travis johnson

Rachel and I volunteered this afternoon with the Obama campaign for a couple hours. We met downtown, learned a few of the rules about canvassing door-to-door and we headed out to Springfield. We headed pretty deep into Springfield, actually.

With all that’s been going on between the current Wall Street bailout and the election I’ve been thinking a lot about where I stand on “the issues”. We need a major change in the direction this country is headed. We’re not in our current state of recession because of some bad luck, we got here because of the last eight years of poor decision making by the Republicans. They’ve proven that turning a blind eye to the financial sector doesn’t work. They’ve proven that without a solid plan (or any plan for that matter) we can’t fight a war we aren’t prepared for. And they’ve proven most of all that caring for the top 1% leaves the remaining 99% of us is awful shape.

We knocked on 26 doors today and by the end of our list Rachel and I were pretty depressed. We weren’t asked to talk to any Republicans - just Democrats, Independents, Greens and those not affiliated with any parties - and we only came across five people that had decided to vote for Senator Obama. We walked through the very neighborhood that would benefit from Obama’s tax cuts and saw kids playing that would have a chance thanks to Obama’s early childhood education and college tuition assistance credits. The school vouchers that President Bush has wanted and McCain continues to propose would do nothing positive for these kids.

I’m voting for Obama because I believe it is the government’s job to care for all its members, not just the President’s friends. Providing better education and assistance to those in need will make this place better for everyone. I see this as a very crucial election. Do we want four more years of what we got in the last eight or do we want real, honest change that will put this country back on track?

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Tags: obama, politics

When Buzz opened to all publishers last night I decided to throw together a Wordpress plugin to easily put Buzz badges on my blog. I then and put up a quick tweet announcing the plugin. Pat tried it out and put up a post about Buzz and the plugin. A few other blogs picked up the plugin, too. I finally created a page for the plugin tonight so people could link back to a page with updated info on the plugin. I also updated the plugin tonight with a much-improved admin page and a few more configuration options. Check it out.

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Despite my lack of updates here, I’ve been having a great summer. If you follow me on Twitter this will all be old news and if you don’t follow me there you should.

Summer kicked off with me and Rachel getting a puppy. Crusher is a Boston terrier / chihuahua mix. He’s only five pounds, but has a big personality. He’s fitting in to our family very nicely.

Softball and basketball were both very successful this summer. Our softball team finished 2nd and I think I had at least 10 home runs. Dunkamite also finshed 2nd. We lost our first game and won out the rest of the season. We had a stretch of three games that we won by 80, 60 and 40 points.

We went to the Oregon Country Fair again and it was as interesting as ever. We brought along a few first timer friends and their reactions were mixed. I always enjoy it but can only take a few hours of it before I need to get home and return to my everyday life.

Other than that, my summer has been filled with work. Lots and lots of work. I haven’t been traveling much which has been a welcomed change. I have really enjoyed working on such an ambitious project. I really like working for a company that I believe in. I think yahoo is doing lots and lots of things right - across all parts of the company - and I can’t wait to see it all come together.

My parents are coming out to visit us in a couple weeks and I think we’re going to try to plan a camping trip before summer escapes us.

I’m posting this from my phone without proofreading what I’ve written. Just roll with the typos and I’ll try to fill in a few links tonight.

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Tags: life

I’ve been running the iPhone 2.0 software for a couple weeks and think apple has definitely improved their mobile phone offering, but I have some issues with the entire platform.

I was most excited for the new apps to be able to use my current location. I was hoping for social applications to take advantage of this feature and none of the ones released so far have gained the critical mass necessary. For instance, I’m on loopt and have half a dozen friends but only one has updated their location in the last couple days. I also check twinkle a couple times a day for tweets within 10 miles of me and it’s always the same few people writing. I think yelp will be pretty cool when I go somewhere outside of Eugene, but I don’t really consider it a social app.

Is anyone using any good iPhone social apps that have a solid user base yet?

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Tags: iphone

I’ve been trying hard to figure out the right mix between posting here and on Twitter. Over the past few months I’ve clearly been giving preference to the latter. This morning I discovered the wordpress iPhone app that looks to be a pretty good tool to post to this blog from by phone. We’ll see if that helps my output here any.

The app even integrated nicely with photos from the phone.

I’m going to try and post more here for those that don’t care about every last detail I share on Twitter. Maybe I’ll even start with a little blogging from the bench tonight as Dunkamite takes on whoever is next.

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Tags: iphone

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Rachel put together a video complication of a few camera videos we’ve taken of Crusher over the past few weeks.

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Tags: Crusher

A few friends from the office went in together and got a 10 game mini pack of tickets local Single-A ball club here in Eugene, [The Emeralds](http://eugene.emeralds.milb.com/index.jsp?sid=t461). The tickets recently arrived and below is the schedule.

I am most excited about the July 2nd game because there will be fireworks following the game

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Congtatulations to this year’s Eightfivethtee Classic winner, ClownBaby. I don’t know who you are, but if you identify yourself i will send you your prize. Needless to say, everyone in this year’s classic did pretty well since KU won it all - and what win that was!

While I didn’t officially win, I walk away with the satisfaction of beating my brother-in-law, Adam. Better luck next time Adam.

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I had to give Google’s new App Engine a try, so I quickly re-built my dad’s The Bet site. The one page-site was built in Python, because that’s what you have to build all apps in and only took me about an hour to setup, build and deploy. It was super-easy. I’m a little worried about building apps that then tie me to Google’s platform, but not enough to stop me from building these simple apps. I’m sure I’ll keep adding to the app, so keep stopping by.

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Tags: python