goodvote.org 

We needed an easy-to-remember address for people whose vote is being challenged. Here's what we came up with.

http://goodvote.org/

If you believe the will of the voters should be reflected in the result of the 2008 election, please pass on the address. It's totally non-commercial, with a single purpose, to help assure a fair election.

PS: 28 million hits for "good vote" -- goodvote.org is not on the first page -- yet!

Microsoft's cloud strategy? 

No one seems to hit the sweet spot, the no-brainer cloud platform that could take our software as-is, and just run it -- and run by a company that stands a chance of surviving the coming recession (which everyone really thinks may be a depression).

Of all the offerings Amazon comes the closest. With a number of turns of the key you get a Unix or Windows platform in the sky. I wish the number of turns was 1, but it seems to be more like 10 or 20. But it's still pretty good.

There are a number of VPS companies, but... none of them are really big enough to make a convincing case they won't go the way of Exodus or Conxion, two colo companies I bet on in the past whose pain became my pain when their businesses got in trouble.

I was hoping Microsoft would hit the home run, but it seems not. Why wouldn't the Windows company just offer Windows in the cloud -- nothing more and nothing less? The marketing people seem to have figured it out, they call the new offering Windows Azure, but what does it have to do with Windows other than sharing a brand? I don't know.

Wouldn't it have been great if they bought VMWare, or another virtualization vendor, and used their deep financial pockets to create server farms all around the globe that just ran the operating system they made famous?

Looks like I'm going to bet on Amazon.

As Rachel Maddow says -- talk me down!

I can't watch this election unravel 

"I can't watch this election unravel over corruption, not this time."

Early vote New Mexico 

CNN on voter suppression 

On this day in... 

Part of my daily routine used to be going back through the archive of Scripting News to see what happened on this day in fill in the year. But when the number of years passed ten for some reason I stopped doing it.

I thought it would be interesting to see what happened on this day four and eight years ago, to see where we were in the elections of those years.

http://scripting.com/2004/10/27.html

http://scripting.com/2000/10/27.html

Nothing really earth shaking happening election-wise in either year, but the Red Sox had just won the World Series four years ago, snapping a losing streak that had been going for 86 years. They called it The Curse of the Bambino. That's why there's a picture of Babe Ruth on the 2004 entry, with a big R.I.P. on it.

You have the right to vote