Watch Barack Obama’s speech on his vision of the future of the perfection of the United States of America:

My favorite quote from this deeply nuanced, insightful and intelligent speech:

“This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy.”

You can also view it on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU

See the comments on Barack’s site:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stateupdates/gGBbTW

Full text of the speech below:

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“Don’t base your votes, this time, on fear. Base them on possibility.”

The time for a thinker as our leader has come.

Watch on YouTube - Michelle Obama: Be not afraid

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Barack Obama is the most intelligent, reasoned politician I have ever heard. This video is remarkable. In it, he shares his views on religion and its role in a pluralistic, progressive society.

My favorite passage of the speech (emphahsis added):

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

You can read the full transcript of his speech here.

Are you hearing this America?

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One of the smartest people around, noted Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, has put together an outstanding video sharing his reasons for voting for Obama. I highly recommend watching it and thinking about the issues he raises. If you disagree, why?

Watch or download the high-quality video here (torrent).

Lots of excellent thoughts and comments on his post too (scroll down).

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I’ve been enjoying using my Apple AirPort Express to stream music from my laptop to our living room speakers using iTunes. The other evening I wanted to watch a DVD and use the good speakers to get the best sound, but you can’t do that without using a helper program.

I found a program that lets you route any audio signals to your AirPort Express — it’s called Airfoil (free to try out, $25 to purchase) and is made by Rogue Amoeba. It’s very simple to install and run. When I tried playing a DVD, though, the audio didn’t synch properly with the video.

This is the solution I found to fix the audio synchronization problem using VLC to play back the DVD and by adjusting the preferences and using VLC’s ability to buffer audio and adjust the synchronization settings.

1. Open preferences in VLC
2. Click on Advanced tab on bottom of screen
3. Select Input/Codecs
4. Select Access Modules
5. Select DVD with menus [Note: to make this same adjustment when you are playing back regular files as opposed to DVDs, simply select File instead of DVD with menus and continue with the rest of the instructions]
6. Change the default value (300 milliseconds) to 6000. This will increase the amount of audio data buffering to 6 seconds, which should be enough to synchronize the audio playback.
7. Click Save to activate your changes (you may need to quit VLC to ensure the settings become active).
8. Re-open the DVD using VLC and click Play.
9. Click the “f” key repeatedly to adjust the amount of audio synchronization offset. It adjusts the audio offset downwards by 50 millisecond increments. I had to set mine to around -4900 milliseconds to correctly match the audio with the video output on my system. Press the “g” key to increase the offset in the other direction. Watch the actor’s lips and adjust the offset until it matches perfectly.
10. Enjoy listening to your DVD audio through your speakers, streamed wirelessly!

Download VLC (Free Open Source video player)

Download Airfoil

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This is lovely.

From WereAllRight. Thank you.

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The IT Crowd is so awesomely funny. Tonight’s episode is so funny we’re watching it again. Completely hilarious. LOLed for about half the show.

You must watch this now. Run don’t walk.

1. Get Miro (used to be called Democracy) - this is an Internet TV player http://getmiro.com
2. Copy this URL: http://tvrss.net/search/index.php?show_name=The+IT+Crowd&show_name_exact=true&mode=rss
3. Open Miro, then click Channels > Add Channel. Paste in the subscription URL.
4. The latest episode (season 2, episode 5) should begin downloading.
5. Watch episode and ZOMG LOL.
6. Enjoy the earlier season’s episodes and all new ones which will automatically download to your computer.

One of the funniest lines from this episode said by Moss:

Ah, well, prepare to put mustard on those words, for you will soon be consuming them, along with this slice of humble pie, that comes direct from the oven, of shame, set at gas mark egg on your face.

So freaking funny.

Enjoy.

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Voting is now enabled on the Miro one-click subscribe button design contest. Voting is by leaving comments. Please leave a comment and vote for my buttons if you like them.

Click here to go view the entries and vote: Design Contest: Judgement Day(s)

Thanks!

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who voted for my submissions to the contest. I won first place. What did I win? Four t-shirts! Yay! Now who’s an “award winning” designer now? hah! Thanks again.

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Miro (the open source video player formerly known as Democracy) is running a contest right now to design a revised one-click subscribe button.

A Fun Little Design Contest
Design up to three buttons and submit them as links in the comments. On August 20th, we’ll create a blog post with all of the submissions.
There aren’t a lot of constraints on what you can submit. Our goal is to have a selection of buttons that would look nice on a blog sidebar or myspace page. We hope to see a variety of sizes and colors.

Here are my three submissions, shown on different backgrounds. My goal for this is to create simple, clean, and usable buttons.

	#FFFFFF	#666666	#000000
Option #1
Option #2
Option #3

I’ll update this post once voting is started so you can vote for my submissions if you like them

Update: Thanks to everyone who voted for my submissions. (I won the grand prize. )

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I am totally looking forward to this. For years I have been looking for someone to do this exact show, and now someone has gone and done it. I’m very excited. And it’s scheduled to come to Columbia, MO later this year in October. So I may get to see it twice… w00t.

Check it out: Video Games Live

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