While it is only a week until Australia votes on their new leader, it is the American presidential campaign that will always take top spot on the world news. It’s big, it’s flashy, and there’s no way anyone can really compete with that.
And it turns out that one of the hotspots for 2008 US Presidential candidates to visit, is the Google-plex in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California.
Six other presidential candidates, including Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and Republican John McCain have already spoken at Google, but it seems that the favorite, was once little known Illinois state senator Barrack Obama.
"There is something improbable about this gathering," the Illinois senator told a packed cafe auditorium of hundreds of Google employees. "What we share is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up."
The Google-plex, which is essentially a geek’s wet dream of a workplace environment, was packed to the rafters to listen to the candidate speak Wednesday.
"There's definitely been a buzz here all day," said Nicole Resz, 26, who works in Google's advertising department. "I've never seen so many people at a Google event. We've had everybody, we've had Mikhail Gorbachev. He's fresh, he's new…"
Possibly the biggest compliment for the 46 year old though, was Resz’s belief that “…there's something about him that's Google-like."
And it isn’t surprising that he was so popular, considering how he played to his listeners. When asked by Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt a standard Google engineering interview question, Obama was right on the ball. Asked by Schmidt what the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers is, Obama replied saying that the wrong way would be the "bubble sort method," (which is a basic but inefficient method for sorting numbers).
"You answered the question correctly," Schmidt replied.
Personally, I like to think that Obama knew this off the top of his head, but even if he didn’t, it shows a willingness to understand the groups of people often overlooked via the politicos.
Obama is very much the geek’s vote of choice, and I regret that I don’t have someone like him to vote for this coming Saturday. He’s addressing major issues such as net neutrality ("The Internet is perhaps the most open network in history. We have to keep it that way."); expanding the high-speed broadband network in America that is so lacking, and freeing up the wireless spectrum.
Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.
