His best work since the Ward Churchill stuff a while back. My favorite:

"Before we in the responsible media go into a feeding frenzy on this story, we first need to ask ourselves the key ethical question: is John Edwards involved here in anyway? No? Okay, nevermind. Frenzy away."

I've felt this way after 3 convention speeches:

1. 1976 - Ronald Reagan delivers buyer's remorse
2. 1980 - Jack Kemp is more than an old quarterback
3. 1980 - Jeanne Kirkpatrick: "...but they always blame America first!"

It's been a long, long time.

This is not Tom Eagleton.

Rich Lowry:

[Palins]’s the object of the cultural disdain of a Left that loves the working class in theory, but is mystified or offended by its lifestyle and conservative values in reality. If there’s ever been an exemplar of the rural America that, in Barack Obama’s telling, “bitterly” clings to its guns and religion, it’s Sarah Palin.

It’s her misfortune to be a pioneer with the wrong ideology. So much bile was directed at Clarence Thomas because he was the “wrong” kind of black man. Pro-life, pro-gun and a down-the-line, if populist, conservative, Palin is a traitor to her gender and thus encounters the sort of fury always directed at apostates.

...The Obama campaign is loath to admit that she’s governor of Alaska, pretending instead she’s still mayor of tiny Wasilla, and the outraged commentary in the press makes it sound like the vice presidency is an office of such import that it would be better if the newcomer were at the top of the ticket and the wizened pro at the bottom — just like the Democrats.

There are some in the media that are anxious for Sarah Palin to step down because her unwed teen-age daughter is pregnant. Some compare her to Tom Eagleton. OK, I'll buy that comparison as far as this: Eagleton was a decent fellow that was unfairly hounded off the Democratic ticket by the news media in '72 purely due to ignorance and FUD.

This is not going to happen this time.

With this pick, McCain has done the impossible: he's made me care whether he wins or not.

Holy cow, I can't believe this!

The one little bittersweet part is that this reminds me even more of '96. I was never a fan of Bobdole and was really hyped when he took Kemp as his VP. We all know how that turned out....

Freddoso:

She is everything Obama is not. A real reformer who took on her own party's corrupt establishment and won, defeating an incumbent governor, 80-20. Don't forget that she's also a mother who chose life for her Down Syndrome baby — we can probably guess where she'd fall on the Born-Alive act. If this is the future of the GOP, they're in good shape.

Steve Yegge:

My minority opinion is that a mountain of code is the worst thing that can befall a person, a team, a company. I believe that code weight wrecks projects and companies, that it forces rewrites after a certain size, and that smart teams will do everything in their power to keep their code base from becoming a mountain. Tools or no tools. That's what I believe.

So now Apple has finally spoken, after 5 days:

On Friday, July 18, 2008 (2008-07-18) we experienced a serious issue with one of our MobileMe mail servers. This issue is currently affecting approximately 1% of MobileMe members. Affected members are unable to send or receive email at www.me.com or access email using any email client software such as Mail on a Mac or Microsoft Outlook on a PC.

If Apple can have an outage that lasts nearly a week because of an "issue with one of our servers," then they have the worst Ops team in the history of the internet.

MobileMe Chat Support Transcript - Do Not Reply To This Message

It appears that Apple just tried to do too much at once. Last weekend, they launched the iPhone AppStore, MobileMe (the updated .Mac service) and the new iPhone 2.0 OS.

I've had a moderately good time using the new iPhone software, though the initial offerings in the AppStore were somewhat overrated (the games look fun, but I don't have time for them), but OK. However, the MobileMe transition has been a complete snafu so far.

We have had a Family Pack .Mac account for the past few years. It has been useable, but a disappointment. There were glaringly obvious missing features for family use:

1. There's a "Shared" directory on the main account's iDisk. There's no way for this to be automatically synched for the rest of the family members. If they want to use it, they have to settle for glacially slow WEBDAV access. This also means no offline use.
2. You can share calendars, but with read-only access. We would rather have shared calendars that my wife & I can both edit.
3. You can share address books with read/write access, but it's buggy. We'd rather have a single address book that my wife & I can both read and write to. The Mac OS X AddressBook sharing just doesn't work well for read/write access.

We worked around these problems and had a fairly robust and useable system.

1. We created a "master" login on all of our Macs that synched the primary iDisk. We used this account to enable us to do stuff with shared data like Quicken, tax returns, etc.
2. We used to keep all of our shared calendars on the "master" account and subscribe to them from the other accounts. This was a pain, as we had to log in as "master" to make any changes to the calendars. Eventually, I installed Darwin Calendar Server on our main machine and opened a port in our firewall so that it could be accessed from outside via https. All of the calendars were served from there and subscribed with read/write access from all accounts on all Macs. This has worked great. I could even subscribe from work and this worked fine with our iPhones.
3. For a long time, we kept our common address book on this account and shared it in the standard way, but this was terribly buggy and we eventually found Address Book Server. We run this on one Mac that is always on with all 3 logins (the "master," me and my wife) always logged in. The standard .Mac synching for each account keeps all the other Macs up-to-date, while ABS synchs between accounts. We shouldn't need 3rd party software to have this capability, but at least it works more reliably than the standard Mac OS X Address Book sharing.

Enter MobileMe. It was promised to provide "push" updates for all this and email, too. The initial transition came with 2 days of downtime instead of the announced 6 hours. The "push" functionality was overpromised and Apple has given everyone a free month to make up for it. A day or two after, I noticed that there was no calendar information on my iPhone.

It turned out that subscribed calendars will not synch to iPhones with the new 2.0 software. Bleh.

After some hours of work, I've set up one of our domains with Google Apps and I'm trying out SpanningSync to see if it's improved since I tried it a year or so ago and found it unusable. So now we're using more 3rd party software to fill a void that shouldn't exist. If it works, I may be able to use it to synch contacts, too and stop using ABS, though.

That's not the end of the fun! It's now been 36 hours since the last time I could access my primary email. Desktop clients can't connect and web access produces a completely blank page: no error message, nothing. Apple has been completely silent about why this has happened or how long it will take to fix.

With our 30-day extension, we'll have to decide in 3-4 months if we want to keep this service. At the moment, I'd say no.

(via NOfP)