I am just floored by the pictures from the Obama rally in Portland earlier today. They are saying 75,000+ showed up.

(official campaign shot)

(crowd's eye view)

According to Wikipedia, Portland, OR has a population of 568,380. So another way to look at this is, Obama held a rally and 13% of Portlanders came to see him. That's incredible.

Or, it's 20% of the people who voted in the 2004 primary.

It's more than a couple months ago, too. Back in March, Molly and I tried to go see the big O speak in Eugene. About 9,000 people made it in to the auditorium. We were outside with about another 5,000 that wouldn't fit. Eugene's about 150k, so a little less than 10% of the city showed up for that one.

(another view)

Seriously though. 75,000 people. OMG.

With the primary season coming to a close, I finally got on board and wrote some election software. This afternoon, I put up a twitter account that grabs incoming primary results and tweets them.

Credit for the idea is due to Ben, who was looking around for something that did that.

I'm not much of a mashup maker, but I guess this counts. Election data is provided by the NY Times and their nice clean markup, and distribution (obv) by Twitter. The app itself is just a simple ruby script: about 150 lines of code in total. I know I'm late to this party -- but Twitter's API is awesome. It's incredibly simple to use, and all you need to feed it are a username/password, no API key, etc. involved.

The NC and IN results are coming in now, and the primaries are winding down. @electionlive will be sitting there, watching as WV, KY, OR, Puerto Rico, MT and SD go down. And then I suppose there's November...

Today, the company I work for, Auctomatic.com (or formally, Entity, inc. — a classic startup name!) announced that it has been bought by Live Current Media. This has been in the works for a while and it has been hard not to talk about it and spill the beans.

Coverage of the deal:

• Auctomatic blog
• Live Current blog
• Kulveer's BBC piece
• TechCrunch
• VentureBeat
• Cnet
• Mashable

Update 3/27:

• Harj's blog (thank yous!)
• Kulveer's blog [PIC]
• Chris Sacca (amazing post)
• Irish Times

Live Current was formerly called Communicate.com, and their main offices are in Vancouver, BC. So, this acquisition means that I'll be moving to Canada for the foreseeable future. I spent some time up there last fall (coincidentally; we went to spend some time with DabbleDB, who invented our web framework), and loved the city. It's going to be great to get to know it better. Plus, Squamish and Whistler are only a couple hours away, so the playground is good too.

The last 8 months have been a bit of a blur -- this has been a wild ride. Thinking back to June 2007, it seems so long ago. My last project was working great as an application, but had not succeeded as a business. I knew that I wanted to work for a startup, and that I wanted to join up with a group that had a bit more business acumen than I did, and a clear idea of the direction they wanted to go, and why.

I ended up joining Auctomatic, and I'm glad I did. It's been a privilege working with Harjeet, Kulveer, Patrick and Brian. Harj and Kulveer are two of the best young entrepreneurs out there, and Patrick is one of the brightest programmers I've ever met. I've learned a ton from them — from programming languages and techniques, to negotiation tactics, to SOMA's best deliverable dinners. Of course, it's never quite a smooth ride with a tiny startup, and (since the founders are Irish and British) I've also seen more of the US immigration system than most Americans probably do in a lifetime (it's a mess!). But, overall it's been a great experience. I'm extremely proud of the work we've done and the value we've created in a short period of time. And, I'm very grateful to Harj, Kul and Patrick for inviting me to join them. They have provided great leadership and a steady hand.

Also, big thanks to Paul, Jessica, Trevor and Robert at Y Combinator. If YC hadn't funded my previous project, Harj, Kul and I might never have met. Thanks also to Paul M, who did some perfectly subtle matchmaking last summer when I was trying to decide what to do next.

Up in Vancouver two weeks ago, I met most of the Live Current folks (the current live currents?). We're joining a really strong team there, and we're really just getting started. We'll have the resources to do things we could only dream about as a tiny startup... this next phase is gonna be great.

The other day I was listening to an episode of KCRW's film interview program The Treatment, and I came across this statement by Tony Gilroy about how he writes. Mr. Gilroy wrote the screenplays for the Bourne movies and wrote and directed Michael Clayton.

If you're a coder, I bet you'll recognize his style:

Elvis Mitchell

And what about you, what's your schedule for writing?

Tony Gilroy

I've turned into sort of a bingey kind of writer. I'm capable of going great lengths of time without writing, and I sorta get stoked up and my process I guess in general...

I sort of have an accumulation stage, where I sketch and I make a huge, huge mess, a big compost pile of scenes, and dialogue, and research, and this huge, huge mess, and at a certain point that's over. Then I try to write an outline very very quickly -- really as quickly as I possibly can, in four days or a week or something, that has almost every scene of the movie, to try to have that sort of rapid -- you know, films are pretty brisk, it's a two hour experience...

There's sort of a pregnant moment where you can't accumulate, and you can't waste time anymore, it's finally time to do it, and it becomes this... rush, and I try to rush through, scene by scene by scene by scene document, and then I'll take a long time turning that into a proper script, then I'll really go back and -- as I get rolling, I don't want to stop working. I go from not being able to work to not being able to stop working, at the very end, you know, I'm not sleeping very much anymore, I'm trying to be -- the whole process is about trying to get to that point where I'm completely obsessed, and I'll work all the time at the end.

(This seems a little incoherent transcribed, but it makes perfect sense as a spoken conversation).

Full interview here.

Hey, you know what really rules? The pie/clock shaped feed update-meter in NetNewsWire:



NNW is the only app I've seen it in, and I have no idea where it comes from. It's just like a normal spinner () and fits into the same places, but it's so much better, because it conveys progress information, too.

Just sayin'.

Here's a simple primary analysis I haven't come across anywhere else. When Obama wins a primary, he has tended to win by much larger margins than when Clinton does. Not only has he won more contests in total, but 12 of those were by a >30% margin, as opposed to only one (AR) for Clinton.



The graph is sorted by margin of victory. Positive bars are Obama wins, negative bars are Clinton wins. I completely ignore Edwards, which skews the results a little for the early primaries, and include Florida and the Virgin Islands, but exclude Michigan (since a score was only reported for Clinton).

Data source: http://politics.nytimes.com/elect... Spreadsheet: demo_win_margins.xls

Now it's time to test pushing images up to the server. A good excuse to post a couple pictures.

This is a panda paw, at the Chengdu Research Base in Sichuan, China. You can see its false thumb:



And here's the Titan, in the Fisher Towers, UT (map)



This concludes the test of the image uploading system :)

Since I make my living (and spend pretty much all my time playing with) the web, it sure seems like I should have a personal site. I've been putting off creating one for a couple years now, and I'm really happy to have fixed this.

It took me a long time partly because I didn't want to just install Wordpress and be done. Most of the personal sites that I really enjoy -- like Tim Bray's, Peter Norvig's, and jwz.org are at least somewhat idiosyncratic. That appeals to me. I want a good foundation for experimenting at least as much as I want to write, and I think any off the shelf software would stifle that.

So, here we go. This page you're reading right now is being served to you by a custom blogging tool, written in Ruby. It uses the excellent Mongrel to serve itself, but other than that it's almost completely custom and library-free. I guess this means I'm writing a web framework (these days, everybody's got one). So far it's pretty simple, but it already does a couple neat things that are making me happy. All data lives in memory, and automatically persists itself to disk whenever it changes, and pages are described with a simple programmatic HTML (similar to Seaside's) that lets you build a library of compound tags as you go.

Here's hoping I manage to keep at this, and am still updating this thing in 2018.