Yes, I did get her a present before I left! She opened it and will be curled up on the couch with the cat and the kid, enjoying it this evening. It's the United Artists 30-film DVD set. She tells me I'll be successfully avoiding Fiddler on the Roof.

Obama, by contrast, is generally on his own on the road; Michelle shows up for some of his events and does her own events. And of course, she's raising two children.

Nothing is done by mistake on a presidential campaign. Does Cindy travel with her husband to show he has a much younger wife? To keep his famously volcanic temper under control? I don't know the answer, but it does seem a bit weird to me.

Now, they have.

Whether you took the 2007 survey or not, whether you're a full-time web designer or not: if you build web sites, you should go take the 2008 A List Apart Survey.

Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.

I hope that some group spends some time and campaign dollars to spread the truth about McCain's terrible record on gender issues.

But besides the strategy, there's something else I want to mention. I was at the gym this morning, and CNN was on in the locker room. They were covering a town hall meeting that McCain was doing in New Hampshire. Remember, he thinks that these meetings are his strength; he wanted to do ten of them side-by-side with Obama. Now, I couldn't see the screen from where I was changing my clothes, but I could hear pretty well. And frankly, McCain just isn't good in these things. He took a question, and didn't answer it, instead pivoting to an attack on Obama on a different subject. He made a joke which fell flat. And in the few minutes I was listening, he used the phrases "by the way" three times, and "my friends" or "my dear friends" twice. The first makes him sound like he can't maintain a coherent argument. And the "my friends" stuff just comes off as phony or patronizing at worst and a verbal fart at best.

We've seen that horrible grimace he uses when he's been told to smile and isn't really feeling it. He's fine one-on-one with the press, as long as they are tossing him softballs, and he's gotten a lot of them over the years. But he's simply not up to the task when a reporter asks him something outside his comfort zone. And as best I can tell, he just can't connect with people on television. He managed to survive the GOP primaries to become the nominee simply by not giving up when his campaign tanked last year. He didn't have to become a better candidate; he just had to hang in there. But Obama was honed into a much better candidate by Hillary and Edwards and the press over the past year. When it's head-to-head between McCain and Obama, I think McCain will be toast.

What we all discovered is that we use words like "girl," "chick, and "babe," and we assume that other people have the same definitions for those words that we do—but that's not a valid assumption, so we end up talking at each other instead of with each other.

So, I promised that I'd give my definitions, and it ended up just being simpler to make it a chart:

Let me know what you think in the comments, please!

The problem now: there's no way for iPhone app developers to give out NFR copies of their apps—Apple makes them state a price, and then that's the price that gets charged in the App Store. As Andy Ihnatko tweeted yesterday,

Already I need to stop and work out a policy for free evals of iPhone apps. Devs sending me $X iTunes gift certificates is bad on many levls

My answer: given that you can go to the iTunes store and give someone a song, album, or movie, you should be able to give someone an application in the same fashion. Apple knows who put the application into the store; that same person ought to be able to send out (a limited number of?) freebies. It's a benefit to developers, to reviewers, and in the long run, to Apple as well.

And no, we have no iPhones (3G or otherwise) here, so this hasn't been an issue for us. Although if anyone wants to send me something that will work with my iPod Touch…

In conversation with some of the other attendees, I was struck by how much some of them seemed to have invested in Obama personally; one guy gushed that he thought that Obama would "heal the racial divide in this country." Another woman professed her love for Obama in a way that I thought was borderline creepy.

The Obama campaign is smart; they've purposely worked on making their guy an icon. But some of his supporters are just a bit out of whack. Which brings me to how many on the left are freaking out now that the primaries are over and Obama has started tacking to the center.

Really, what were they thinking he would do? Obama wants to win. He's a politician who will do whatever it takes. Personally, I absolutely want that from a Democratic candidate. If, in the middle of one of the debates, Obama stands up, emits a bloodcurdling scream, opens his mouth larger than humanly possible, and eats John McCain's head, I will applaud our new demon master.

In the meantime, some of his strategic moves make me roll my eyes, like his sop to the superstitious yesterday. But that's politics. No doubt we'll see more of that.

To the lefties that have taken to the fainting couch about those moves, I heartily recommend that they read this post from John Scalzi.

John McCain was fifth from the bottom of his class at Annapolis. He's admitted that he was constantly having problems with discipline and authority. I would normally applaud that, but he was in the Navy. After Annapolis, he crashed two planes, and ran another into some power lines. This is a picture of a mediocre pilot, not some hotshot. He went to Vietnam, was shot down and became a POW for six years, during which he suffered from torture by his captors. Upon his return and physical rehabilitation, he commanded a Florida training squadron.

He was never offered a significant sea command, which led to him retiring from the Navy as a captain. So it appears that aside from his POW experience, John McCain was not an exceptional or especially well regarded Naval officer. I presume that those Navy promotion boards knew what they were doing.

When Wesley Clark, West Point valedictorian, Rhodes Scholar, four-star general, and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, says this about John McCain:

John McCain is running his campaign on his experience and how his experience would benefit him and our nation as President. That experience shows courage and commitment to our country - but it doesn't include executive experience wrestling with national policy or go-to-war decisions. And in this area his judgment has been flawed - he not only supported going into a war we didn't have to fight in Iraq, but has time and again undervalued other, non-military elements of national power that must be used effectively to protect America. But as an American and former military officer I will not back down if I believe someone doesn't have sound judgment when it comes to our nation's most critical issues.

...I'm going to believe Clark's assessment. Clark is making a judgment about McCain's experience and fitness to be President, based on his (Clark's) superior knowledge of the national security arena. I think that Clark is far better qualified to make that judgment than I am, and far better qualified than virtually all of the weenies on the right and the left that are criticizing him for daring to tell a hard truth about the Sainted McCain.

A big problem I have with these sort of blog posts, though, is that too many of them (John Resig's Programming Book Profits as another) are written after one book, or one editor, or one publishing company. Not all books, topics, publishers, editors, etc. are created equal, and you really can't extrapolate anything meaningful from a single data point.

Now, I'm thinking about pitching a session for 2009 SxSW: "So You Wanna Write A Book?"

I need to know: if there is such a panel, would you want to attend? And if so, who would you want to see on the panel?

One issue I have is that I know so many people who really ought to be on this panel (me as moderator, for one!). Just as an off the top of my head list in no particular order, and limiting it to people I've seen attend SxSW before, here's who I'd love to have: John Resig, Wendy Sharp, Michael Nolan, Simon St. Laurent, Kathy Sierra, Stephanie Sullivan, Virginia DeBolt, Julie Melton, and Christian Crumlish. Others I haven't seen at SxSW, but would want to have on for their particular points of view: Adam or Tonya Engst and Laura Lemay. And then there's the people I've never met, but who I think would be valuable contributors such as Adam Greenfield. And I could go on and on and…

So? Let me know what you think in the comments.

[and in case you're wondering about my qualifications to moderate this panel: I've been a tech book author for over ten years. I'm one of the very few people around who actually lives off their tech book writing. I've written for multiple editors and multiple publishers. I've had books that were hugely successful, books that were moderately successful, and one book that tanked—so I can speak to a little of everything.]

I got an email today (thanks, Jamie!) telling me that Amazon has a new link format, and asking if I could please update the bookmarklet? Sure—no problem. Here you go:

Amazon Credit

To repeat what I said last time:

To install: drag that link to your bookmark/favorites bar.

To use: find the item you want on Amazon. When you're on the item page, click the bookmarklet, and the page should reload, giving the friend credit for the recommendation. That's all there is to it.

If you have a problem with this bookmarklet, just let me know. It'll be easier for me to fix, though, if you give me as much information as possible (your browser/version, your OS, what item you were looking at, what you expected to happen, what did happen, etc.).

Want to provide this bookmarklet to others, personalized for your blog? See where the code starts with myCode='chalcedonyconsul'? Just change the value in quotes to be your associate ID instead, and place the bookmarklet (the whole thing, not just that snippet!) as a link on your blog with these same instructions (a link back to here would be appreciated as well).

Enjoy!