Negative campaigning tends to make people stay at home, which is why I'm not voting today in either Texas or Ohio. But as a former resident of Ohio many years ago, I am compelled to reveal everything I know about Barack Obama. Well, actually, everything Barton George at Sun Microsystems knows.

And that's not much.

Barton George is the group manager of free and open source software and Gnu/Linux. [When it comes to Linux, Sun remains Stallman-compliant.]

We were chatting the other day about Sun's acquisition of MySQL and George happened to mention that he went to the same grade school in Hawaii as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Then he sent me a link to his blog, which has two Punaho grade school pictures of Barack.

One shows him as a participant to what the blackboard in the background says is the Pencil Chewers Convention. Attendance appears to have been limited to a handful of miscreants, but there's Barack, mugging for the camera and looking like he ate the whole thing.

The other is a confident sixth grader, standing in front of a small group of classmates with arms folded, looking directly into the camera and already showing the potential of a really big smile.

"He didn't know who I was," confesses George, since he was in the third grade at the time the pictures were taken and Barack was one of the big kids. But he can say he always looked up to him.

George is a little surprised at the serious mien and stentorian poses that Barack sometimes assumes on the debate platform, since George is used to seeing him as "more of a fun-loving personality. Just seeing him now, he's completely different."

Well, that sometimes happens between the sixth grade and the Oval Office.

But the revealing thing I wanted to reveal was that there shouldn't be two candid pictures of Barack available from the same yearbook. According to the rules of the time, says George, each student was limited to appearing in one picture. But Barack overcame barriers and upset the establishment even in the sixth grade. To see him in two pictures from the same yearbook, go to George's blog at http://blogs.sun.com/barton808/entry/omidyar_joins_punahou_board_of. Also http://blogs.sun.com/barton808/entry/obama_in_73.