This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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March 2008
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Walking Dead

For a variety of reasons, I only got about two hours of sleep last night. I am dragging through the day, doing what I need to do, but it is painful. The comfy round chair my office-mate brought into our shared office a few months keeps beckoning, but I am resisting and trying to keep productive. Need to make it through the day, then I can get home and… well… I’ll have passed the wall by then and probably still won’t fall asleep until midnight, but I can still wish for an earlier sleep, can’t I?

Just to add to my bleh, a few minutes ago I got lunch from the cafeteria. The entree today was cheese quesadillas. I was wary, but I didn’t want to wait in line for a burger or what not. So I got them. It is aweful. I tried about three bites, but trying more is just not something I have in me today. So I’ll probably be off to the vending machine soon to make up for the lack of real lunch. In the mean time, here is my short lunchtime post. :-)

Bleh.

Tough Decisions Delayed

I mentioned briefly and without detail on the last podcast that we were in the process of making some tough choices relating to having Amy continue at her current school next year or trying somewhere or something else. There are a number of factors in play including some stuff the school is doing, some of how Amy is doing, and also of course the costs involved, which are not trivial. The official deadline for deciding on next year is tomorrow.

With the information we have today and the situation today, that would have been a very hard call for us to make today, and Brandy and I were leaning in different directions. This morning though, we had a 40 minute meeting with the Head of School to discuss some of our concerns. In the end we’re going to do some stuff, they are going to do some stuff, and we now have until the end of June to make a final decision on next year. That helps a lot.

Hopefully by then we’ll have a much stronger sense of where things stand and if it looks like things are starting to look more like they did in 6th grade (very positive) as opposed to how they looked the first half of 7th grade (not so much).

So… three more months… and in that time we… and Amy… and the school… have some work to do. We’ll see how that all works out.

Second Day of OH/RI/TX/VT Delegates

We now have 292 of 370 (79%) of the delegates counted for Tuesday’s Democratic primaries and caucuses. As expected, with more of the results actually in, the advantage Clinton had yesterday has dwindled, but not disappeared. I should note that Obama also picked up five superdelegates in addition to delegates earned in the Tuesday states.

As of today, here is where we stand: Obama 51.2%, Clinton 47.9%, Edwards 0.9%. The gap between them, which had been 4.1% before Tuesday’s results, which had shrunk to 3.0% yesterday, is now back to 3.2%. In raw delegate terms, the gap went from 109 delegates, to 86 delegates, back up to 96 delegates.

With what has been counted so far (including those 5 superdelegates), since Tuesday Clinton gained 155 delegates, Obama gained 142. A net difference of +13 for Clinton. Back in the terms I posted Tuesday this puts Clinton at 52.2% of the delegates awarded… she needed 55% to be on a winning pace. With just yesterday’s results, she accomplished that. But add in today’s count and she is no longer there. If Hillary and Obama split all remaining delegates at the same percentage as the results of the last two days, Obama would win the nomination.

At this point there are 1079 more delegates up for grabs assuming no delegates change their minds. This counts both pledged and superdelegates. To win Obama needs to get 505 of those. Clinton needs 601. In percentage terms, Clinton would need 55.7% of them. Obama only needs 46.8% of them.

On the other hand, momentum does unfortunately really matter. If someone starts to get seen as a loser, then that tends to feed on itself. 56% is a big number. A difficult number But it is not actually completely out of the realm of possibility. And of the states that are left at this point, a bunch do favor Clinton. And if Obama shoots himself in the foot again like he did with that Canada story in the couple days right before Tuesday, then that will make it even more possible.

She would need to have the superdelegates flip in enough numbers to reverse the pledged delegate count most likely. But if Obama loses a big string of these heading into the convention, like Hillary did in February… then those superdelegates may well flip.

What’s left from Tuesday to count on the Democratic side are 11 more delegates from Ohio and all 67 delegates from the Texas Caucuses, which still have not release actual results in delegate terms. That should favor Obama some, so the gap between them may widen a bit more again. But not by too much.

Another election on Saturday. They just keep coming…

I won’t go into a detailed analysis of all the delegate counts on the Republican side. We have 250 of 256 delegates accounted for at this time. And we all know McCain wrapped it up yesterday.

But the important news today? Over the last two days of counting Huckabee picked up 4 delegates in Rhode Island. And 16 in Texas. This brought him to 267 delegates. Which is 12 more than Romney’s 255. So Huckabee wins second place!!

Woo Woo! Go Huckabee!