Thunderbirds Are Go!

January 20, 2009 in The Journey of a Facebook Application

A friend of mine will often text me on a lazy weekend evening to say “In front of the TV? Go the Channel 4!”. I would change the channel to find he’s directed me to a classic episode of “Police Cops 19” or “When fat celebrities fall down – Exposed!”. And about 5 minutes later a second text will arrive “Ha ha ha ha, did you see that fat celebrity fall down!?”

At long last I can finally reply to him and say “We’re all watching it and talking about it on Facebook, join us!”

That’s right, the real-time-social-micro-forum-live-blog-application is now live!

It’s called Small Talk. It’s still in alpha/beta/omega or whatever term you use that means “don’t give out to me too much if it’s still a bit rough ’round the edges”.

If you’re on Facebook please try it out, I’d love to hear your feedback. I’ll be on it today discussing Barack’s Inauguration (especially when Twitter falls down!) so join in if you’d like to watch it with me, or even if you can’t get to watch it and want some live updates!

Obama names Tom Daschle as his Secretary of Health and Human Services

November 20, 2008 in links, Videos

It was announced earlier today that former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle will be Health and Human Services secretary in Obama’s cabinet. The news is pretty widespread on the internet, and all of the big news sites have write ups on the story, so I won’t try echo here what they’ve already said.

However, if you are interested in the people that the American’s new President-elect is selecting for his cabinet (as I am) you should have a look at some/all of the interviews below which are good introductions to Tom Daschle. Charlie Rose interviews are always quite good, each one is about 20 mins.

December 2, 2003

May 14, 2002

July 25, 1996

November 29, 1994

Leave a comment and let me know what you think of Mr. Daschle.

The Debate

September 27, 2008 in links

So the first debate came and went last night. I tried to write a quick little post after watching it and some of the analysis but at 6am (and after a few beers) coherent sentences were a little hard to come by! I’m sure the web is already flooded with much more detailed and smarter analysis, so I’ll spare you anything more than a few sentences of my own. As a Barack fan, I was a bit disappointed, but maybe that was just because my expextations were high after such a shambles of the week for the McCain campaign. To be fair to McCain, I didn’t think he had it in him to argue his points as well, even if I didn’t agree with him he was able to articulate his policies quite well. I didn’t see a “winner” but, as many people having been saying, this foreign policy debate was supposed to be McCains ‘home turf’, so anything less than a big win for him is a good debate in the Obama books.

Here’s my favourite clip of the night


For those that can’t view the video, a rough transcript:
Obama: “John you like to pretend the war started in 2007 when you talk about the surge… the war started in 2003! At the time when the war started you said it was going to be quick and easy, you said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were, you were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators, you were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shi’ia and Suni, you were wrong….. If the question is ‘who is the best equipped to make good decisions about how we use our military and how we make sure we are prepared and ready for the next confilct’, then I think we can take a look at our judgement”