Note From The Editor | featured news

Over the years, whenever the site was slow to load up, I always went through the same routine. I checked traffic logs to see if it was due to a sudden increase in traffic. If not, I would look at the mysql slow query log to see if there were slow queries bogging up the database. If that wasn’t the culprit, then I would take a look at the access logs to see if there were any irregular activities from search engine bots.

It was supposed to be a close race, but if you had been following Nate Silver’s 538 blog on The New York Times, then it wasn’t. Within days of the election, it showed Barack Obama with a probability of about 91% to beat Mitt Romney -- based mostly on state polls and the electoral college, not the national polls or the popular vote, although both of the latter are included in his algorithm.

Even with that stat behind me, I was still concerned because there was still about a nine percent chance that Romney would become president, and you know the saying - shit happens.

Lately, we’ve been adding more local news feeds to the site. Eventually, I want to have most of the major cities across the U.S. covered. What I had noticed since starting this local news project was that the more feeds we've added to the site, the slower the feeds on the homepage updated.

Yes, the third presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on foreign policy was, unsurprisingly, boring, but at least it was good boring -- for a Democrat, that is. It was only surprisingly boring if you bought into the pre-debate hype generated by the media, which pointed to this as a make-or-break moment for both candidates.

So far, Barack Obama’s victorious outing in the second presidential debate against Mitt Romney isn’t showing much of a bounce in the national or state polls. If there’s any bounce, it’s very slight in Obama’s favor. It does appear to have halted Romney’s momentum though. That, in and of itself, is pretty good news for Democrats. As is, even though both candidates are statistically tie in the polls, Obama is favored to win by popular vote and electoral college.

Like the vice presidential debate, I was afraid to watch -- afraid that Barack Obama would just be too nice of a guy to get into a brawl with Mitt Romney in the second presidential debate.

I had low expectations. After Barack Obama’s disappointing and deflating debate performance last week, there’s a lot of pressure for Joe Biden to deliver. That’s scary because the guy’s been known as a gaffe machine. And you never know how people perform under pressure.

At the get go, I thought Biden delivered big time. He had energy. He had fire. He took control of the debate.

If you’re a Democrat or an independent supporting Barack Obama, last night was tough to watch. Obama took a lot of punches, but didn’t fight back. All he did was block or deflect Mitt Romney’s attacks on his policies regarding the economy, medicare, Obamacare, taxes, and social security.

Obama Was All Defense and No Offense

My 2-year-old and her cousin thought my laptop needed some cleaning while I stepped out to run an errand. The door to my home office was closed, but not locked. When I got back, I was told that my nephew was pouring water with a small bucket onto my less-than-a-year-old ASUS Zenbook while my daughter did the wiping with a towel.

When my mom discovered what had happened, she immediately wiped as much of the water off the laptop as she could.

According to this AP article, The year is 2030. Man will walk on Mars if everything goes according to plan, and if the government gives them adequate funding.

NASA plans to send six to eight astronauts. The trip would take six months each way, and they’ll stay there for 18 months. The mission “will give scientists the chance for unique research on everything from looking for other life forms and for the origin of life on Earth to the effects of partial gravity on bone loss.”