Rich but never bitter

Don't miss Rep. John Dingell's (D-MI) letter to Bush economic adviser Gregory Mankiw about jobs in the fast food industry. (You'll need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.)

Re-defeat Bush in 2004

I attended the Democratic caucuses for precinct 1362 of the 43rd legislative district of Wahsington state this morning. I live in what you might call a liberal neighborhood. Actually I don't care what you call us, we're a bunch of lefties in Wallingford and Fremont. Someone suggested at the caucus that in our hearts we all supported Kucinich, and no one disagreed.

About 15 Wallingford and Fremont precincts gathered at the Hamilton Middle School Audtorium, about a 5 block walk from where I live. I showed up a bit before 10:00 and signed in for Kerry. The Dean people were out in force. Dean posters were everywhere, and there was a Dean table handing out Dean stickers. I liked Dean early on in the run up to the primaries. He brought some interesting new energy to the process and encouraged the other candidates not to be timid about attacking Bush. He energized people who had grown cynical about the politics process and showed a great aility to use the Internet as a fund raising and organising tool. The results of the early primaries, though, demonstated to me that Kerry had a better ability to connect with a broad cross section of voters.

By 10:00 the auditorium was full, and by 10:30, when caucus actually got started, the stage was full too. Classrooms were opened up to handle the crowd, and our precint ended up in room 123. We had 18 votes for Kerry, 9 for Dean, 4 for Kucinich, and 2 undecided. The Democratic party rules require 15% support to get delegates. Our precinct could send 6 delegates to the 43rd legislative district convention, and this meant that a candidate needed 5 votes from our precinct to send delegates to the legislative district convention. Everyone wanted the Kucinich people to get their delegate. The Kerry camp could have spared a vote, but one of the undecided went for Kucinich, and they got their delegate.

We ended up with 3 Kerry delegates, 2 for Dean, and 1 for Kucinich. The woman leading the Dean group gave us a hard sell to switch over to Dean. I was impressed with her organizational skills. Our precint leader was kind of winging it, but the Dean person had the rules practically memorized, and did a great job keeping us on track.

When it came time to pick delegates, only a few people raised their hands to be delegates, so I did too. We ended up with 4 people who wanted to be delegates. We did a paper ballot vote for three, and I made the cut, so I'm now a delegate to the 43rd district convention. I'm going to need to give this some thought. The precinct causcuses are just whoever shows up. The legislative district convention is a little more serious. I need to give some though to what postions I want to take, other than Bush sucks, and Kerry is better. Ed Murray, our state representative is chair of the House Transportation committee. So perhaps I should lobby for bicycles as a transportation alternative. Also Democrats are hot on protecting American jobs ( a good thing), and often want to restrict H1B visas. Half my team at Microsoft are foreign born, and I like working with these people. I'd rather have them working in America contributing to the American economy than competing with us in their home countries. Do I make a stand on this issue. Lots to think about. An interesting day, and an interesting time to look forward to in May.

News Aggregators

Now that I'm blogging and reading other folks blogs, I'm finding myself ready for a news aggregator. There's a wide variety out there, and I've been trying some out over the last few weeks. There are at least two standards for news feeds and they each have several versions. RSS is the older standard originated by Netscape. Atom is a newer standard and is the one supported by blogger.com, the service that powers this blog. News feeds are an XML description of site content and allow a new aggregator to check periodically for updates to blogs of interest. I had several requirements in looking for a news aggregator:

• Ability to subscribe to both RSS and Atom feeds.


• I log on to my lap top as a machine user at home and as a domain user at work. I wanted to access the same list of subscriptions at home and at work.


• Access to NNTP news groups is a useful extra feature

A friend recommended NewsGator, which handles both RSS and Atom and integrates nicely with Outlook. It also has a plug in for NNTP newsgroups. The problem with NewGator is that it refused to allow me to share my feeds between two users. The feeds themselves are store in an Outlook PST file, which can be put in a common location. There are some additional files which store subscription information, and these get stored in the Application Data folder of the user profile. I tried to trick NewsGator into sharing these files, but to no avail. A question to their forum resulted in a suggestion to sign up for there on line service ($6 per month). It has some neat feature, but I didn't want to pay that much. Newsgator is a free download with a 14 day trial. $29 to license.

Korby Parnell recommended SharpReader, a slick .NET Framework app. It doesn't support Atom or NNTP, so I rejected it. It does have the advantage of being free, which is a very good price. If all you need is RSS, then it might do it for you.

Next I tried NewzCrawler. This program defaults to putting it's files in the Application Data folder of the user's profile, but you can set an option to point it elsewhere. It handles Atom, with a few quirks I was able to work around, and it also supports reading and posting to NNTP newgroups. It has an option to post to blogger, but I ahven't been able to get it to work yet. It's free to try and $24.95 to register. I recently registered my copy.

I also tried some other readers, but they were mostly RSS only readers. I don't view this as an exhaustive survey of the field, but NewzCrawler seems to meet my current needs.