Last year I noticed that the BBC seemed to report at every single-dollar change in the price of oil, and wondered if they would continue to do so. They didn't disappoint. Oil is $100 a barrel, folks. America and the UK: cower in fear. Trinidad: PARTY TIME!

A little under a month ago I said They will build a box with a DVD slot and a video iPod dock and a wireless Internet connection, and that will be your box A box which does exactly that has just been announced in time for CES, the Consumer Electronics Show(case?), one of the big annual events for the release of new kit. This one is released by little-known Apple accessories maker iLuv, but similar things from bigger names are inevitable.

Last night, after an entertaining dinner with friends in SoMa, I met a different group of friends who were already out in the Castro, in the hopes of getting some dancing in before going home. Within 10 minutes of entering the club: somebody randomly grabbed my ass a creepy old guy in a sweater -- you know that guy -- leered at me a drunken queen in a muscle top grabbed my shoulders and said something unintelligible a muscle mary.... well, just existed two gays got into a fight over the same guy a cute guy hit on me... and when mildly rebuffed immediately hit on another guy, then 2 minutes later another, until he finally started making out with a fourth guy. a tweaker with a ravaged face, clearly high on crystal meth, walked past an ancient man who looked like Ross Perot hit the dancefloor, dressed in glitter and a sleeveless top hundreds of guys openly checked each other out, their hunger undisguised, unsubtle and vulgar It was like some kind of sick parody of what the religious right thinks gay people...

One of the things I often mention when people ask me why I'm so deeply in favour of Obama is that he is the candidate who strikes me as really understanding modern technology. I wasn't sure where I'd even picked up that initial impression (although Hilary's uninformed stance on video game violence made me sure that she didn't understand). But now I'm beginning to find positive evidence. It started with his plans for a national CTO position, but beyond the basic idea that government IT sucks and needs to be fixed, and that telecom carriers are killing innovation and need to be shaken up, there's a deeper issue here that I was finding it difficult to articulate until Matt Stoller did it for me in an article about differences in media policy between Clinton and Obama: the internet and our media are not just issues, and they are not just tech issues, they are organizing principles around which we are shaping the very nature of our politics and culture And that's it. Having an uninformed stance on telecoms...

Putting these here so I don't have to keep looking them up. May also continue to include results. January 3—Iowa Caucus D: Obama, Edwards, Clinton. R: Huckabee, Romney, Thompson (source) January 5—Republican Wyoming caucus Romney, Thompson, Hunter (source) January 8—New Hampshire Primary D: Clinton (39%), Obama (37%), Edwards. R: McCain, Romney January 15—Michigan Primary Biden, Edwards, Richards and Obama are off the democratic ballot. January 19—Nevada Caucus / Republican South Carolina Primary January 26—Democratic South Carolina Primary January 29—Florida Primary February 2―Maine caucus February 5―Super Duper Tuesday Primaries/caucuses for both parties in 19 states, plus three Democratic-only caucuses and one Republican-only primary Updates: 2008.01.13: NH results.

Thanks to Dan Cortesi for the useful Twitter Stats perl script, and more so to Brad Kellett for making it a web service (I mean, seriously, who downloads and installs software these days?). Here are mine: Tweets per day Wednesday is a big day for tweets. No idea why. Just bored? Tweets per hour 9am is no surprise -- I always tweet on the morning shuttle after reading the incoming tweets of the previous night (my UK peeps tweet in the middle of my night). 10pm is surprising; it might be that was the time I was getting home for most of last year. Tweets per month The drop-off in July is almost certainly due to the huge deadline crunch which kicked off around then. This is also a really surprisingly accurate reflection of my "quality of life": things got rapidly awesome until April, improved steadily right through July, and then plunged after August. Top @ replies All this really proves is that Jonathan twitters more than anybody else I know, so I reply to him a lot.

Would it be rude / provocative / silly of me to wear my Yahoo! Pride t-shirt to the gym? Not the purple one with the boa, a white one with a rainbow-tinged "Get out there" logo on the front. It just happens to be a good exercise shirt, is all.

I had a little time to mess around this weekend, so I decided to learn how to do an iPhone site: meet the really very simple iphone.seldo.com. Part of the work I needed to do to get that going also allowed me to finally produce the RSS feed with the scratchpad mixed in that several of you have asked for (and I also finally visibly linked to the RSS feeds, as well as including them in the autodiscovery).

How do I complain about Twitter being down when Twitter is down? Revert to stone-age "blog" technology? What I would be tweeting about, if Twitter weren't down, is how awesome I feel after today's gym session. I've pushed through the sore-every-time stage to the feel-awesome-every-time stage. Woooooo! dances around room

Nothing like a landslide victory to brighten up your weekend. It's official: anybody who doesn't think Barack Obama is going to be the next president hates Hope, is frightened of change, and is probably also a racist.

You have run an excellent campaign. You have taken standard election issues like poverty and healthcare, too often ignored, and pushed hard to make them real for the electorate again. And now with John dropping out of the race, you have an important choice: whom, of the remaining two democratic candidates, can you trust? Who will keep those issues in focus and make real progress on them? I say that candidate is Barack Obama, and you should vote for him. I could talk about the way Barack Obama has worked with the underprivileged in Chicago, try to make some kind of tortured analogy to say that really they're the same kind of guy. But that would be disingenuous of me and insulting to your intelligence. They are different candidates, and that is why you were supporting the other guy. But what is true is that Obama is the candidate who really cares, sincerely cares, about changing what is wrong with this country. He's not in politics to beat the Republicans, or to fight the political battles of the 1970s yet...