look for it and it wasn’t obvious anywhere in the documentation. But it also shouldn’t have been necessary – unless I did something wrong to cause the duplication.

Oh well. It’s done now. But I thought I’d write this up in case someone else has the same problem and finds this blog post in their search. Please add a fix in the comments, if you happen to come across one.

Last weekend, I had a near-death experience (at least it felt like that to me) when I accidentally wiped out the database for a website I manage.

With one click, I suddenly realized that I had deleted almost every page and post that had been published over the past year. Yikes!

Fortunately, I have a back-up plan. So imagine my horror when I realized that my automated backup system hadn’t actually been working properly for the last few weeks!

Long story short, after spending a lot of hours sweating like crazy, I did figure out how to restore the database, and everything is working just fine.

So I can relate to this nicely told tale, about how Pixar very nearly lost all of Toy Story. The parallels with my own experience are pretty close.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, my new, improved backup regime is working nicely, thanks for asking.