This is another one of those rambling blog posts where I have no set agenda before I sit down to the keyboard and start banging away. I am out of town again with work (no, I don’t blog all day in my underwear – a frightening thought), so please bear with me as I stare at the four walls of my hotel room and the lovely view of the employee parking garage outside my room’s window.
Recent Kindle Paperwhite Giveaway
I did hear back from Karl, the winner of the latest giveaway of a Kindle Paperwhite with 3G. He seemed pretty excited about winning it, but I have to tell you it will be a few weeks before he will receive it: there must be one heck of a backlog for these, as I placed the order for him at the end of last week, yet Amazon tells me delivery won’t happen on Karl’s doorstep until December 24th! Congratulations again to Karl, and I hope the delivery date gets moved up a bit.
A couple of people had issues with being able to enter the giveaway – that appeared to mainly be a function of the developer of the plug-in I used, where one thing or the other wouldn’t work. For you techies out there, it appeared to be an issue related to a Flash plug-in that was either incompatible with some displays (strangely, the Kindle Fire and not so strange some iPhone devices). That’s two giveaways in a row where this particular plug-in has had issues, so before I do another one I will be investigating other alternatives.
The US Elections
This next section is for the USA readers of the blog: no matter if your candidate wins or loses tomorrow, maybe – just maybe – our Congress can act like adults and remember it’s about compromise vs. everything has to be 100% one way or the other and nothing ever gets accomplished. I’m tired of all of the robocalls, mudslinging, and both sides taking little snippets of a longer conversation and twisting what the context of the original speech or conversation was about in the first place and I’m sure you are, too.
Knowing I would be out of town this week for work, I voted early: if you haven’t voted yet, please get out there and vote tomorrow as there are billions of people across the globe who would dearly love to be able to vote in any election or in an election where the outcome wasn’t determined in advance. I heard a quote from someone – I can’t remember who right now – that went along the lines like this:
“Americans will go halfway across the globe to defend someone else’s idea or form of democracy, but won’t walk across the street to vote.”
Prove the naysayers wrong, and get out there and vote in this and all elections!
Okay, I’ll get off of my soapbox now!
Election Heat Map
I said I would get off of my soapbox, but I’m not finished with the election. Many of you will recall I told you back in August about the “Election Heat Map” Amazon was maintaining, which profiles the best-selling “red” or “blue” books by state.
Amazon has released what they are calling the “Amazon Election Heat Map 2012” which has colored each state “red” or “blue” in terms of the top-selling political books by state. They are computing percentages, updated daily, for each state and the USA by comparing the 100 best-selling “blue” books during the time period against the 100 best-selling “red” books during the same time period. You can click your mouse over each state and see what people are reading by state which, in my un-educated opinion, gives you a fairly good idea of what the other side is thinking.
Clicking on the individual states is interesting in a voyeuristic type of way as you see where the book-buying public of the various states are leaning and what books they are purchasing. Some states are really red, some are a kind of pinkish color, and, as I type this, only three states (Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont) and the District of Columbia are blue; and two states (Maryland and Rhode Island) are grey, which means they are evenly split at 50-50. Is your state red, grey, or blue?
If you would like to take a look at this “Election Heat Map 2012” you can click here or type in http://bit.ly/heatmap2012 into your web browser.
By the way – a “blue” state represents favoring the Democratic Party and a “red state” represents favoring the Republican Party.
The #1 blue book is Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, which has received an average user rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars based on 85 customer reviews. The #1 red book is Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever by Martin Dugard and Bill O’Reilly which has received an average user rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars based on 3,674 customer reviews.
Well, looking at what I’ve written so far I realize I talked about politics too much, yet at least I didn’t start harping about one candidate over the other – if you’ve read this far I appreciate your patience!
Have a great rest of the week-
Michael
Posted in: Giveaways, Misc. and Random Stuff
