Web Development and Technology Blog

Senate Minority Leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, is running for re-election next year and has launched a web site with a blog that so far has been pretty well updated. It is good to see a GOP Senator so pro-emerging tech and hopefully will continue to use this to communicate directly. Maybe some other Kentucky politicans will start doing this (hint, hint Ernie Fletcher).

On a personal note, I went to Sunday school with the Senator’s daughter, I even have photos from 1978 to prove it, LOL.

I saw this absurd article in today’s Herald-Leader. Stacy mentioned the other day how much quicker she can get around Cincy or Atlanta than around Lexington (probably because of our vast number of Interstates running through the backwater (uh, metropolis)). So the idea that what we need to do with an earmark is spend $100,000 on is pedestrian traffic. This is laughable and absurd, but moreover, this “in-fill” trend that city leaders like to talk about is a FAD, nothing more. In Jessamine county we are building a ton more Square Footage to serve Lexington workers than downtown Lex is, but hey let’s spend our tax dollars on pedestrians!!! (BTW, up until this I had really been supportive of the Newberry administration, but what bad priorities.)

Article: Earmark for Lexington

In a similar vein is this blog post on Fred Thompson’s site about how “temporary” taxes are anything but. I love this quote:

As we all know, there are few things more permanent than a temporary tax. Just ask the folks who footed the cost of the Spanish-American War for the past 108 years via a federal excise tax on our phone bills.

Since my wife never seems to come here, and her using RSS is unlikely, I have added an e-mail notification option to the sidebar at the right.  Feel free to sign up to get an e-mail when I post.

My wife and kids are out back-to-school shopping. School starts back on Wednesday. I am glad their boredom will be over, but every year I lament the state of our American educational system more, but that is a rant for another blog.

Anyway, currently I am playing with tools in the Yahoo User Interface, some little JavaScript widgets that help give your sites a little more Web 2.0 interactive flair.  I am not doing anything complicated, but wish I knew JavaScript better, but with learning C#/ASP and the MS-SQL, MySQL and PHP work, I don’t know that my brain could take in anymore.

Of course, if the wonderful people at WordPress would put out a Rich Text Editor like the one embedded in this blog editor my life would be simpler. One of the reasons I am working with the YUI is that version 2.3 has a rich text editor. I have tested out quite a few and can’t seem to, at least easily, get the right set of options configured in any of them. So far, YUI’s Editor has been the easiest to configure, but still missing an image upload option (at least that I have found yet).

Lastly, while I took a break from coding, I was looking at the Iowa Straw Poll results. I find these to be great money makers for the party that holds it, but of limited real value. However, because the media places value on them, so do the candidates, or is that the other way around? Anyhow, after watching a video the other day from Mike Huckabee, I was very impressed to see his  second place win.

I went over to his site and thought it looked pretty cool and they already had a YouTube video up of post-Straw Poll spin, in about an hour, that is pretty good. What surprised me was that it was running ColdFusion. I have never done any Coldfusion, but what I have seen of Scorpio, ColdFusion 8 (which maybe out of beta now), Adobe hasn’t abandoned it, and with the help of BlueDragon, it might actually hold some developer mindshare.

On a personal note, I thought Huckabee to be a very articulate speaker and well-reasoned thinker. Plus, he has a good personal story with the weight loss and the Baptist preacher background. I will say the most ironic thing about him is that his sons, one of whom got arrested last year, are all still relatively large, and here the Governor lost all this weight and wrote a book on it. I am not really surprised about one son, as I met him back in my College Republican days and I think we all knew the only way he was involved with the CR’s was because of his dad, kinda reminded me of Tommy Boy.

So guess there are my random thoughts for Saturday…have a good rest of your weekend.

Well, not to sound obsessed with the whole “I’m with Fred” Thompson flirtation/campaign, but got an e-mail today and they have a 2.0 version of the site. The site that has been up all of 5 weeks. Guess this explains that whole $21,000 he dropped in the first month that I mentioned in a previous post.

Anyway, I should say don’t use me as a judge of the presidential campaign web sites, frankly I have only spent like 10 minutes on the other GOP ones, and not much longer on the Dem ones. (Although, doing a quick tour just now, I love the fact that McCain’s is begging for money and not much else on the front page…I’ll leave it at that.)

Today, would have been my grandfather’s 97th birthday. When I was a kid I always thought it was so cool that his birthday was exactly a week before mine, I thought that gave us some special connection.

Reflecting back now, I realize how little of a relationship I had with either of my grandfathers. My mother’s father because he died in 1986, and my dad’s father because he just was hard to get close to it. When “grandaddy” would talk and tell stories, it was wonderful. But those moments couldn’t be prompted. Guess he was very laconic, and if you asked tell me a story about X, you got the short version, but when he was ready to talk, he was quite the raconteur (kind of like my son, Jacob, when he wants to talk he never shuts up, but ask him a question and you get one word answers, LOL).

Grandaddy was a real example to do better in your life, both personally and professionally. I know my grandmother misses him, as do the rest of my family. I love you, Grandaddy.

BTW, quite the dapper photo. Found it when Courtney and I were looking through old Funeral Home photos. Doesn’t he look cool!

(Sorry, bad week both personally and professionally, so maybe got a little overwrought earlier when I wrote this)

While I wait for a backup to finish so I can completely rebuild a server (my favorite task :-<), I thought I would post this quick thought. DISCLAIMER: The opinions contained in here are Ed Pearson’s alone and do not reflect the opinions or views of any employer or contracting company.

I read an article today about the changes to the congressional ethics laws and they have this strongly worded section over candidate’s spouses and other family members being paid by the candidate’s committee or the family member’s employer being paid by the committee. I come to most of these articles different than most Americans. Having worked with and met many candidates and their families, I have found most to be honest and the family members often extremely talented and smart in their own right. Often they have skills that, while not alone, are very valuable to a candidate and for which they would otherwise be well-paid in the open market. All committees meet pretty stringent and frequent reporting requirements, so they employees and vendors for a candidate are well known (the only exception would be in the case the vendor currently doesn’t have to disclose that they employ a family member, then okay make that a reporting requirement, in the interest of full disclosure).

If the candidate’s donor are okay with the arrangement, why should the House Ethics Comm. care. This isn’t taxpayer money, but donor’s money. If it is an appearance thing, like Caesar’s wife, then okay. But for these “government watchdogs” to get all concerned over how this private money is spent and in the process lambaste these private citizens who are, for the most part, only trying to help their family member do a good job and get elected is a travesty.

Moreover, I don’t think this will alleviate the past lobbyists scandals, or the current Alaskan scandal, but I hope it gives everyone warm fuzzies that a law was passed that made no practical difference (isn’t that most laws these days???).

I will now get off my soap box and go back to my servers.