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Although I have previously expressed mild reservations about Barack Obama’s ability to get elected president, I have been very pleased to see that his big win in Iowa has propelled him to the front of the Democratic race.

I had long assumed that Hillary Clinton would steamroll her way to the nomination, but I’m glad to see that Obama has become much more of a contender now. Not that I have anything against Hillary winning the nomination—far from it!—but given a choice between the two, I’d rather see Obama get the nomination. Although Hillary makes a lot of her experience, I suspect her electoral strategy would end up being very similar to Kerry’s in 2004—and we all know how well that worked. We had an experienced candidate last time and another in 2000, and both of them lost to someone who was widely perceived as more personable. Why not try a charismatic candidate this time? 

I went to a Ringo meeting tonight for the first time ever and ended up winning an iPod nano in a drawing held afterward. Will I be going back there again? You bet I will!

And thanks to the presentation Kilian Muster gave at the meeting, I might even be able to figure out what I am supposed to do with this thing. 

I remember a conversation I had once many years ago, when I was a young journalism student, with a friend of mine who worked part-time for a local ISP. I was telling him about all the amazing things I was learning in one of my information-gathering courses, a lot of which focused on how to make profitable use of library resources. He remarked casually that libraries would one day cease to exist, because any and all valuable information would eventually find its way onto the Internet. Although I didn’t doubt even then that such a thing might happen one day, I was taken aback by the confident assertion that followed: “Heck, almost everything worthwhile already is.”

I was reminded of that conversation when I came across this article at CNN:

Use with caution: The perils of Wikipedia

In particular, this part caught my attention:

[Former American Library Association president Michael Gorman] added that Google and Wikipedia were creating a generation of “intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet,” with no interest in exploring non-digital resources.

I know this is true simply by the attitudes of many of the people I know and work with. If they can’t find something with a few Google searches or a quick swing by Wikipedia, it might as well not exist. It’s a shame, really, because even as remarkable as Google and Wikipedia are, they both barely amount to a drop in the bucket of human knowledge. To consider either of them anything more than the starting point for any significant information need would be foolish.

But what can be done about it? If everyone assumes that all the world’s knowledge is available in one place, how will they ever find out otherwise?

After what feels like a really long time, The New York Times is finally allowing non-subscribers to read Paul Krugman’s columns again. Naturally, I think this is a very good thing. They should have never put his work behind the subscription wall in the first place, but I’m happy to see that they’ve now learned their lesson.

The company where I work is located in an area called Shimomaruko, which is not particularly well known for anything except the fact that my company is headquartered there, but if you ever happen to be in Shimomaruko in the evening, it is well worth your time to stop by a place called “Magic Bar Yuzawa,” which is not far from Shimomaruko Station. It’s quickly becoming my favorite bar on Planet Earth.