A depressing ad

I saw a very depressing ad for a GPS navigator the other day. The caption on the ad was "Stop bothering strangers!" In other words, it's such a terrible thing to ask someone for directions. Never mind that the stranger might be perfectly happy to do someone a favor....

The Obama - McCain Race

Well, it seems that we will have an interesting Presidential race after all. The combination of an African-American Presidential candidate running opposite a female VP candidate should reveal some interesting facts about the American electorate. Let us just hope that the substantial issues will remain the main focus of the campaign.

Obama and Farrakhan

Sen. Obama's Louis Farrakhan's endorsement is somewhat troubling, albeit perfectly understandable (after all, his objective is to win the nomination, not to be objectively fair and honest... The two definitely don't go together). It seems to be self-evident that either:

• People will think that Obama is beholden to Farrakhan, and that this is liable to influence his decisions about various issues, or
• If Obama and Farrakhan agree on any issue (namely Obama's candidacy) that automatically means that they must agree on everything, which is obviously false.

It's really a shame that the intellectual level of much of the American electorate is so low.

More musings on the Democratic primaries...

It is looking more and more like Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate for President. Of course, it is not "politically correct" to refer to the fact of his race (and I honestly don't think that it makes the slightest bit of difference as to his qualifications for the position), but the fact is that there are certainly a lot of voters to whom it does make a difference. As I mentioned previously, there will no doubt be those who will vote against him simply because he is not white. On the other hand, there will also be those who will vote for him for the exact same reason. What is interesting, however, is that while there are plenty of supporters of the Democrats who might have racist views, it doesn't seem likely that many of those who have, shall we call them, "anti-racist" views, would have voted for the Republican candidate in the first place. If you've managed to follow this, what comes out would seem to be that if Sen. Obama will be the candidate, all other things being equal, it doesn't look like it will help the Democrats so much.

The Democratic primaries

As things stand now, it looks like the Democratic candidate for President will be a member of one or another minority groups (OK, I know that women are not a minority group statistically, but they certainly are politically...) It will be interesting to see how that will impact on the voting. Will women who would have voted Republican now vote for the Democrats, if Hillary Clinton is the candidate? Or will the Democrats lose the votes of people who are not ready for a woman President? Of course, the same questions apply if Sen. Obama is the candidate. Time will tell...
Of course, I'm talking about is people who will vote differently than they otherwise would have, because of the gender/ethnicity of the candidate.

OOPs

I really wish that my first exposure to Object-oriented programming had been with Python. Rather than being overwhelmed with all kinds of obscure keywords (shared, public, friend, etc.) which just made it harder to grasp the basic principles of OOP, I could have just dived right in to the essence of it. Oh well...

Hi everyone

This is a brand-new blog, so I'll just explain how I picked the name I did. I was setting up my Blogger account, when I was asked for the title of the blog. Somehow, I hadn't really thought of one yet, so I let it wait for a while. Nothing popped into my mind, so, since I am a programmer, and I really love the Python language, voilà, we have a name. Seriously, for anyone who is considering learning how to program, IMHO, nothing comes close to Python. It is a simple language to learn and use, but also as powerful as any other language there is.