Nixon had Agnew and Bush the First had Quayle…

…and many people doubted those VPs’ qualifications to succeed, too, hence the almost amusing joke that they were their President’s life insurance policies.

But given McCain’s health, the odds of the country’s having to cash in his policy are far too high to take any chance of letting Sarah Palin near the Oval Office, let alone the button.

I wish John McCain a long and happy life, but I’m not willing to gamble my country’s future on it.

Obama-Biden '08

(As always, IBM has its opinions and plans; I have mine. Any resemblance between the two is coincidental.)

Where’s my undo? Or: How to learn a lesson in under 140 characters

Diane and I were out for a walk last night, discussing the day’s events. As we were talking, I suddenly remembered that I had to arrange a call with a mentor — more accurately, I had to ask my assistant to arrange the call, since significant calendar negotiation will be required.

I didn’t want to forget the task (especially since I’d already forgotten to do it when the opportunity first arose due to the other 40 things I was doing at the time), so I quickly sent an SMS to Twitter to cause Sandy to send me a reminder this morning.

Unfortunately, I forgot to preface the SMS with “D S” — so instead of being a direct message to Sandy, it went onto my public timeline. I realized this almost immediately and resent the message properly; then, I went on to Twitter to remove the inadvertent tweet.

It wasn’t there. For some reason, the SMS-to-Twitter channel wasn’t working. And it’s hard to undo something which hasn’t quite happened yet.

I kept looking, but the tweet hadn’t appeared by the time I was ready for bed. So I did the only other thing I could think of — I queued up another tweet in hopes that the wrong one would only be visible for a few seconds.

This morning, I awoke to find two messages on Facebook commenting on my error (I have my tweets echoed to my Facebook status, don’t you?). I went onto both Facebook and Twitter and expunged the accidental message…and when I got to work, I did remember to ask my assistant to set up the appointment.

Lessons learned:

  • It’s far too easy to omit the “D S” from a tickler request and make it public
  • Be careful of what goes onto a tickler request, just in case someone else sees it
  • Perhaps it would be better to use the email interface to Sandy instead, since the worst that can happen is a misdirected note instead of publication
  • Edsel Murphy is alive and well