Anna and I watched about 30 minutes of this last night. I wasn’t planning on watching it for own pretentious reasons . . . but there was nothing else on while we were trying to fall asleep unless we wanted to watch Latvia vs. Chad in a nationalistic wet noodle fight. We didn’t see Obama (probably a good thing) but we did catch Johnny Mac do his thing for a while. It was about what I expected both sides to do . . . drop the name of the Jesus like he was their homeboy in every answer and somehow work in an Old Testament story in each answer. While I’m not sure if Obama did this last night since we didn’t get a chance to watch him (it wouldn’t surprise me if he did), I’ll rely on Zach Lind’s quick diagnosis which seems to be about right.

Which also why you should read Zach Lind’s blog . . .

“For me, the most illuminating question Warren posed was on the nature of Evil in the world. Obama answered by saying that we should confront the evil in the world, but that it can only be God who can completely eliminate evil. And he added that in confronting the evil of the world, we must do so with humility. McCain, on the other hand, without hesitation said we should defeat evil. He claimed that he would “follow Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell” if need be. In addition to that, he claimed that he knows how to find Bin Laden. Finally, he said that he had no doubt that with the US military, he could completely rid the world of evil. In my view, Obama’s response was much more responsible and was rooted in reality, which is always a good thing right?

Sadly but not surprisingly, the crowd, while friendly to Obama, was really eating up McCain’s responses. The strangest moment, as Andrew Sullivan noted, what when the crowd gave it’s loudest applause for McCain’s call to begin off-shore drilling as soon as possible. It’s interesting that a room full of people who could afford the $500-$2,000 ticket price for this event are THAT concerned with the price of gas.”

I’m going to be a dad in 10 weeks and I’m not freaked out at all. But we’re enjoying a couple of days off down at the beach with our friends Stephen and Linda. And it’s been nice to have a little time off before the home stretch. Here’s to my beautiful wife Anna who is a champ.

Why Not?

VHS set of Season 1 only $9.99. The value of antiquing

Ok . . . so the secret is out. I broke down and got an iPhone. Strangely (or fittingly) I’m using my comptuer less and less and am envisioning a day where mobile phones will be the new computer and personal computers will go the way of the dinosaur. People have been forecasting this for a while (with me jumping on the bandwagon in an effort to call myself an ideator and future-caster). But with smart phones being capable of so much, it’s only fitting that the transition from the bulky desktop beasts to the portable handheld device happen sooner rather than later.

I’m not going to write a review up of the phone itself but rather the Wordpress Mobile App. As a longtime user of Wordpress (3+ years) thanks to Eric, I find this mobile App (available for free in the App Store) to offer me almost everything I need and want in a mobile blogging application. It’s small, streamlined, but yet still functional.

It begins with the ability to add multiple blogs to the interface. So while I only have set up one blog, it could very easily be set up for multiple Wordpress Dashboards to maintain multiple blogs. Which is a really nice feature.

Once you go to your particular blog, it pulls your latest blog posts. In order to write a new one you simply click on the button on the bottom right hand side of the screen. My only complaint at this point, is that they make it very difficult for you to delete a blog at this point. Not that you would want to, but if you needed to it would be a nice feature to have.

You then get to the “Writing” screen. Once here, you can set up your tags for SEO, your categories and Title and Post. Once you’re ready, you just change the status from “Local Draft” to “Published”. But the cool feature for “micro-blogging” from your iPhone is the ability to add photos. By clicking on the photos icon across the bottom you get taken to this screen . . .

Once here you are able to go in and add photos directly from your iPhoto galleries photo from your computer or you can take a brand new shot with the camera that is built into your iPhone. This is where it gets fun and becomes extremely practical and efficient for blogging on the go.

Once you get your pictures taken, your post written and categorized . . . you’re good to go. You can create a post from scratch to live in less than 2 minutes, complete with photos, text, and categories. Not bad for blogging on the go.

Now what this App (and Apps like it) will do for the way we interact with media is still taking shape. Things are definitely changing. Becoming much more fluid and dynamic and interactive. The challenge will continue to be to produce good content (i.e. good art) with so much freedom and so many options. Only time will tell how that works out.

If this isn’t an interesting combination for night time reading as I go to sleep, then I don’t know what is . . . Kierkegaard, Watership Down, and Roald Dahl.

In the midst of everything else that has been going on, I still somehow managed to churn out a magazine for August. You can check it out by clicking on the image below . . .

I’m getting ready for our mini-vacation to Destin next week. Can you tell? I’m listening to G. Love and drinking beer out of a Destin coozy with Dr. Phil on mute. I love my days off. I tend to get bored which lead to wardrobe changes and props in my blogging.

My iGoogle Einstein quote of the day . . .

“I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.”