the tindog coffeehouse

With only a week to go before the 2012 election, the race is effectively a toss-up between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, with the deciding votes likely coming down to a handful of so-called “battleground states”: Ohio, Nevada, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The winner, of course, will be whoever collects a majority of the 538 available electoral votes according to Article II of the Constitution.

The electoral college was devised by the framers of the Constitution as a way to prevent an unpredictable general population from directly voting for the president. Instead, their vote would count as a preference for how their state’s appointed electors should vote (although the electors are not legally bound to abide by those preferences). Such a system seems completely antiquated today, however. We have a much more organized electoral system and better technology, which should in theory reduce fraud. Besides, with many states strongly trending Republican or Democrat, many votes don’t seem to really matter. If you’re a Republican in California or a Democrat in Texas, for example, it seems pointless to vote since the outcome for your state is all but guaranteed. It’s no surprise, then, that in recent years there’s been a greater call to eliminate the electoral college, allowing the winner of the popular vote to be the winner of the election.

But I think you could actually make an argument for keeping the electoral college. Let me explain.

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It’s hard to believe, but it was 10 years ago this week that I first went to work at Microsoft, the ink on my new MCSE certification still fresh. To this day, I’m still not sure how I made it through the rigorous interview process, but somehow I made it on as a “blue-badge” (a full-time Microsoft employee, as opposed to the “orange-badge” contractors that mostly walked through the door), hired to provide professional server support from the still-under-construction Las Colinas campus in Irving, Texas.

I arrived just as Windows 2000 was being released to manufacturing and just in time for Y2K. It was also right before the dot-com bubble burst in early 2000. Indeed, in the two years I worked there, I saw the glory days of the late ’90s — a time when working at Microsoft meant swimming in lucrative company stock options and bonuses and work was something you did between foosball tournaments — give way to the harsh realities of the falling stock market, before regaining a sense of hopeful optimism with the impending release of Windows XP.

It was from my cubicle that I watched the presidential debate between George W. Bush and Al Gore in which Gore touted his infamous “lockbox” and where I watched the ugliness of the 2000 election drag on with all its “hanging chads”. And it was from my cubicle where I witnessed the horror of September 11th. But it was also a place where I made numerous friendships and countless memories.

It was a stressful job, and I can’t say I fully miss it. But I learned more there than I have at any other job I’ve ever had. It provided invaluable experience that I’ve taken with me in the years since leaving, and I’m grateful for the time I was given there.

Tons of books made from dead trees (probably from the rain forests!) and multiple energy-sucking monitors. Al Gore’s office is killing the earth.

In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the creation of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Department of Defense agency that would give birth to what is now the Internet, Vanity Fair has attempted to compile an “oral history” of the Internet, from ARPA to today.

So how’d they do?

Al Gore aside, they did pretty well, at least at a high level, interviewing pioneers such as Paul Baran (the inventor of packet-switching), Vint Cerf (the inventor of the TCP and IP protocols), Bob Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet), Marc Andreessen (Netscape), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Larry Page (Google), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).

It’s mind-blowing to think that something so basic as a computer network wasn’t always so obvious, and how technology that we use every day and take for granted could very easily have never existed but for a few brilliant minds.

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