Carly Fiorina was one of the early speakers at the convention tonight.

She followed Meg Whitman, the first CEO of eBay. Carly was the former CEO of Hewlett Packard before she was ousted. Her crowning achievement was the meter of Hewlett Packard and Compaq.

As a technical person, I never saw any benefit to a merger of the two companies, and I saw Carly transform HP from one of the forerunning innovative technical leaders in the industry of electronics technology development to a purveyor of high prices printer ink. The merger acheived little beyond merging two commodity product lines with the goal of maintaining a sales leadership position, a dubious goal that Hewlett packard probably could have striven for without an expensive

merger: in the end, Dell is still the leader in commodity computer sales and HP no longer has a role in high tech innovation. As a technical person, those issues are close to my heart.

However, earlier this morning our Minnesota delegation as treated to a special presentation from Carly Fiorinia, and I was very impressed to hear Carly speak about her support for John McCain and her leadership role inside that campaign. Carly had some great messages.

Which is why it saddened me to watch her speaking to a convention floor that as abuzz in preparation to take votes for the presidential nomination. Carly was giving a very dazzling performance, but no one was listening, and it was hard to listen over the buzz. At least I will be able to go back and watch my cspan recording.