It’s finally over. It always seems to feel that way come Presidential Election Day here in the states. After months and months of non-stop campaigning and debating and character assassinations, we have a new president. Despite how any of us wanted it to work out, a colleague of mine summed up the result quite eloquently:

Gruss Gott wrote:

No child anywhere in the World will doubt that with hard work they can be President; if only they have democracy like America.

America has just peacefully overthrown its existing President and replaced him with a black dude with an arabic sounding name.

Let there be no doubt that America is the greatest idea in government that the World has ever seen and that the people of America have tonight fulfilled its founders genius and shouted it to World.

Congratulations America!

Now we must earn the opportunity we’ve given ourselves.

Stop the presses! Another fabulous Google rollout. SMS text messages for free! At least for now. Read more here:

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/tips/2008/10/31/gmail_labs_adds_text_messaging_to_gchat-2.html

Excerpt:

Gmail’s latest Labs experiment adds an option to send SMS textmessages to contacts from the Google Chat sidebar, at no cost and with replies arriving as new chat lines. Like other Labs, you’ll have to enable it by heading to the Labs icon in your Gmail settings and enabling “Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat,” although the feature is apparently being rolled out gradually to users. Once enabled, you can type and choose a contact from the Chat sidebar and select “Send SMS” from the options that pop up to the right of their name, or select “Video & more” from the options dialog on a chat window. Enter a phone number, type your chat, and Google tells the recipient that they can reply like any other text. Gmail’s definitely making a play to become your all-in-one contact and messaging center, and free text messaging is a powerful tool to getting there.