7 posts tagged “election”

Alternate title: Dang, I Thought It Was a Bug!
I did some messing about with election widgets on election night. The CBS election widget was more scalable than google's election widget, the keeping up to date and never locking up at all for me. The google map's election widget did (google's widget failed for 15 minutes during the peak) but it had a bug.

On Huffington Post's site it showed a 50 state map. When I hacked out the widget source code from CBS' HTML and added it to my site on vox it didn't show the states. The picture below shows the original from HufPost on the left and what it looked like on my site on the right - my version is missing the state by state report and it's embedded links:

CBS Election Widget

At the time I wrote it off as a bug in my blog.

I just had an interesting realization.This wasn't a bug at all, it was a carefully (and nicely) implemented scalability feature. CBS allowed anyone who wanted to to embed the widget, but on freebie web sites it only showed 4 numbers: electoral college votes and percentages for each candidate. The authorized web sites got the whole colored graphic US map with embedded links. Of course, it may be a bug due to the way I copied and embedded it or some other factor, but if so this fits into the "better to be lucky than good" category.

The CBS widget never broke down as far as I could tell, but the google MAPs widget died for 15 minutes during the peak demand. With hindsight, I think CBS implemented a nice throttle on the data for unauthorized users - it still worked and provided useful data, but the overhead is reduced from 54 variables with a graphic map to 4 vairables and text. Very good attention to load, scalability and reliability. I saw some web awards nominations that are open, I'll have to go see if they have any categories for design and scalability of widgets. Truly a well thought out approach, subtle but impressive.

The election is over, and I was noticing a certain let-down. No major potentially Earth changing decisions in our near future - both a bit of a let-down and a bit of a relief.

As I was driving in to work I was listening to the right-wing wackos radio station (for some reason I prefer to listen to the wackos I disagree with more than the ones I agree with, it's less embarrassing I suppose; from that comment you can tell that I have at least a mildly left wing self image). The assignment of blame has begun.

I also have to give some major props to the Glenn Beck show. I really tend to find Beck annoying if not downright offensive, so I rarely listen to him for long. I switched over and he had a caller going off about Obama paranoia - basically stating the caller's inability to accept Obama as his president. Beck broke in and surprised and impressed me. I wish I could remember more of what he had to say, it's probably somewhere on the web. Basically, he said according to the laws and the constitutions, Obama was going to be our president. Obama has no record yet, and he says he wants to rule from the center. He deserves to be given the opportunity to do so, and we need to suspend judgement until we have some actual real world actions and policies to reflect on and either criticize or approve. Beck in particular talked about a relative who drove him crazy when Reagan was president, going on and on about assorted crazy conspiracy theories about the evils of the president. Beck called the conservatives out on this point and said we don't want to be the crazy, unhinged doomsayers that we were so critical of the left for being when the right was on top. Beck earns a tip of the hat for me, I didn't know he had that sort of reason and opennes in him. I'm glad I listed to him a bit, my opinion of him went up quite a bit.

There are still political debates to be held and points to be scored. They may not have as much impact on mainstream life (or what passes for it, anyway) but at least the real political junkies won't have to go into complete withdrawal.

So the right wing talkers were on about the McCain inner circle blaming Palin for blowing the election. Talk about your circular firing squads. The main thing the president really does is pick the people who will head an assortment of departments that actually are terribly critical to our lives, welfare, and happiness. From FEMA, to DoD, to all the Justice groups (FBI, Marshalls, ATF, etc.), to the people who regulate what goes into our food & our medicine, to all of the obscure law enforcement groups and so on, these groups all are led by people who report to the president. So the McCain inner circle is complaining that the Palin pick blew it. They are basically saying McCain, in his only real public campaign act that is similar to actually being the president, chose someone who damaged his chances. That says much more about McCain's inner circle and McCain himself than it does about Palin. And if McCain's inner circle is that messed up (wasn't Graham & his bad econmy=Americans are whiners, not to mention deregulation champion honors, McCain's economic expert? I could go on) then that's just more evidence that McCain did not have the judgment to be the executive we need.

More than anything else, the failures of the Bush administration are failures to do the actual executive job of the president: choose the right leaders for the assortment of cabinet positions and department heads he controls, then enable them to succeed in their jobs. "Good job Brownie"" at the FEMA, SecDef Rumsfeld and his "force-light" approach to the war in Iraq, and the asleep at the switch financial regulators who saw the whole investment banking industry implode and disappear on their watch are just 3 examples of his inability to choose the right people.

Bush was the best 20th century style campaigner we ever had, so he could pick good people, apparently only to run campaigns. As our chief executive he was made of exactly the material his failures at running an energy company and a baseball team would lead you to expect him to be. While McCain was never a CEO, his performance in terms of choosing campaign advisers and a VP candidate leads me to believe he's the same sort of lousy-at-personnel decisions type of executive that Bush was. Except worse, since he can't even pick good campaign people.

The jury is still out on Obama to some degree (ask me what I think in 4 years), but at least he chose people who ran a very successful and uplifting campaign.

So looking at a small sampling of conservative and liberal or progressive sites, what do we see?
Drudge report is pretty reliably conservative, they have a running total of votes (currently showing Obama with 15,056,142 to McCain with 14,788,905 so Obama so far has roughly 50.45%; otherwise drudge has links to ABC news for per state results. Pretty low end efforts, but mildly useful. Otherwise there are plenty of links to stories to inspire and fire up the base - black panthers intimidating oppressed whites, etc.

little green footballs is one of my favorite conservative blogger sites, he's got some good postings and the requisite black panther's story. He also has thrown in the towel by 6:28 PST by quting his own work: "If John McCain is the nominee, we’re going to have at least four years of a Democrat in the White House" - which goes on to say that Iran will have nukes within 2 years, so a Democratic president (since he'll do nothing to stop it) will have to face a nuclear armed Iran. I have to note that 8 years of Bush hasn't defused that probem yet, and let it get to the final 2 years of run way, but hey, let's not inject any reason here.

foxnews.com is somewhere between a Republican mouthpiece and a serious news operation. Their electoral vote couts still show 0 at 6:50, the other networks have called enough states that the west coast and Hawaii will be enough to put Obama over the top - the election has already been decided and they haven't called a single electoral vote. I think their hearts aren't in this. One prominent story about Obama's victories in PA and OH, interestingly, they know they've been called but the web site doesn't reflect it.

Huffington Post is the nearest thing to a real news and opinion outfit the blogosphere has, they are pretty reliably liberal/progressive. They are already well into the triumphant large headlines like "Obama on road to victory" and so on. Their map is a little out of date - I heard a network call NM for Obama, they still show it leaning McCain. Of course, maybe they're right, but I'm choosing the more certain claim as the correct one by policy today. huffington post has liveblogs from an assortment of writers, I checked it before 6 and it was mildly interesting. Very short, nearly micro-blogging style comments. I'll revisit that later, I think.

dailykos is proudly progressive and quite partisan. They lead with "Obama may be winning, but come on west coast, we still need you to turn out to support local candidates, Democratic senate and house candidates, and to vote the right way on initiatives (like rejecting the gay marriage ban in California). Between 6:29 and 6:35 they decided it was over and Obama won. Pretty good discipline getting the "don't ease up & don't forget we still have races to win" message up, and a mildly amusing graphic equating McCain and Palin with toast. Nothing all that compelling, but I pretty much never find dailykos compelling anyway.

ABC just called Ohio for Obama at 6:24 or so. The widgets show:
Gadget    Obama    McCain     Total
CBS          194         124          318
MSNBC     195          76           271
CNN          174          69           243

ABC's web site is up to 195 - 81, total = 276 - CBS is ahead of ABC even with their gadget.

google's election map widget has been effectively dead for the last 15 minutes. I suspect so many people linked and embedded it that the periodic updates are swamping it and not being answered. It would be interesting to see what kind of volume they got, and how much of it they were able to handle. I suspect that they won't release that data, though. ** Update as of 7:10 google was working again. Must've fired up more of the cloud server... **

MSNBC added 9 more to McCain by 6:32, and changed it to 200 - 85 by 6:35, still 34 behind CBS' total though.

I embedded google's election gadget on a previous post, I see that Huffington Post has a collection of election related gadgets, interesting stuff.

CNNs looks pretty nice, but it includes headline news, I'd prefer to skip that. So I'd say the CBS gadget is my favorite.
I'll have to see how quickly they update - kind of a real time performance test. Unless it gets too boring.

It's finally here - now we wait impatiently while results trickle out. 2 states for McCain & I for Obama so far, no real surprises yet.

In honor of the election I'll embed this:

Scream

The shrieking hordes, the blood in the streets, the imminent end of civilization as we know it - it'll all be over soon. We hope.

Don't forget to mail in your ballot or vote on Tuesday!