A doctor who was on call at my hospital the other night left me a voicemail the next morning as he was going off duty to tell me about the book he had been reading overnight. He had found my name and address on the inside front cover and some notes I had written on the blank pages in the back. It turns out it was one of the books I had given to a used book store in New York in 1970 to thin my collection before moving to Boston.
Daily Archives: 18 Oct 04
Glad I don’t live in Toronto
‘Frankenfish’ rears its ugly head in Lake Michigan
’10 Things I Hate in a Web Site’
“I wonder if some people create and publish Web sites for the sole purpose of tormenting their visitors.” — Jason OConnor, Oak Web Works (marketingprofs.com) Although this marketing professional is really talking about commercial sites and the liabilities their faults create in self-promotion, perhaps these sins are no less deadly for a site such as mine. I have committed, I think, two of the mortal sins discussed here — excessive scrolling (which is really difficult to avoid in a weblog which adds a significant amount of content before it falls off the scroll at the bottom) and, more egregious, slow load time. Adding jimcrackery in the sidebar and importing external content are my major vices in slowing down the load time. There’s a dialectic tension for me in maintaining this site between fancying it up and simplifying it down; I’ll keep at it. At least, the larger, blog content column loads first, so you can read the important stuff while the pageload keeps on going. Last time I asked, the opinion here was in favor, for example, of keeping the little box telling people what is playing in iTunes; it’ll still be there after you read the day’s posts…
Greens For Impact
“…an organization of principled, pragmatic Green Party members and progressive populists dedicated to the goal of defeating George W. Bush in his bid for a second term as president, while simultaneously furthering the growth of the Green Party as an independent alternative to the corporate-dominated parties.
While we do not represent or work with any of the presidential candidates, we believe that this agenda is most-readily forwarded by a strategy designed to maximize the Green Party’s impact. Greens for Impact works to:
- Encourage voters to register Green
- Encourage voters in safe states — those that are so overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic that we can be confident today of who will win there in November — to vote for David Cobb in the General Election
- Encourage voters in swing states to vote for John Kerry in the general election, and
- Actively and forcefully push for the use of instant runoff voting (IRV) wherever suitable, alongside ballot access reform and full public financing of campaigns.”
I was pointed to this site by David Segal, minority leader of the City Council of Providence, RI, and chair of Greens for Impact. Note that one of their particular foci is to dissuade potential Nader, as well as Cobb, supporters in swing states from taking their votes away from Kerry. Segal asks that like-minded people try to steer traffic to their site as we head into the homestretch.
