Let’s throw this one in the “From the Mouthes of Babes” category.

So, the family is sitting around the table enjoying dinner the other day, and somehow the conversation turns to religion. My wife jokingly asks, “What’s Jesus?” Without even thinking about it, my daughter responds immediately with the following definition:

“Jesus is a word you use when you are upset, surprised, or amazed.”

I still get a nice little chuckle every time I think about it.

I have to admit that the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll has been driving me nuts lately. With everything that Dubya has done to the country and the world since 2001, how is it possible that John McCain is tied with my man, Barack Obama?

Some say McCain is not your typical Republican, and that may have been pretty accurate if we were watching replays of the 2000 campaign. In recent times, he has been anything but a maverick by getting friendly with the President. I actually think race is playing a lot bigger role than anyone would readily admit, but that is a whole other topic.

Regardless of why the poll is so close, the big question in front of us is whether or not the poll is accurate at all. With so many new voters registering and voting for the first time in this year’s Democratic primaries, it seems to me that all of the old algorithms and equations will not work this year.

As I have said before this election season, there is a much more accurate view of the intentions of the voters this November, and it’s a place where people put their money where their mouths are. I am talking about the Iowa Electronic Markets. Check out the current quotes for the Winner Take All market: $0.634 for the Democratic Party nominee and $0.376 for the Republican Party nominee. The voters/traders in this market are betting overwhelmingly that the Democratic nominee will win this November. As an Obama supporter, I certainly am excited by these results, and I hope they’re right.

I think it’s time for the mainstream media to keep an eye on these markets as they have in the past several presidential elections. There’s nothing quite like betting with real money that makes people be honest with themselves.

So, I managed to talk my wife into letting me take her iPhone with me to the kids’ swimming lessons. I thought I would try out the WordPress app to see how well it works. I have to say that it is very impressive. What is even more impressive is the iPhone’s spelling checker. I haven’t been able to fool it yet with my fat thumbs. I guess I need to step up my attempts to get my company to switch from BlackBerry to iPhone. 🙂

I have a lot more to say about MobileMe than this post, but that will need to wait for when I have more time. For those of you going through the pain of the .Mac to MobileMe transition, Apple is finally providing status updates to let us know how everything is going. There’s only one post so far so it is yet to be seen how much they’re actually going to tell us, but this is a step in the right direction.

A little over a month ago, something different happened on the way home from one of my occasional trips to Washington, DC. Prior to calling Group A to board, a large group of older gentlemen in matching yellow shirts began congregating in the pre-boarding area and eventually boarded the plane.

It turns out that I was on a plane with a group of World War II veterans going home after visiting their memorial courtesy of Franklin County Honor Flight, a not for profit group dedicated to making sure the remaining WWII veterans in the Saint Louis area who are willing and able to visit the World War II Memorial are able to do so at no cost to them.

As I boarded the plane and headed to the back passing row after row of veterans, I could tell that they had experienced a wonderful day. You can see the pictures from that day on the organization’s web site. Even Bob Doll was there! Well, it turns out that their day was not quite over. Once we had reached cruising altitude, the leader of the group took over the microphone duties from the flight attendants and began recognizing each veteran on the flight one by one giving their rank and a description of where and how they served in the War. It was an incredible experience. After everyone had been recognized, the veterans received a well-deserved round of applause from everyone on the plane. I will not soon forget my flight with some of the best from the Greatest Generation.

If you’d like to learn more about or donate to Honor Flight, visit Franklin County Honor Flight in the Saint Louis area or the national site for the Honor Flight Network.

Since Steve Jobs’ keynote at the WWDC in June, I have been waiting patiently (well, quite impatiently) for the new and improved .Mac which has been rebranded as MobileMe. Based on the keynote and guided tour, MobileMe finally looks like the mail, address book, and calendar applications I expected from Apple when they launch iTools and .Mac so many years ago. As a user of many devices and computers on a daily basis, I have always struggled with keeping everything synchronized. Perhaps MobileMe will finally provide the solution for which I have been looking.

My big question now is, will MobileMe provide enough functionality to convince me to move all of my email, contacts, and calendars from Gmail and Google Calendar to the MobileMe platform? This will be no small feat considering how long I have been using both of those Google applications. The one big plus for me will be the ability to use desktop applications on my Mac and Windows machines. Right now, I can use Gmail on the desktop using IMAP, but having to move messages from one label to another can become annoying and cumbersome. Google also has sync applications for Google Calendar that can sync with Outlook, but I have found the functionality to be buggy at best. To me, neither of these solutions is good enough, and they tend to take away from my productivity and enjoyment of the applications.

If MobileMe can truly deliver on its promise of providing a consistent user experience on my Mac using its built in Mail, Address Book, and iCal applications, my Windows machine using Outlook, and the Internet, I will be a very happy camper. My guess is a lot of other people will feel the exact same way. We’ll know any day now if MobileMe is really Exchange for the rest of us.

A while back, Â I wrote Notes on the MacBook Air. Â I recently got my hands on the better sub notebook.

First and foremost, I’m a huge Mac fan. Â I’ve loved Apple products for as long as I can remember.

I am, however, somewhat disappointed by the MacBook Air now that I’ve gotten my hands on a Lenovo X300. Â The X300 is what the Air should have been from the beginning. Â Built in optical drive (CD/DVD Burning) or extra battery port, video out, multiple USB ports and still lightweight.

Best of all, the X300 has most of the ThinkVantage technologies that make their ThinkPad line the ultimate business tool it is.

My only problem with the X300 is that it doesn’t run the Mac OS. Â If it did, I’d be a switcher in a heartbeat to the hardware natively with no hacks.

I’m assuming Lenovo marketing folks came up with this spoof. Â Enjoy!

I’m sure a lot of you have seen the outrageous and too-weird-to-be-true emails that have been circulating the Internet for over a year now regarding Barack Obama and his family. I find the one that claims he is secretly a Muslim especially amusing. Most of these emails are started by fear and rumor mongering Republicans who are scared to death that they’re going to killed in November. The problem is the people who continue to forward these lies to everyone in their address book because they do not have enough intelligence or common sense to realize that if something sounds completely outrageous, it probably is.

To fight these lies, Barack and his team have published a website called Fight the Smears to debunk the rumors and nonsense. You can find it at http://www.fightthesmears.com/. Here you will find the smears that have been circulating the Internet and evidence to prove them wrong. You can also submit new smears that you receive through email.

The Obama campaign has taken advantage of technology like no other campaign in history, and this is just another example of its leadership in the Internet space.