Scripting News for 7/21/2008

VPs coming soon 

Friends close to both campaigns say the announcements of the Republican and Democratic choices for vice-president are likely coming within the week. At that the announcements will be unusually late.

No speculation on the choices from the sources, however — I have a strong feeling that McCain will pick Romney. Seems like an obvious balance to McCain. Younger, but not too young. Tall and healthy, conservative. He might be smarter than McC, but not by too much.

Obama will pick someone safe, not too famous, not flamboyant. Easy on the eyes and easy to forget.

McCain, who is the full-hour guest on This Week on Sunday may choose that venue to make his announcement, opposite Obama who is the full-hour guest on Meet the Press.

April Fool in July? 

I don’t know about those guys over at TechCrunch, they always get me with their April Fools jokes. Now here comes this piece that announces they’re getting into the hardware business! Could it be for real? I don’t know!!

I’m reminded of this post by Mike this weekend where he reviewed a service by the former editors of Uncov, and said, quite accurately that you always understimate how hard something is when you look in from the outside. Making something easy to use is a lot more work than making soemthing that’s not, although to the non-engineer this seems counter-intuitive.

Now, Nik is an engineer, so I don’t want to be appearing to talk down to him, cause that wouldn’t be appropriate. But this does either seem completely utterly unrealistic or a damned good off-season April Fool joke. 🙂

PS: This post suggests that it’s serious. In which case it’s a good thing — thinking big is how you get big things done. Best of luck. I’ll buy one for $200 for sure. Maybe even more. 🙂

Catching up with the Junks 

A couple of minor updates from the Land of Junks.

1. NewsJunk and TechJunk are now available on identi.ca, thanks to its new wonderful API.

2. Both feeds are available in OPML as well, for applications that like OPML.