Obama's VP

"She got millions of votes, but she's not on his ticket. Why? For telling the truth." Or something like that is what the McCain campaign is saying about Hillary Clinton in a recent ad.

And it's crap.

Hillary Clinton is not Obama's VP... because she pisses people off. Republicans have hated her for a long time. In the primaries, she pulled some catty stuff that turned a lot of Obama supporters against her. A couple of days ago before Obama announced Biden, I was talking to one of my friends and he said if Obama picked Clinton as his VP, he might not vote for Obama. Between her strong personality and previous tactics, she's very divisive and that is exactly the opposite of the message the Obama campaign has been trying to send.

It's a shame, because in my opinion she would complement Obama's strengths quite well. Where he might be naive, she is realistic; where she might be distastefully conniving, he can act straightforwardly. Of course, I know there are many who would debate this with me - but my point is even though she might be an asset in office, she would be a definite liability in the election.

Also, is America ready for a black man AND a woman? I hate to acknowledge the factors of sex and race underlying this election, but they're there, and I bet that was considered in the decision.

And with regards to Joe Biden: I've heard a few people who are as miffed about Biden as my friend would have been about Clinton; they say they might not vote for Obama now that he's picked Biden. These dopes need to realize that despite the "Democratic ticket", president and vice-president are actually separate races. They can vote for Obama and vote for someone else (maybe give the Green party props) for VP if they can't bear to vote a straight ticket.

Vote Obama, everyone.

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Update on the apartments: I applied for an apartment last week and came close to getting it, but not quite. I'm trying to see some more this weekend.

Apartments

I'm looking for an apartment to rent starting between ASAP and mid-September. And it turns out that looking for apartments is a) boring and b) difficult.

I just called five places I wanted to set appointments with. I got the following five responses:

1) There's an application pending, and we're not open on weekends.
2) Busy tone.
3) No answer, but I did leave a message on the answering machine.
4) The place has already been rented.
5) The place can't be shown yet because it's still occupied.

So I've gotten zero actual appointments out of it all. I think I'm suffering from the fact that the research is a bit stale (done last weekend) and this business is even more first-come-first-served than I thought. I'll have to just look through some more listings and hope that newer ones will pull through.

Gnome vs. KDE

I prefer GNOME. I have always found it to be easier to use, more visually pleasing. It's simple and well-organized – a few essentials are laid out, the rest sequestered in intuitively labeled menus and folders. I don't like KDE – it's too Windows-y, with recursive menus and icons all over the place.

If you think about it, GNOME is kind of Mac-like. But I friggin' hate modern Macs! I think they're too flourishy and obscure what you're trying to do. I hate Windows Vista most of all because it's Windows trying to look like Macintosh and ends up with the worst of both. GNOME isn't like MacOS X or anything like that. GNOME is still clean and simple. It looks like older Macs, around system 7.5.

Could it be that simple? Could it be that I like GNOME simply because it functions like the earliest desktop I learned to use?

Linus Torvalds, I hear, prefers KDE. He says something to the effect that GNOME is too simple, so it doesn't do what he wants to do with it – with, I'm sure, some inflection of superiority in the language. If you want to do a lot with your desktop, that's fine - but I'd rather work mostly from the command line.

Statement of Purpose

A friend of mine started a blog to keep in touch with people while he's at college. I liked the idea so I'm doing the same. I also have wanted for a while to have a more focused, audience-aware blog than my livejournal. These are the things I expect to post about:

- general updates on life, people, things, how it's going
- talk about my classes
- commentary on the news
- interesting thoughts/ideas that occur to me
- reviews or listings of books, movies, and other media
- computers and especially my linux box

I'm not gone yet, but the summer is swiftly and definitely transitioning to "preparing for school" time.