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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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A Geeky Spin Chilling a Cocktail - Round Ice Cubes

I found these funky ice cube trays at the MOMA store in Soho in NYC. The “cubes” are about 2 inches in circumference. (Am I using that term correctly? From the North Pole to the South Pole of the round ice “cube” is 2 inches. Well, you get what I mean.) They are $7 each and only make 2 ice cubes globes. I bought 3 of them, spending a crazy $21 so my ice is not only cool, but hip.

Update on March 29, 2008: I see these are now available on MoMA’s web site. Click here to visit their product page.

The YouTubified Election of 2008

This morning, Hillary Clinton officially announced her presidential ambitions. My impression is that Hillary Clinton a really smart person, who is definitely up the difficult task of being president of the United States. The other candidate competing for my vote, Barack Obama, also seems like a smart, capable person who may also be up for that challenge. (I’m sorry, John Edwards, you’re not up to the challenge when competing against these two.)

But who will win the Democratic primary race, Clinton or Obama? For many years, a candidate’s on-camera persona has held sway with voters than the substance of their message. The JFK Nixon debates are an easy example of this. Radio listens thought Nixon won the debate, TV viewers though JFK did. In the upcoming YouTubified election, I believe this effect will be magnified more than ever. Perception trumps reality. Minus any scandal, the candidate who speaks best, regardless of content, will win the election.

Let me suggest what is reality and what is perception between them. The reality is that Hillary Clinton is a tougher, smarter politician, better suited for the presidential seat. She’s got the experience and the savvy to get people on her side behind the scenes to get her goals accomplished.  Barack Obama has also got some of these qualities—he’s intelligent and has some political experience, but if this were a written test, he would definitely come in second to Clinton. But reality is not the only factor here that determines who people cast their vote for. The perception war between these two favors Obama. His on-camera persona is one who feels the voter’s fears and personal struggles, understands his or her lot in life. He’s here to fix things for “me” and has the best chance of doing it because he “gets me”.  Ms. Clinton, try as she might, can’t “feel” more than Mr. Obama.

Clinton’s web site promises a conversation happening between each voter and her, facilitated by the web. This is where I think the reality of her political savvy could potentially win. If she’s here, in my living room, listening to me more than Obama is, maybe she can get enough of those “perception” points in her column to pull this out.

I’m definitely ready for a different attitude of the person who occupies the office of the president. Luckily, I think either choice between Clinton and Obama is a much better situation that we are now in.

All I can hope is that the best candidate (but by which criteria) wins.

Now for some video.

Barack Obama on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton on The View

Update: I may be completely wrong about this race. See this story on ABCNEWS called Clinton Leads ‘08 Dems; No Bounce for Obama. Go Hill!

Ruby on Rails on Deck

Last night I started a new Lynda.com course, Ruby On Rails Essential Training. I’ve wanted to know more about RoR for a while and it’s so much easier for me to absorb information like this when I can hear and see the lesson happening rather than just reading a book.  If you’ve heard of RoR and want to simply know what it is, you should check out the link and watch the free movies. They offer a good overview of what it is and will walk you through installing it on your computer. If you want the full lesson though, you’ve got to pay lynda.com for it. I’ve had a great experience with the courses from the site. Highly recommended. 

There Goes 6 Hours, Or, My Day with Civilization 4.

I’ve been a fan of Sid Meier’s Civilization games for many years. I’ve played Civ 1, 2, and 3. All have been some of wonderful time sinks. After putting it off for a long time, I finally broke down and bought Civilization 4 when I saw that it was optimized to run on my Intel Mac. My aging copy of Civ 3 was PowerPC only and it was time for the upgrade.

I’m not sure why, but every iteration of this game is literally makes the hours disappear for me. There have been a few games in my life that have been able to do that. The original SimCity was a fascinating game. I also like SimCity 2, but they’ve gone downhill for me since then. Another great game for consuming the hours was Ico, for the Playstation 2. The difference with Ico is that once you played it, it was over. There wasn’t much replay value for me, but it was a beautiful game.

Getting back to my addiction to Civilization though. The only game that has compared to its drug-like draw has been World of Warcraft, aka WoW. I’m going to have a tough even tomorrow because WoW is getting its first expansion released tomorrow, The Burning Crusade. My copy has shipped and should be waiting for me at work tomorrow. I’m not addicted enough to run WoW:TBC on one computer and Civ4 on another tomorrow night, but as you can see, it has crossed my mind.

CBS and YouTube, Sitting in a Tree

I’m not at CES anymore, but just today I read about a deal announced at CES between YouTube and CBS in which CBS is giving permission for people to use CBS content in their own creations. That’s not only cool, it’s really smart on CBS’s part. It’s a great way to encourage CBS content to make its way deeper into the culture. Let your audience promote your shows for you while they’re putting their own spin on them. If someone feels such a connection to one of your brands and uses it to express themselves, sueing them is probably not a great idea. (The following video isn’t necessarily good, but stopping this type of video from going live is pretty pointless.)