My Little Corner of the Net

Will You Vote?

Chart: Are you planning to vote in the midterm elections next Tuesday? Results: a) Yes, I plan to: 20% (157 votes), b) Yes, I already have (absentee ballot or early voting): 11% (86), c) No: 53% (414), d) I'm not sure: 16% (123), Total votes: 780

We live in a great country, one where we to choose those we want to lead us. Next Tuesday we have our annual elections where we, the people, get to decide on our new senators, members of Congress, and govenors.

Every day RIT posts a poll on their portal site. Yesterday’s poll asked “do you plan to vote in the midterm elections next Tuesday?” The results? %3% of respondents say no, 16% aren’t sure. Although this poll isn’t scientific or representative of much of anything, the results aren’t that far offf on past performance, where we as a country typically see turnouts of under 70%.

The thing that really gets me is that everyone is quick to blame all of our problems on the govenment. If the govenment isn’t meeting our needs, the best way to send it that message is by voting for change. I am by no means going to take anyone’s right to speak their mind about the govenment (or any other issue) away, but if you don’t vote, how can you complain?

So, wahtever you do on Tuesday, make sure you vote.  Not only is is your right and duty as a citizen, but it is also a wonderful privledge.  It only takes a few minutes, but it can have a tremendous impact.

Summer To-Do List

Now that it is quickly passing, here’s a list of the projects that I want to get done this summer. These aren’t in any kind of priority order, nor is it an exhaustive list of projects.

I figure that by posting it here I can hold myself accountable for getting things done.

Tay House

  • Expand the “perspective scouts” section of the site.
  • Improve the online treesale sign-up.
  • Create a “My Tay House” area for site management, etc.
  • Improve calendar, news apps.
  • Build new mailing list app.

R.A.T.S.

  • Convert old pages to new design.
  • Clean up site, remove pages no longer linked/needed.
  • Finish event scheduling app.
  • Create events email creation tool.

Interbrite

  • Finalize new design and start implementing.
  • Write new content to reflect new directions for business.
  • Create/find a CMS for the site (ora psudo-CMS for now).
  • Market myself.

HighEdWebDev

  • Work on workshop and code examples.

General

Master’s Degree

  • Come up with a topic for my Capstone project.

Yes, this list is ambitious. No, I probably won’t get to it all this summer. Yes, I still have to work 40 hours/week in addition to all of this. No, I am not insane…well, maybe I am.

M&M Cookies

I needed a cookie fix today at lunch, so I walked across campus to the SAU cafeteria to get one.  I decided on an M&M cookie when I got there.  I’m now sitting in my office eating it and it got be thinking about making M&M cookies with my mom, way back when I was in daycare.  We were making them for some special event—probably my birthday or something.  Anyway, I remember that we made a basic sugar cookie recipe and then pressed three M&M’s into each cookie.  I wanted to add an extra M&M to one of the cookies, but mom wouldn’t let me, as it wouldn’t be fair if one person got four candies and everyone else only got three.

Was this a pointless post?  Yes it was.

New Toy: Motorola Razr V3c

Razr PhoneI’ve been using my newest toy, a Motorola Razr V3c cell phone (in hot pink—yeah, right), for about a month.  So far I love the phone.  Its ultra-thin design makes it easy to slip in my pocket, so easy that I often forget that its there!  It has a large, easy to read screen, and a 1.3 megapixel camera.  Sound quality is very good, and it comes with all of the features I need (such as a calculator, calendar, etc.).

I got the phone despite RIT’s Verizon rep’s opinion of it.  His opinion was that it was too fat.  I kind of agree, although I’m willing to trade width for depth–the thinness of the phone is what really sold me on it.  I switched to Verizon because I was sick of the lousy service I was getting from Sprint.  Working at RIT, I am also elligible for a 10% service discout and discouts on accessories, so that helped sweeten the deal.  Since most everyone I know has Verizon service as well, the free IN calling will save me lots of minutes, too.

I also purchased software that lets me connect the phone’s USB port to a computer.  With this software I can backup my contacts (which is worth the $30 price tag, IMHO) and sync my Outlook calendar to the phone.  I should be able to download my pictures and upload MP3 files as ringtones as well, but Verizon has conveniently blocked those features on the phone, forcing customers to use their service to send pictures (for a price, of course) and to buy
their ringtones.  I’ve heard there are hacks that you can do to the phone to get around this, but I haven’t tried.

My only complaint about the Razr is that the small batter doesn’t have a long standby life.  If I forget to plug the phone in, I’ll loose about half of my battery charge overnight.  With my past phones I’d lose 25% at the most.  So far service has been much imporoved over Sprint.  I don’t think I’ve seen my phone go out of range once (compared to Sprint, where I’d lose service in certain parts of my apartment).

The true test of the phone will come in about two weeks when I verture up to the Adirondacks for the weekend.  Up there, saying service is spotty is an overstatement, and I’ve noticed that only Verizon customers seem to be able to get anything.  We’ll see how this phone does then.

Email Cleaning

Woo hoo!  I just cleaned out my email accounts after getting “your mailbox is over its limit” messages on my account at work for about two weeks.  Now I’m down to just 74 messages in my work account and only eight in my Interbrite account!  (From about 300 messages each before the cleaning).  I did move several messages to a new folder so that I can easily off load them to a local folder on my computer at home tonight, and I moved a lot of work stuff to off-line storage at work, so I didn’t actually purge all that much stuff, but I’m still proud of myself.

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