What a day. This morning Alisa and I had round two of our discussions about the upcoming select-board election. I've come out as a supporter of 
Robie Hubley. Alisa is having a harder time choosing because she's worked with the other candidate in several contexts. In looking at the materials, and some of the communications Alisa has had, I don't longer have any question but that Robie is the right candidate. For me, the key issue is the charter. The other candidate supported and still supports the charter whereas Robie makes a clear and unequivocal statement in support of town meeting. There are plenty of other reasons to like Robie and I've spoken with other people who've given me reasons to question the other candidate. Unfortunately, I'll be teaching and won't be able to attend the debate tomorrow. I shouldn't say it that way -- I will be fortunately spending a wonderful evening with my students.
After our whirlwind discussion, I ran to the office, made sure people had equipment that needed it, ran to the writing conference, and gave my presentation. It was a joint presentation with another writing instructor who talked about using forums. I wasn't able to give it my full attention because I got called away to another room because someone couldn't make their laptop talk to the network. It was a PC. Luckily a real technical support person had already arrived, so I didn't have to decline to help. They asked me if my connection was working. I said that it was. He asked if I had had to do anything special. I said that, no, I didn't even check my settings -- I just plugged it in and it worked. Then I couldn't just let it go and had to add, "But then, I have a Mac." It's frustrating seeing how much the PCs and PC users suck up technical support. We could do a lot of interesting an creative things if we didn't have to invest so much effort just to get the PCs to work at all.
I was supposed to run a workshop on wiki stuff this afternoon, but I was caught up in a discussion when it was supposed to start and got in 5 minutes late. So the instructor had just started without me and things were going fine. I had known that I wasn't needed for students to start using the wiki and couldn't have planned it better if I had tried. The students were already plugging away happily and I just made a couple of comments averring my willingness to help and then I could run along and work on other stuff.
Tonight was the October Meetup for Dean. I played a small role by downloading videos from the Dean website and playing them through a TV. We played the short Dean welcome, the news segment about Dean's internet use, and a few minutes of the Generation Dean video. Good stuff. I was suprised how many people to the meetup were new. It was about perfect: I would estimate we had 30 new people of 40 or 45 people there. More students this time than in the past who are looking to organize a Dean Corps for the area. Very encouraging.
The presenter pointed out something I hadn't heard before, which was that the ordering of the primaries had been tweaked this time to favor the well-known big-money candidates by piling up the big primaries early, in March, which would make it difficult for a less well known candidate, like a Carter or someone like Dean, to gather steam in the smaller early primaries and then raise the big money to get to the big states. The implication is that the DLC wants to shut out folks like Dean. Dean's strategy of raising money through the internet early, before the primaries have even begun, has thrown a monkey-wrench into their plans.