Archive - Oct 2004
October 30th
Saturday Night Update
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/30/2004 - 21:35
It has been a long couple of days. I am home decompressing before I pick up one of my daughters from a Halloween party. I am reading blogs and emails, and putting together this post.
As an aside, I am currently over 300 email messages behind. I haven’t been to BlogExplosion or the MOOs in quite a while. Hopefully I can catch up a little bit before crashing.
Yesterday, I created turf maps for much of Stamford. (See my entry here and here for some of my comments on political map making).
This morning, I stopped at Greenwich Democratic Headquarters and dropped off a box of walk cards for Kim’s campaign. Hopefully, a lot of them will get distributed over the next 72 hours.
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Rate on NewsTrustOctober 27th
The politics of baseball
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/28/2004 - 00:30
You know, when Kim entered the race for State Rep in our heavily Republican district, I figured she had about as much chance of winning as the Red Sox had of sweeping the World Series after coming back from being down three games in the playoffs, and having it culminate during a lunar eclipse.
The way Kim's campaign is going, I still think the chances are about the same.
Aldon
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Representative Democracy
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/27/2004 - 09:50
(Originally published in Greater Democracy)
According to his blog, Josh Ferguson has finally voted. With the Blogger’s for Bush banner on his site, I expect that I probably would have voted differently than he did on many issues. However, is blog entry about voting has some very important comments.
He lives in California and notes that he and his wife spent six hours studying the 24 different propositions on his ballot. He writes about this:
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Random comments on multiple blogs
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/27/2004 - 08:54
(Originally published at Ryze as part of a discussion about why have multiple blogs.)
First, I should note that I’ve always pronounced ‘blog’ as one syllable, and I’ve never heard it pronounce ‘B-log’. That is in part, I believe, because ‘blog’ is a shortening of ‘weblog’.
I currently have quite a few different blogs. Some of them, such as the ones I have on Blogger, LiveJournal and Xanga, I have primarily to test their software and the be able to authenticate into their systems.
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October 26th
Connecticut Doctor's for Poor Public Policy
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/26/2004 - 10:51
In a recent blog entry, I wrote about the 'Connecticut Doctor's for Good Medicine'.
This is a PAC that that is supporting an anti-abortion activist who is campaigning against PACs.
The American Medical Students Association disagrees with the policies that the PAC are promoting.
Now, they are handing out vicious attack ads like this, and this.
Please check here, and here to see if your doctor is participating in this vicious attack group. If so, please let your doctor know that you do not approve of such conduct.
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October 23rd
Encouraging or discouraging voters
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/23/2004 - 22:03
(This was originally published in Greater Democracy)
Back during the Republican National Convention, I had the opportunity to hear what a few conservatives where saying about voter fraud in the coming election. I wrote up comments about it here.
Back then I wrote about John Fund, member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and in 1982 a chief investigative reporter for syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novack, suggested that if the election is close, we’ll have more what happened in Florida in 2000, the law suits will happen across the country.
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Saturday evening links.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/23/2004 - 19:31
Last night, I set up The Progressive Blog Alliance Aggregator. You can see recent blog entry from those PBA sites that I've been able to find the RSS feeds for. Currently there are around two dozen sites feeding this aggregator. As a general rule, it updates hourly.
One of the links I found there was Big Boys determined to Keep Their Guy in!. It is about a battle at the Plain Dealer about who they will endorse. There is more on the subject over at Daily Kos
Also, as I was searching , I found a pointer to Wolf packs for truth. I highly recommend this site.
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The mathematics of BlogExplosion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/23/2004 - 09:46
Yesterday, I spent a couple hours surfing through BlogExplosioin and I hit an interesting wall.
You have visted all the active sites in rotation.
The rotation is set up so that you can only visit a site once per 24 hours. Please come back later to visit more pages.
This got my thinking. I have earned about 700 credits from surfing sites around 1400, and another 300 mystery credits. In return I’ve had about 1000 visits to my site. I still have a few credits left for people to come to my site, but when those credits are up, my site won’t be in the active rotation. Based on this, there are more credits being used up than are being created, so eventually, unless they make some changes, BlogExplosion will implode with no more sites available.
To a certain extent, I am already seeing this. The number of hits from BlogExplosion have been decreasing steadily over the past few days. Based on this decline, I expect that I’ll be getting traffic from BlogExplosion for about a week more, and then it will dry up altogether.
I am wondering what other people have observed.
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October 21st
A couple interesting websites
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/21/2004 - 20:50
A survey of Internet Use for Political Information.
Very much worth checking out.
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Book Recommendations
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/21/2004 - 20:07
Over on a BlogExplosion blog, Psych Grad Mamma asked for a list of book recommendations. Here is what I came up with:
If you want some very enjoyable fiction that is very close to psychology, I highly recommend Irv Yalom's books,
When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession and
Lying on the Couch : A Novel. Of course, his book Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy is a classic, but that isn't fiction.
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