Loose keys are one of the sure signs that you’re imminently moving.  Your contact lens solution sits alone as the last surviving representative from the bathroom regiment.  Well, except for his partner, the contact lens case.  Your laptop has survived, too, because it’s charging up for the early morning departure and you can’t possibly pack it away yet.  You will need to look up some detail at the last minute.  Your sheets are gone, and you’re probably going to sleep in your clothes.  Related, you hope that Old Spice works for 24 hours, since the thing is packed away and just to be safe, you put it with all the other dangerous multiple-ounce supplies.  Just remember to triple check your phone’s alarm, because your real alarm clock is packed away.  And sleep a little, if you’re lucky.

The coffee mug is to save thirty cents.  And the trees.

News organizations are good at making it seem like a horse race that’s still kind of neck-in-neck. It’s good for fairness amongst the candidates, and it’s good for encouraging people to watch the news. But I wanted some straight answers. Vikas mentioned Intrade, where people can go buy stock in particular outcomes. They’ve got Obama at 91.6% right now. But still, that’s just a market, and markets aren’t always right.

So, is there a better way to end the discussion? Yes. The following table, I think, ends the dispute.

Obama will win the Democratic nomination.

*Updated*

Here’s how it works:

• Take the current delegate status, minus superdelegates.
• Take recent polls for the next two all remaining contests (Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Montana, South Dakota), and give Hillary every single undecided voter. (This will not happen in reality unless she singlehandedly prevents a terrorist attack or Obama reveals a new strategy of “hopelessness,” with the catchphrase “no we can’t!”)
• Obama ends up on top, 1702 to 1588.
• Even if you include MI & FL, Obama ends up on top, 1771 to 1766.
  

In order for Hillary to win, then, 62% of the undecided superdelegates would have to decide to go against the popular vote. And remember, the real number will be higher than that because every assumption here heavily favored Clinton. Will this happen? No. I’d go buy some Intrade stock if I were you.

Today I was running for a while in Central Park.  It’s nice to run when all of the Olympic athletes aren’t out in fancy running gear, lapping you, while their hearts thump along at a chill 65 bpm.

But anyway, if you aren’t an Olympic athlete, I think you have to put a decent amount of mental focus into running.  I can’t really focus on anything moderately complex when running.  The good news is you’re boosting your cardiovascular system and improving muscle tone.  And your exercise goes by faster.

In comparison, if I walk, I can have a more interesting mental dialogue.  This is a great time to put your thoughts in perspective, and look at things from a different angle without all the contextual clutter of your usual workspace.  For me, this usually includes rethinking some technical challenge or general strategy.  It’s not always work — maybe it includes time to think of what birthday presents I should get for others, or who I need to send a thank-you card to or get in touch with.  But the point is, I’m always surprised by the number of important ideas that emerge when I’m just walking.  This is, I think, more valuable than a little added muscle tone.

Hybrid

I think the most advantageous strategy is to run first.  Run until you get a second wind and your legs start feel different, maybe a little numb.  And your field of vision is narrowed by about 15 degrees.  Then, with your senses partially numbed, walk home and divert all of your energy to your thoughts.  If you’ve got an MP3 player, either shut it off or play some song you’ve already heard a billion times.  That way you’ll ignore it.  Make sure your field of vision expanded again, that means your brain has the right amount of oxygen.  Take a few breaths, and think like you’ve never thought before.

Comments in code today are so archaic.  I just realized this when I thought about migrating this little sketch into some code I was writing.  I could do it, and it wouldn’t be the first time I turned a simple diagram into either some overly verbose English description or some time-consuming ASCII art, like …

/*
Here’s a bad ASCII art diagram that poorly explains
the code below.

[  ][  ][  ]
[  ][  ][  ]

[  ][  ][  ] [  ][  ]
         [  ][  ][  ]

         [  ][  ][  ]

*/

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just annotate something with a tablet pen?  The annotation could be stored as a compressed base64 string at the bottom of the same code file.  It could be visually anchored to a marker within existing code or comments.  Visual Studio could just collapse this block and render the inked annotation instead.

Does anything like this already exist?