Today is the last day you have to cast your vote for either the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, or the Republican candidate, John McCain. If you’re not a fan of them, there are plenty of others. So please, if you are an American who can vote, go vote today.
Here is some last minute information for you to help make up your minds:
I look forward to seeing the results tonight! Get out the vote!!!
With only one week to go until the US Elections, it seems that at least 75% of you out there (if you’re voting) are planning to wait until November 4th. My question is, “Why?” If your State supports early voting, you really should go and get it over with. We all know that most people are procrastinators, and when it comes to voting a lot of people think that their vote doesn’t count. Well, just remember, your vote always counts if you use it… the way a lot of people “win” their elections is by hoping their opponents supports don’t vote.
As far as the election itself, it is currently assumed that with his stable 5 point lead Obama is untouchable and will be our next President, but history shows that’s not always the way it goes. Just look at the Gallup poll of Nixon vs Humphrey:
In 1968, the race between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey narrowed over the last month of the campaign, from double-digit leads for Nixon in late September to only an 8-point lead for him among registered voters in polling conducted Oct. 17-22. By Gallup’s final pre-election survey, conducted Oct. 29-Nov. 2, Nixon held only a 1-point edge among likely voters, and ultimately won the election on Nov. 5 by less than 1 percentage point, 43.4% to 42.7%.
As you can see, Nixon just barely won, even though Humphrey was way behind until the very end. Actually, in the past, the polls have never been that accurate, as you can see in this chart:
The polls showed higher numbers 9 times outof the past 14 elections… in fact, when polling higher, it averaged 6.59 points higher. When polling lower, it averaged 3.2 points lower. So, what does that all mean for Barack Obama? It means that his supporters shouldn’t just assume that he has it made since he’s polling 5 points higher… for John McCain, it means his supporters need to get out en masse and try to win this thing. It’s been reported that in California, a State where Obama is polled at +18, when it comes to over 210,000 early voters, he’s ahead by only 1000 votes (just +0.5), so yeah, your vote does count.
To sum this entire post up:
GO VOTE. DON’T WAIT. YOUR DEADLINE IS 7 DAYS AWAY.
WordPress 2.6.3 is out, I’ve updated, and all seems well in the world! Hooray for progress!
This month has been the busiest for me in quite some time. Between our bi-annual trade show’s here at the office and a week long business trip, I’ve had almost no time to myself. I’m still around, just quite busy.
Later on this week I think I’ll give one last wrap up of what I think of the election (as it’s nearly election day) and a few other things. I’m still just catching up on all of my leftover work.
I manage to post on a few of my other microblogs, so if you’re needing that “fix” of what I’m up to, check this out:
In short, it’s a timeline of all my online activity from my other sites (such as Facebook and Twitter to name a few). If you’re someone that has a ton of places you visit, consider signing up and swurling it all together!
SpaceX, the private company established by PayPal’s founder Elon Musk, has made history by successfully launching their Falcon 1 rocket and achieving orbit. Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit! The amazing thing about this is that it was only their fourth try. While many people see that as failure, most countries take many tries to get it right.
This launch comes after the failure of the Falcon 1 (Flight 3). During Flight 3, a problem occurred just after the first separation which prevented the second stage from occurring and from reaching orbit. According to their press release, “SpaceX was aware of and had allowed for a thrust transient, but did not expect it to last that long. As it turned out, a very small increase in the time between commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation would have been enough to save the mission. The fix was also very simple, requiring one line of code to be changed.”
You can see the video of the launch here:
Congrats, again, to SpaceX!