I am looking at getting a new phone to replace my BlackBerry Pearl. I sorta want an iPhone, but I don’t want to a) Switch over to AT&T and… well… that is the primary reason.

I am looking for another phone and I am finding something unfortunately: You cannot buy a phone nowadays that doesn’t have a camera.

Many places will not allow you to have a cameraphone (Court Houses, some other event venues, etc) which means there are times when I would have to leave the phone elsewhere and basically be SOL if someone needs to get ahold of me.

You would think BlackBerry would release one of their new phones without a camera.

The way the polls are looking right now it appears that Barack Obama is going to win the election. No matter how many tricks they try to pull on election day I just don’t think McCain can pull this out. And with the ground game Obama has going on the election may already be won due to early/absentee voting.

Which brings up something I am, confused, about. Does this mean that things will get better?

See, my entire ‘adult’ life we have had a republican president and republican policies being applied. All I really know is Bush. I have no freaking idea what is going to happen in an Obama administration. It would be… totally new… to me.

This is going to be interesting.

So, I’m not doing Mock Trial this year… A few non-confrontation non-controversial nothing-necessarily-I-did events got in the way.

Well, if someone drops out this winter I may have a spot, but that isn’t looking like it is going to happen.

This is the second major extra-curricular that has gone sour this year, the first being the school newspaper (which was basically my choosing) and now Mock Trial. And I was genuinely excited about Mock Trial and am genuinely… sad… that things won’t work out.

Anyways, I have other things to keep me occupied. Like school.

It is standard practice for a political campaign to provide the press pool with at least 1 riser and access to an XLR audio breakout box of whatever is going on onstage. If you run the event and don’t provide them with an audio breakout box they will otherwise rely 100% on the mics on their cameras, which pick up a lot of background noise (you later mix this in with the audio feed from the campaign so you aren’t hearing JUST the mic on the podium).

Back during the DNC convention (and really every main event covered by all the networks since then) you may have noticed that all the broadcast networks were actually using the same cameras. It is pointless to have 10 organizations (CNN, NBC, Fox, CBS, ABC, PBS, C-SPAN, etc) fighting over the best angle to watch the podium, so they just have their trucks tap into a ‘pool’ feed of general purpose cameras.

This year was a big deal, because it was covered 100% in HD by the networks, which causes a whole host of problems when it comes to staging/lighting/bandwidth/etc. So there needed to be a member network that would coordinate this entire HD production.

And, of all the networks that could have been responsible for the HD feed of the Democratic National Convention, the network group that organized the HD feed for DNCC was Fox News.

We haven’t really had a ‘perfect’ and ‘fair’ election for a president in a long time. Or at least one where one of the candidates won outright (aka 50%+ of the vote). There is a claim that could be made that had Ross Perot not been involved in the 1992 race Bill Clinton wouldn’t have won. And of course the mother of all poor ‘unfair’ elections was Bush v. Gore in 2000. A majority of Americans (50%+) have not decided on a president in an election in 20 years. I really hope that changes this year.

I hope that this general election is fair and played by the rules, just like the primaries were played by ‘the rules’, and that whichever candidate wins they win with over 50% of the vote. I want to be able to tell my children that this election was won fair and square, from the moment Obama declared his candidacy until the moment he stands on the stage on inauguration day, that all the rules were followed as written. I want to win by enough electoral votes that the states where there might be challenges on registration or campaign activities are unnecessary. I want to win in such a way that this election isn’t decided by Ohio or Florida alone. Ultimately, I want a president where the American people overwhelmingly decided that this person was right for the job.

That would be nice.