Today it was my very great pleasure and honor to cast a vote for the world’s first non-white (major contender) U.S. Presidential candidate.

I hope he wins. It would make me (and others I know) feel a whole lot less despairing about the world.

I think that while I have historically had a very difficult time making this distinction when I talk about why I find it so comforting to vote for Obama because he’s not white, I will try it again.

White folks don’t have as much “skin in the game”. There’s something there, no matter how Huxtable-like the Obamas may be. They know what it’s like not to be white, and that’s honestly enough for me. That alone makes me trust him far more than I ever have a previous president, even Mr. Carter, even Mr. Clinton, the two most close to my politics in my lifetime. I trust Mr. Obama to know what it’s like.

It’s just easier to trust someone who’s been on the same wrong end of the stick as you have, or a similar one, to have your best interests in mind, than someone who’s just learned by observation or example, but has no risk of being at that wrong end of the stick. I expect this is why some veterans are voting for McCain, too.

To be able to share that kind of primal trust with a presidential candidate? Priceless.

Yes. We can.

As you may know, the our border agents have started to require various travelers (i.e. the shifty-looking ones that try to cross borders) who happen to have tech gadgets with them to turn those gadgets on, login, mount encrypted drives, etc., so that those agents can make copies. I’m not planning to leave the country, but I’m also not interested in taking chances here.

Normally while the gross invasion of privacy of others bothers me, the actual fact of this sort of behavior does not, because I usually don’t travel with my various vitally private files (usually to do with cryptography) with me.

This has changed since I started using a USB key and portable applications to do what of my personal business I do at work. Until this morning, I had GPG, GPGShell and my GPG/PGP keys on my USB key that I use for portable computing. Now I don’t. The alternative was to keep that stuff on my USB key but put them in a hidden cryptography volume. I decided that was probably too fiddly and I didn’t need that stuff with me that badly.

But why would I think about it at all?

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