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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.

Medicare, the health care plan for the elderly, is a tricky issue for Paul Ryan. He wants to get rid of it and replace it with one supported by a voucher system. That’s why in his budget plan for the House, there is a $700B spending cut for Medicare.

He’s attacking Barack Obama for trying to take the same $700B from Medicare to help fund the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare). So what makes his $700B cut good and Obama’s bad?

“We are the ones who are not raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare,” Ryan told Fox News anchor Brit Hume.

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.”

In 2008, people were wondering who would become John McCain’s running mate for the presidential election. We all know now that it was Sarah Palin. Leading up to the announcement, her page on Wikipedia was the most edited of all candidates, according to TechPresident.com.

This is not the first rover to land on Mars, but the first one that I was able to watch via the internet. At least, that’s what I was hoping for. What I got was a streaming video of astronomers from NASA reacting to various milestones that Curiosity met as it lands on Mars. In the end, my reward was two low resolution black-and-white images of Mars.

Betaworks bought Digg, the website, for about half a million. It’s a complicated sale. Linkedin acquired the patents, and Washington Post got the talent (the engineers).

The first thing Betaworks did was relaunch the site on August 1st. I noticed because their RSS feeds stopped working on Wopular. They had rebuilt and redesigned the site from scratch in just six weeks.

Design-wise, it’s now a three-column site - like Wopular (and Pinterest) - with headlines and thumbnails spread within each column. It doesn’t look as organized as before when headlines only occupy one column.