Confessions of an Undercover Geek

The big news in Washington D.C and as I’m sure most of you have heard is that the former President Gerald R. Ford passed away. You could tell this morning when walking to work that things were a little bit more of a buzz then usual.

Ford’s remains will be coming to DC on Saturday where it will lie in state at the US Capitol Building before going to the National Cathedral.

As a newly minted resident of the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area, this is kind of exciting. It is not everyday that a president passes away. For him to lie in state and to have a state funeral is a pretty big deal in history and I get to be here for it, which is exciting.

Saturday night I plan on going to the Capitol Building to check out what happens. It should be interesting. I’ll take photos, if they let me, and blog about it after.

Ford’s presidency was before my time and I have to admit that I don’t know more about them the basics from history. Over the next couple days, I want to learn more about the Ford Presidency.

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I think I almost spit coffee out my nose when I recently read that the State of Michigan is receiving an award from the Center for Digital Government for the 2006 Best State Web Portal.

Oh where do I start? Well…

The State of Michigan does not seem to care about World Wide Web Consortium internationally accepted standards like HTML. According the W3C Validator, it has 113 errors with HTML 4.01 Transitional.

The Web Standards Project has a great article on the advantages of using web standards.

The web site does not use CSS to lay out the page but it uses tables. Using tables for layout is a practice that has been given up by the Web community. It constricts the way that people view the site. It bloats the size of the HTML file for the page. It also makes the code much harder to maintain. It will take more time to change the site the next time that they update it.

The left navigation on the page is an image of white text in a blue box. It is an image of text. Why not just use HTML and CSS to make it look the same way?!? By making the text an image, they have given the user one more thing that they have to download, so the load time will be slower. A person with a visual disability who turns up the size of the font in the browser won’t be able to have the size of the text of the navigation increase.

Of course, they have a text-only version of the page. Unfortunately text-only pages have gotten such a bad rap for not being equivalent or not being accessible that people with disabilities won’t use them and they consider them a slap in the face.

I have more to say about this web site. Look for a Part 2. Maybe I’ll do a whole series of posts on why the State of Michigan Web site is an embarrassment.

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Today was my first day of my Foundations of Sociology class at RIT. We got talking about the war. I made a point about how wanting to be free is a natural part of being human. It is something we all share.

Apparently, my classmates think that freedom is a American ideal that we impose on the rest of the world.

I must have a western prejudice against slavery. (sarcasm)

I think a bunch of the founders just rolled over in their graves. It’s sad how much we take freedom for granted.

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I have posted my thoughts on Book 4 of Plato’s Republic. I really like this essay. I think it’s pretty good.

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Today I posted to my Plato’s Republic blog my commentary on book three. Check it out and let me know what you think.

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Victor Davis Hanson had a really great editorial on Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal. The editorial, At War With Ourselves, sizes up the war and where we are at as country. I think he is right on.

BTW… I am made it safely to Lansing, MI.

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I wonder why people care so much about Cheney’s hunting accident. Isn’t it sad how much news coverage this is getting? People are starting to talk about how the accident was released to the press as a coverup. Oh Geez! This was a hunting accident. Give me a break. Lets let the president move on to the business of governing.

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One of the biggest news headlines last night, other than President Bush’s State of the Union Address, was that Cindy Sheehan got arrested at the Capitol Building. If I was the Democratic Party Leadership, I’d be pretty pissed off at Rep. Lynn Woolsey for inviting her. Sheehan getting arrested has outshadowed the Democratic response. I looked on CNN.com this morning and Bush’s Address was the top story and Sheehan was the #2 story. I am surprised at the lack of fore thought by the Democrats.

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The blogosphere seems to be pretty quiet about President Bush’s State of the Union Address tonight. I looked on Technorati and Memeorandum and I didn’t see any good discussion threads brewing. Maybe the State of the Union is being overshadowed by the movie Brokeback Mountain getting 8 Oscar nominations or Samuel Alito getting confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice.

Maybe people are finally starting to realize that the State of the Union is nothing but rhetoric and pandering. I know that Bush is really counting on this State of the Union to give him a bump in the polls. He wants to layout his agenda of 2006.

I unfortunately will not able to watch the address live. I have my Intro to XML class tonite from 6-10 and it will probably go the full 4 hours tonite. For those of you watching the event, you may want to try out the State of the Union drinking game. We could take bets on how many billions of dollars in new programs will be proposed…post a comment with your best guess. I am guessing $10 billion (uneducated guess).

I will probably sit back with a Sam Adams White Ale tonite, after class, and watch the post-game coverage. It shall be fun.

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I was glad to see that Judge Samuel Alito, after a 58-42 vote is now, Associate Justice Samuel Alito. He was confirmed to be the newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Now I just hope that he lives up to what everyone speculated he is going to be.

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