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Category Archives: news

Phone banking for Obama (highlights!)

04-Nov-08

I volunteered for the Obama campaign and called voters in swing states yesterday and today. I really wish I’d gotten involved sooner! It was actually a lot of fun, and it was amazing to see the huge diversity of people who showed up at the headquarters to help. I wish I could have [...]

Salaries of Govt. Officials and Standing with Minimum Wage Earners

05-Dec-06

Part I
Did you know that the Federal Govt. spends about $91,687,500.00 (that’s nearly $92 million, for those of us who don’t often see numbers bigger than 4 or 5 digits) a year on the salaries of 551 people?
Did you know that our president makes $400,000 a year? (sources: 1, 2) The average US [...]

“V” comes to the capital.

12-Nov-06

A friend of mine sent me this link about people dressed as V (from V for Vendetta) visiting security check points at the White House, the main Treasury, IRS and Justice Department Buildings and the Capitol in order to
…deliver the People’s Petitions for Redress of Grievances relating to the Government’s violations of [...]

less than 1/3 of 1% difference.

09-Nov-06

On the Virginia race:
An Associated Press count Wednesday night showed Webb with 1,172,538 votes and Allen with 1,165,302, a difference of 7,236, or less than one-third of 1 percent.
Wow. There are more people enrolled in some high schools than that. My high school was something like 6,000 people when I was enrolled. [...]

Voter turnout

08-Nov-06

Cassady just told me that voter turnout exceeded 40% for yesterday’s midterms (preliminary analysis). I know that I was one of those people who decided to stop feeling apathetic and start actually trying to understand what’s going on and get people to vote. Seems I wasn’t the only one.
Other news is saying they [...]

An Oregon reaction to Election Day!

08-Nov-06

Oregon:
Did you see the OregonLive results yet??
I’m pretty happy about pretty much everything there. :) Except, uh… laughably 47 is passing without 46. Considering that 46 ALLOWS laws regulating campaign funds in the first place, you can’t pass a MEASURE THAT WOULD REGULATE FUNDS (measure 47) without it. And thus… right [...]

Literacy, technology, Google, and India

05-Oct-06

(or titled “part 2 of the “hole in the wall” India literacy experiment post!”)
Google announced yesterday that it’s launching the Google Literacy project to help spread literacy and provide resources and lots of other stuff for teachers, parents, mentors, students, and just regular people (with internet access) to help do so.
While promoting literacy worldwide via [...]

ban a book during banned books week. yes!

03-Oct-06

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451″ came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence
Hahahahahaha. coincidence, my ass.
so… I’ve been hanging out on reddit.com this morning. can you tell?

AOL sued for releasing member search data

26-Sep-06

Wow.
I didn’t even hear about this before now, but today while reading some of my work-related rss feeds, I came face-to-face with the story of AOL’s big screw up last July… and the fact that now they’re being sued for $5k a person-whose-data-was-released…
wow.
Here’s a link to the complaint and here’s a story and another [...]

Google gives public domain books!

31-Aug-06

I feel a tiny TINY bit bad for those awesome sites who’ve long maintained archives of public domain literature (Gutenberg, C.U.T., and this UK library to name a few), because now they’ve got some serious competition. But at the same time, now they don’t HAVE to maintain those libraries. They probably weren’t making a [...]