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Santas gather in record numbers in Las Vegas

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First stop on ‘Oprah-bama’ tour: Iowa

DES MOINES, Iowa (CNN) — Political endorsements rarely translate into votes, but sometimes the timing of one can carry great significance.

That’s what Sen. Barack Obama’s campaigners hope for as they pick up the backing of Oprah Winfrey less than one month from the Iowa caucuses.

The three-state Oprah-bama tour starts at a Des Moines, Iowa, rally Saturday in a space that can accommodate thousands. It then moves east to Cedar Rapids for an event expected to bring in close to 8,500 people.

The two will travel to South Carolina and New Hampshire on Sunday.

The nod by the empress of daytime television comes at a time when independent politicos and campaign aides believe the Democratic senator from Illinois is picking up steam. The latest Des Moines Register poll puts Obama ahead of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-New York, in Iowa and shows him gaining ground among women.

Women are proving to be a crucial voting block in 2008 for all the Democratic hopefuls, but most especially Clinton. At a recent Obama rally in Iowa City, many women expressed the difficulty they had in deciding whether to vote for him or for Clinton because she could be a first for their gender. Watch how Winfrey’s campaigning could give Obama a boost

Winfrey’s endorsement is an obvious boost for Obama in his effort to steal women voters from Camp Clinton.

I think it’s going to help him with the women my age because she’s very popular, very respected among my age group, said Linda Peterson, a middle aged mother and probable Obama voter from North Liberty, Iowa.

According to The New York Times, women make up 75 percent of the audience for the Oprah Winfrey Show and more than half are over 50. More than 40 percent make less than $40,000 and a quarter have no more than a high school education.

One of the secretaries was just so excited about the fact that Oprah was coming, said Jodi Plumert, a University of Iowa professor and ardent Obama supporter. She said ‘Who would’ve thought Oprah, coming to little old Iowa!’

I think that having Oprah here on Saturday will definitely pull women out, said Iowa City resident and Obama precinct captain Cheryl Carter. I think it will just show that women in Iowa are Barack Obama supporters.

Although Clinton will be campaigning in Iowa on Friday and Saturday, rival campaigns acknowledge Winfrey will leave little air in the Hawkeye State. Watch what issues are important to Iowans

Sen. Clinton is a big fan [of Winfrey’s] and thinks it’s great for every candidate to bring in surrogates, said a Clinton aide. But ultimately the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and America are going to vote based on the actual candidate’s experience, strength, record and the ability to do the job on Day One.

The Clinton campaign will put its star on stage the day before Oprah-bama hits South Carolina when former President Bill Clinton makes campaign stops in Charleston on Saturday. Check out some other celebrities who are endorsing candidates

Bill Clinton said Friday that his trip is totally coincidental.

Hoping to use the gift of Winfrey as more than a free-media magnet, the Obama campaign set out to use ticket distribution to the four events as an organizing tool.

During the first week tickets were available, precinct captains had as many tickets as they wanted to hand out to Obama supporters and on-the-fence voters. Regular voters seeking tickets were required to either put in four hours of volunteer time or attend a caucus training seminar.

When I make phone calls a lot of people say they’re undecided, said Monique Washington, an Obama precinct captain. I say, ‘Well, would you like to come see Oprah and Obama and Michelle?’ and they go, ‘Yeah, I want to come out.’
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CNN.com readers recall the life-changing Commodore 64

(CNN) — If you know this command — Load *, 8,1 — like the back of your hand, you probably have fond memories of the Commodore 64, one of the first home computers commercially available en masse.

The C64, released in 1982, celebrated its 25th birthday this year.

CNN.com readers responded to our story on the C64 with an outpouring of memories and anecdotes.

Readers explained that the C64 opened up a world of programming and sparked a lifelong fascination with technology. Below is a selection of readers’ comments, some of which have been edited for length and clarity.

Ian Schafer of Staten Island, New York This computer changed my life, allowed me to learn computer program, got me online for the first time, and was the most important birthday gift I’ve ever received. I now run a successful digital advertising agency. I love you, C64. See video of Ian getting a C64 for his 8th birthday

Jim Wood in North Georgia I grew up in the mountains of North Georgia. I remember mowing yards and such to save up money to by the C64 for $300; it took me awhile to get the disk drive, printer, etc. … but I did it. I even took the C-64 to junior college and it was the end-all solution; you could play games, write papers, program and all through a color TV in the dorm. I always preferred it over the Apple II and even the first IBM PC Clones.

I am 40 years old now and the C64 will always hold a special place in my life because it allowed me learn a skill set that has steadily evolved into my livelihood today. I have returned to the mountains that I love and I am the CIO of a significant community bank, and it all, in a sense, started with the C-64.

Catherine in Wisconsin On a visit home, my dad bought me one. I kept talking about it and showing him ads for it. I think he did it to shut me up. Best thing he ever did for me. It sent me down a road I never thought I’d go — becoming a techie. It gave me my ‘niche’ in a turbulent time.

Gadget Girl in Canada The C64 was the first computer that I owned myself. I wrote and edited my undergraduate thesis on it! I can’t recall the name of the word processor I used back in 1988, but I recall that in order to spell check, it first alphabetized the entire document, and then compared it with a dictionary. My thesis was 60 pages long, and I could go and wash and dry two loads of laundry while it was running the spell check. Ah, good times!

Nik in Beijing Yet another user here who started with Commodore, ended up going into computer programming and is now making a comfortable living from it.

It’s amazing all the games, but someone here mentions The Reference Guide — yes, I have never come across a computer book since so complete and so useful.

C64 defined a generation. Too bad I won’t be able to attend the Mountain View event.

Amit in the U.S. My favorite computer. I learned to use it in India in 1984-85 when I was in the 6th grade. We were the first generation of computer geeks in India! Great to see it on the main site. I wrote games and search routines on it too. What a memory to revive!

Amanda in Canada Wow, thanks for the little flashback and laugh. I still remember my grandma buying the first C64 I ever played on. Soon after my parents got one, and we were hooked! My favorite game was The Winter Olympics and Lemonade Stand.

Texrat in Fort Worth, Texas Wow, so great to read this! The C64 changed my life. At the time of its release my mom could not understand why I wasted $1,500 on a toy and its accessories. But today that little investment keeps paying back career-wise. Thank you Commodore! I owe that beige box so much.

Bob in Boston, Massachusetts In 1999 when I went to UMass, in Lowell, to fix one of their systems I was surprised to see … a C64 in the computer room monitoring the weather equipment that was mounted on the roof. It had been doing so since the C64 was new and [considering] If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, they just left it running. I gave them my old C64 stuff from the attic as spares and — I hope — it’s still chugging along.

AnimalRobb in Jacksonville, Florida C64 opened the door for not only programming, but for message boards and much of the early context for the first generation of Internet usage. I remember the first time I hooked a phone line to a computer and felt like I had arrived!

Annoying Man 66 in Camas, Washington This article has me nostalgic to the extent that I’m going to move home with my parents and watch Never Ending Story on a loop with my brother, the boss of the Midnight Riders.

JB in Mission Viejo, California I remember typing programs by hand into the C64 at night after school, copying line-by-line instructions from C64 magazines. This was before we had access to disk drives/cassette backups, so you could never turn the power off or you would lose everything.

And once you had that program or game loaded ,that was all you could do with your C64 — until next month’s game magazine showed up! Can’t tell you how many times a late night lightning strike would shake the power grid and I’d lose everything.

Evan Koblentz in New Jersey Chuck Peddle, the technical wizard who ran Commodore’s computer division in the late 1970s, spoke for 90 minutes at the recent Vintage Computer Festival East 4.0 in Wall, New Jersey. His lecture was recorded on video in four parts. Read about it and watch the video clip via this blog post … enjoy!

Rob in Oaklawn, Illinois Wow, it’s been that long. We had the Atari 800 and C64. I was 11 at the time and my mom got me a subscription to a computer magazine that showed you how to program. I would spend hours doing these programs. My mom was shocked when I spent seven hours inputting code just to show a graphic of Santa in a chimney popping in and out. I miss my C64 and Atari 800.

Jaira in Kansas City, Kansas Oh I remember the C64!! I was 4 years old when my mother brought it home in 1984. She had an in-home office back then and I used to curl up by her feet when she worked on it! I used to LOVE IT when she allowed me to get on the computer back then. I thought it was so cool to type and see it on screen! Later on she bought my brother and I games and we had a ball. I won’t ever forget those times.

Veronica in Florida Oh … the fond memories of fighting with my brothers over who got to play.

Wes in Lake Elmo, Minnesota I have always told my kids that I invented the computer virus on my C64. I had written a small BASIC version of Pong but had neglected to put any barriers around the screen memory area of the computer. When the ball went past the paddle, it would rip through the memory area that contained the program and the program destroyed itself!

Mike in Colorado I was lucky enough to be in high school in 1984 and just interested enough in computers to get my start on a C64. The best investment my dad ever made for me was this little beige computer. I was fascinated with the text-based games of Scott Adams (anybody remember Adventureland?) and asked my math teacher, who happened to teach in the computer lab, how I would go about writing a game like this.

Ever hear of arrays? he asked. No… I said. Well, you’ll need to know how to store the rooms and keep track of where each room is in reference to the others. You’ll need arrays to do that. Thus began my quest to create my own text-based game and find out what these mysterious arrays were that he was talking about.

Twenty-five years later, I’m making quite a good living still doing what I love to do — creating new things with software. A formal college education and faster computers with more powerful programming languages like Java have certainly made the job easier, but I still look back fondly on that time when I was first learning how to create something entirely from scratch. The Commodore 64 let you do that.

C64fan35 in New York I wonder … How many C64 users (like myself at 10 years old in 1985) are now programmers, or work in IT? I know I do and probably because I was a 10 year old kid fooling around with the C64, typing LOAD * ,8,1 and thinking I was launching the space shuttle or something. Javier van der Biezen in Curacao, Netherlands Antilles In 1985 and 1987, our high school Mgr. Nieuwindt College got the first computer room on the island. … Man, this brings back memories. We also had two of the monitors and keyboards in one giant console kind of computer. I remember when I typed… The sound was clack, clack, clack… Funny stuff, God bless….

Lou Ricker in Italy, Texas I’m 84. C64, the fun machine, is right here beside the PC. A teenager, Craig Chamberlain, wrote a great music system. Some German guys and Australians did great things. Bill Gates wrote the operating system for $7,000 — back when he needed money. I wrote a program to select gears for my lathe. I replay the old chess games and marvel at how smart I used to be.

Load * ,8,1 in Los Angeles, California I grew up in the Philippines and the C64 was everywhere in my neighborhood — from VIC20s to the more advanced (at the time) Amiga. My brother and I would wait patiently for the games to load off from the cassette tape drive. It taught us BASIC and logic even before we could speak a whole sentence in English! Now both in our 30s, we long for games like Space Station, Karateka, and Mission Impossible. Who can forget synthesized vocal sound bytes like Stay a while, Stay forever!. Hope to attend the 24th anniversary festivities up in Mountain View. More power to the C64!

CyberSpy in Cyberspace Has it really been 25 years since my BBS went up? Life has really flown by. I remember going from the Vic 20 to the C= 64. Now I’m remembering zmodem, 6485, C-Net 64 — but my fondest memories were coming home after school and playing Jumpman or Jumpman Jr. with my father, who never really had time while struggling to work and keep our family together.

To some, like myself, the Commodore 64 was more than just being a SysOp or a gateway to phreaking/hacking and other underground activities –who can forget wardialing and scanning for MCI Codes — it was molding us into professionals who would work in the the .com era, InfoSec, programming, networking, etc. It symbolizes a time when life was simpler, new, refreshing, and being on the cusp of what was to become the digital revolution, with MTV just coming on the air, people getting cable television and the Betamax/VHS wars.

Thank you CNN for posting this news article. Hopefully someone can do a story on BBS’s, and how they were the precursor to today’s Social Network Sites. When those of us that didn’t fit in had a BBS to turn to and could find others just like us — and not resort to gathering firearms and shooting up a school or mall. If not for Commodore and its legacy machines, who knows what I would be doing now. E-mail to a friend

found here.

‘Canoe Man’ John Darwin charged

LONDON, England (CNN) — Canoe Man John Darwin has been charged on two counts of fraud, UK police have said.

The 57-year-old was charged by officers in northeastern England on Saturday with making an untrue statement to procure a passport and obtaining money transfer by deception, said Detective Sgt. Iain Henderson of Cleveland Police.

Darwin will appear before Hartlepool magistrates court Monday, Henderson said, when police plan to ask for him to be remanded in custody. Henderson added that Darwin was fit and well.

Darwin came to worldwide attention after he walked into a police station in London last weekend — five years after the remains of a red canoe he paddled into the North Sea, off northeastern England, washed up on shore near his home of Seaton Carew, leading everyone to believe he had died. A spokeswoman for Cleveland Police told CNN that Darwin had told police: I think I am a missing person.

Despite an extensive search involving police, Coast Guards and the Royal Navy, no trace was found of the prison officer and former teacher after the wreck of his canoe was found.

Darwin was presumed dead, by police, the public and his two sons, Mark and Anthony, now aged 31 and 29.

He was declared dead by a coroner in 2003, 13 months after his disappearance in March 2002.

Henderson said the police had received many calls, both from the UK and overseas, in response to their appeals for information about Darwin’s whereabouts since he was last seen.

They also appealed to Anne Darwin, who sold the family home in Seaton Carew and moved to Panama recently, to come forward and contact them. She is believed to have left Panama for the United States.

Shortly after he went to police, Darwin was reunited with his two sons, who released a joint statement saying the reappearance of their father was a huge shock.

His sons have since said they fear they may have been the victims of a huge scam and released a statement saying they want no further contact with their parents. E-mail to a friend

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Giggs nets 100th Premiership goal

MANCHESTER, England — Ryan Giggs scored his 100th Premier League goal as Manchester United beat Derby County 4-1 at Old Trafford and moved to within a point of leaders Arsenal.

Chelsea remained third, two points by United, after a 2-0 win against Sunderland. Arsenal are at Middlesbrough on Sunday.

Portsmouth pulled off their sixth successive away win by beating Aston Villa 3-1 to move up to fifth place.

Ayegbeni Yakubu’s hat-trick helped Everton go level on points with Villa after a 3-0 win at home to Fulham, who have now gone 25 away league matches without a victory.

Habib Baye’s first goal for Newcastle was the last-minute winner in a 2-1 home win over Birmingham.

Giggs put United in front five minutes before half-time when he followed up a Cristiano Ronaldo shot parried by Derby keeper Stephen Bywater.

The 34-year-old Welsh winger has made 519 league appearances in 16 years with the Old Trafford club.

Just before the break Ronaldo set up a second goal when his free kick, after Darren Moore fouled Wayne Rooney, was not cleared and Argentina striker Carlos Tevez struck from inside the box.

Tevez converted a right-wing cross from unsettled defender Wes Brown after 60 minutes and, although Steve Howard scored Derby’s first away league goal this season, 14 minutes from time, Ronaldo made it 4-1 from the penalty spot in the final minute.

Andriy Shevchenko helped Chelsea make light of Drogba’s absence, after his fellow striker was ruled out earlier Saturday following an operation on his knee, by giving the Blues a 23rd minute lead at Stamford Bridge when he headed in a cross from Salomon Kalou.

Frank Lampard converted a 75th minute penalty after Danny Higginbotham’s foul on Alex and there was further woe for Sunderland when Liam Miller was sent-off late on for retaliation.

Sulley Muntari’s spectacular double sealed Portsmouth’s first win at Villa Park for 37 years after Craig Gardner’s own goal gave Harry Redknapp’s visitors an early lead as they stretched their unbeaten run to 11 games.

Ghana midfielder Muntari scored with a ferocious shot late in the first half before adding his second and Portsmouth’s third with a sublime, curling, second-half effort.

Gareth Barry’s late penalty was little consolation for Villa, who paid the price for failing to turn their early domination into goals.

To come to a good side like Villa and do what we did is magnificent, Redknapp said.

I’m delighted. We were different class.

Fulham kept out Everton until the hosts opened the scoring through striker Yakubu who scored from a 51st minute rebound after Australia midfielder Tim Cahill’s volley was blocked by the feet of Fulham Keeper Antti Niemi.

The Nigeria forward then scored his eighth of the season, and fourth in three games, when he headed in from a flick-on by Phil Jagielka after a corner by Mikel Arteta.

Yakubu then completed his hat-trick in the 79th minute after being played in by South African midfielder Steven Pienaar.

Newcastle conceded a ninth minute goal when Cameron Jerome exploited defensive weakness before rounding keeper Shay Given to give Birmingham the lead.

Obafemi Martins, fouled by Mathew Sadler in the box, then equalized from the 37th minute penalty which was pushed onto the post by Birmingham keeper Maik Taylor before crossing the line.

And Senegal defender Beye completed the comeback in the 90th minute when he headed in an Emre free-kick. E-mail to a friend

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