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I just realized a lot of my uploaded images are missing, I’ll try to fix that… soon..

Barack Obama has raised nearly 600 million dollars: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/summary.php?cid=N00009638
John McCain has raised nearly 360 million dollars: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/summary.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00006424

In Comparison George W Bush took in about 367 million in 2004: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/index.php?cycle=2004
and 192 million in 2000: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/index.php?cycle=2000

One of the criticisms of the Bush run for the White House was how much money he had, which we haven’t heard about Barack Obama. Why? And why does it cost so much to run a campaign these days? The only thing I can praise John McCain for is for keeping the money under control. Now thats money raised, but Barack has spent about 470 million of his contributions thus far and will probably spend a bit more for his TV show tonight. I just find it all a little odd.

Just as a note, I’m not voting for either Obama or McCain, I just don’t agree with their platforms 100% so I can’t vote for them. So I’m not trying to bash what Obama has done for the sake of bashing Obama. This is all just statement of fact. I wonder how much under their new tax plans this can be taxed…

I just had a small epiphany for a decent experiment with Electronic voting. The idea is simple:

1. Write a backend database using open source software to store voting records.
2. Write the frontend web interface with login, vote, live results pages.
3. Issue two forms of unique identifiers (think SSN, drivers license) to millions of people worldwide.
4. Make a day for people to come online and vote on a fake ballot to test the system.
5. Allow people to venture in and try to 'hack' this imaginary system to change votes or skew voting results.
6. Take the knowledge learned in Step 5 and re-examine the architecture to fix any patches.
7. Rinse, Repeat.

Its so simple. Making this a community driven project with Open Source Software will make it free and also more open to public scrutiny. After it is all over, it'll be a good thing to promote worldwide for any democratic nation to use as their voting system. Or at least test in the real-world until the system is stable. Sure beats the other proposed, closed, voting systems that were so prone to problems!

Thoughts? I'll try to create something in "my spare time" for this. It does sound really interesting to me and I'm sure a lot of others would be interested as well.

I'm still in the process of getting a house, so I thought I'd provide some insight into how I see the market since I'm in the thick of it. I'd like to start by saying that what the news says is false, with a little bit of truth. It is true that the housing prices have dropped a lot, which is mainly due to the amount of foreclosed homes on the market. But homes in the low range (<400k) are selling like mad, especially in Ventura County (California). So the market is still moving, except house prices have dropped. In my mind it is a good thing that the price of homes has dropped, as it allows more people to move into homes they can afford. The market the past couple of years has been insane with homes in the 500k+ range, even for small homes. Thats a half-million dollar home. How can someone who makes even 100k a year afford that type of home? Well you finance it at a low rate, with nothing down, which will adjust at some point to a higher rate. Thats why the market crashed, the high price of homes that was out of proportion to incomes in California, it couldn't go on forever. Now we're here.

There are a few problems that we've encountered while looking for a home. One is that there are now a lot of sharks in the market. We've seen people out looking for an investment property since houses are much cheaper now. When we submit an offer there are usually multiple offers, some of them cash offers. It makes it hard for us to get something within our price range and it just plain sucks. But these people have been doing this even in the higher-priced market, so its expected. Another problem we've hit is pre-approvals. I have preapproval from americorp financing, but apparently that isn't enough. We're bidding on foreclosed homes, owned by banks. So what do they want us to do? Get pre-approved through them! On the outside they want preapproval so they can ensure the property will close escrow, so if your financing goes through you have them to finance through. But I have another theory. The big one I've had trouble with is Countrywide, the leader in foreclosed homes. So much so that they have their own marketplace set up to sell their newly acquired assets. Plus they want you to get approval through them… so you might end up getting a loan from them… so they keep the property under their title (or lien, or whatever) and let you rent. If you're lucky and you pay off your loan, they get income from the interest on the loan. If you don't, they repocess the property, still getting something from the interest and resell to another chum. Sounds like a profitable business. But thats just a theory. More updates when they happen.