If you can’t see the freight train of the 2008 Presidential Election coming, you must be blind. Debates between primary candidates are already on the air and make for great entertainment. Here’s my prediction: none of the above. We’re going to be surprised next year by a candidate and a platform and he’ll win in a landslide.

The United States is increasingly aware of the concept of saving energy. Long the niche cause of a small part of society, the last 10 years has seen a sharp increase in recycling, waste reduction and consideration for the environment.

Then came the war in Iraq.

The chain that connects our cars to a oil sheik in the Middle East got pulled tight a couple of times in the last two years. This year, there’s rumblings of US$4 a gallon for gasoline during the prime summer vacation months.

Here’s how it breaks down: people are sick of the war and they are sick of arguing about it. There is one thing that Americans of all political leanings agree upon and that’s the price of gas and it’s too high. The candidate that figures out how to spin energy conservation, the impact on energy of the war in Iraq, the Republican party and it’s ties to big oil company profits together will win the election.

There’s already someone who is doing that: Al Gore.

He’ll step back and let everyone yell and scream about George Bush and whether it was right or wrong to go to Iraq. When the general public is tired of hearing that line, he’ll step in and say “Let’s be nice to our neighbors, explore alternative energy, stop the advance of global warming.” It will be refreshing and positive and *that’s* what will win the election.

Pretty Pretty Bang Bang: “Since we have vision insurance (for the first time) and my old glasses were almost 2 years old, I decided to invest in some new frames. I went out of my normal zone and opted for wire frames with rimless bottoms.”

Click over to see the great picture of Tammy with new glasses and (bonus!) new shorter hair. She looks fantastic!

Ted Leung on the air: “Last week while I was in San Francisco, I sat down for an hour with David Wadhwani, the VP of product development for Flex and Ely Greenfield, one of the Flex architects. After I wrote my original post about open sourcing Flash, I got a note from David asking if I would be willing to spend some time to help him understand the issues that I raised in that post and its follow ons. This afternoon David called to tell me that Adobe was announcing that it was open sourcing Flex v3. I was especially happy when he said that my posts and our conversation had an impact on his thinking about open source and Flex. There is a press release with the announcement as well as a FAQ on the basics.”

ZachIsHere: “I learned that my good friend Joel had a bat in his place in KC via Facebook.”

Here’s the a picture of the about box as proof: Radio UserLand lives!

There’s still bugs and it’s not ready for testing, but it works

I got some email from yesterday’s short post about working with the [Frontier](http://frontierkernel.org) kernel project to make a Radio UserLand UB. Here’s some answers to those questions:

* The UserLand Software license currently applied to Radio seems to allow the software to be used with another kernel application as long as it’s properly licensed.

* The source code of the kernel project contains all of the code you need to build a Radio UserLand application and it has from Day 1. That means that the Radio UserLand **kernel** is as much “open source” as Frontier.

* UserLand Software (the current version) is still the legal copyright owner of the product name “Radio UserLand” and the root file code is still “closed source”.

* If I get this to work at all, I’m going to suggest that UserLand make the open-source kernel the one for Radio and sell hosting and application upgrades for their yearly $40.

Daring Fireball: “Switching contexts on the Mac is conceptually based around apps, not projects. Coda is like OpenDoc, Panic-style.”

Today I bought a piece of software sight unseen. [Panic](http://panic.com) came out with a new all-in-one web editor called [Coda](http://panic.com/coda) that looks fantastic. I already own Transit, their wonder file transfer software so I knew that this would be good. I got halfway through [Steven’s blog post](http://stevenf.com/2007/04/announcing_coda_10.php) about the features when I skipped to the bottom and read “For a limited time, Coda is available for as low as $69 to existing Transmit 3 owners.”

That was all it took.

I bought the license and installed the software. I guess that was a mistake because Coda behaved very oddly until I did the expected: ran the app, quit the app, restart the app and feed it a serial number, quit the app after verification, restart the app and import the bookmarks from Transit, quit the app, restart the app and begin editing.

I expect stuff like that in a “one point oh” product. What I didn’t expect was that I could immediately be useful right out of the box. When you press a toolbar button or select a menu choice, it makes sense and the action is expected–no surprises.

I’ll be redoing [Tammy’s website](http://redbeedesigns.com) in the next few months, so this will be trial run. After that, it’s on to some new WordPress templates for the both of us.

The Dilbert Blog: “I’m good at spotting trends. For example, yesterday I was at a hotel pool and saw an older guy with a ponytail and a hairy chest. He was a generally hairy guy. But his back was evidently shaved. Except for. . . Wait for it. . .”

A couple of months ago, I was able to take advantage of a mistake by Circuit City and purchase a new home theater-in-a-box system by Denon. The Denon DHT-487 is an outstanding setup for a reasonable price–in my case $269. Here’s the story:

It’s a typical Sunday morning in the Kirks household. We’re drinking coffee, eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. Typically, I’ll pull all of the ads out of the paper first, then the pull and toss the “chaff” (classified ads, sports, TV guide), and finally sort the paper for Tammy. I let her read the comics and other sections first while I pour over the ads looking for unique deals.

This particular Sunday morning I breezed through the CC ad until I saw the Denon kit. Knowing it was too good to be true, I grabbed the savings checkbook and went downstairs to talk to Tammy, already working on a project that morning. She confirmed that I was not seeing things nor crazy so I was off.

After a brief discussion with the chagrined CC staff, I walked away with the Denon equipment and a $30 CC gift card. Wow! I spent about four hours that afternoon setting it up and it was time well spent. It’s amazing at full price, let alone the bargain I got. The sound quality is stunning for this type of setup. Combine the good sound with the HDTV I bought in November of 2006 and I have the home theater setup I’ve always dreamed about.

I’ll try to take some pictures this weekend and write some detailed posts on the components. My brother-in-law was down in Springfield for the Easter holiday and we watched Die Hard at full volume. The upconverted picture was amazingly clear, ensuring that I won’t be buying HD-DVD for quite some time. The sounds of bullets, crashing glass and more were crystal clear even at the high volume.

Amazing!