Waldo Jaquith

Archive for January 2011

That went better than expected.

In Virginia Politics on 31 January 2011 tagged richmond sunlight with 2 comments

That business of soliciting donations to buy the 2011 General Assembly session video? It took just under 46 hours for all of the money to be donated. A lot of it was donated by friends and regulars here. Larry Gross, Shaun Kenney, Jim Duncan, Craig Fifer, Kathy Mateer, Jeffrey Uphoff, Jeannine Lalonde, Bruce Roemmelt, Janis [...]

links for 2011-01-31

In ShortLinks on 31 January 2011 with 1 comment

New York Times: New Dietary Advice From Government—Just Eat Less The Ag Department has released the newest version of their dietary guidelines, and they've simplified. They're skipping asking people to eat or not eat specific nutrients, and just want Americans to—for the love of God—stop eating so much. Drink water, not soda. Half your dinner [...]

Legislative video sponsorships.

In Geek, ShortLinks, Virginia Politics on 29 January 2011 tagged richmond sunlight with 2 comments

Richmond Sunlight has no video of the legislature for a single day of the 2010 session, since the site a) doesn’t have a budget and b) I didn’t raise any money. So, this year, I’m soliciting sponsors for every day’s video. The average day’s House and Senate video requires buying $18 worth of DVDs from [...]

Both legal and dumb.

In Politics on 27 January 2011 with 43 comments

Open-carry activists are to the second amendment as Westboro Baptist Church is to the first amendment. What they’re doing is legal, but they’re still bastards.

links for 2011-01-26

In ShortLinks on 26 January 2011 with 3 comments

The Urbanophile: Yes There Are Grocery Stores in Detroit It's become accepted fact that there are no major grocery stores in Detroit. (I wrote about the very topic here, dubiously, two years ago.) Here a Detroit resident points out that he and his fellow 800,000 other Detroiters shop at any of bajillions of grocery stores [...]

How Instapaper works.

In Geek on 25 January 2011 tagged instapaper with 5 comments

Marco Arment on how Instapaper works: The bookmarklet has a mechanism to save pages from sites that require logins for full content, such as the Wall Street Journal and Harper’s, by sending a copy of the page’s HTML from the customer’s browser to the server. It’s like automating the “Save as…” menu item: if you [...]

links for 2011-01-24

In ShortLinks on 24 January 2011 with 12 comments

Roger Ebert: Why 3D doesn't work and never will. Case closed. Walter Murch explains why 3D is fundamentally flawed. "It is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time." Anyhow, it's not like 2D films are really 2D. When we see a character on screen walking towards us, we don't say [...]

links for 2011-01-21

In ShortLinks on 21 January 2011 with 3 comments

Born This Way Gay adults submit photos of themselves as children and write about when they knew they were gay. It's actually kind of nice, and often funny. (tags: humor gay) PickupTrucks.com: Delta IV Heavy Rocket vs. 2011 Ram 3500 Heavy Duty Diesel A reminder of how hilariously inefficient our method of getting into space [...]

links for 2011-01-20

In ShortLinks on 20 January 2011 with 4 comments

Virginia Defense Force I have occasionally lamented that the 1917 federalization of national guards made it impossible for somebody to volunteer to serve Virginia in the manner of the National Guard without any danger of being called to go to war in a foreign land. There are probably lots of people who would take up [...]

CNS does it right.

In Geek, Virginia Politics on 19 January 2011 tagged richmond sunlight with 2 comments

Although it’s true that basically no media outlets bother to mention bill numbers when writing about legislation, I really have to give credit to the always-vital Capital News Service, run by Jeff South at the VCU School of Mass Communication. Every one of their articles about legislation provide bill numbers for every single bill that [...]

links for 2011-01-19

In ShortLinks on 19 January 2011 with 12 comments

Thought Catalog: Five Emotions Invented By The Internet "Emotion" is kind of a strong word, but I'm not sure we have a better descriptor in English. (Ah, those efficient Germans.) (tags: humor internet) Wall Street Journal: Companies yank cord on residential phone books The State Corporation Commission is considering letting phone companies stop distributing phone [...]

Memo to Virginia journalists.

In Geek, Virginia Politics on 18 January 2011 tagged richmond sunlight with 5 comments

Please start including bill numbers in your coverage of legislation. If you did that, then Richmond Sunlight would promote your coverage of that bill, prominently, on that bill’s page, as well as on pages about related bills. Media coverage is the only major component of the information ecosystem that simply can’t be incorporated into this [...]

links for 2011-01-18

In ShortLinks on 18 January 2011 with 9 comments

Wikipedia: Operation Eagle Claw I'd been told that President Carter did nothing to attempt to free the 52 Americans taken hostage in Tehran. The truth turns out to be exactly the opposite. Operation Eagle Claw was an amazingly brazen, totally bad-ass attempt to rescue every last one of them. It failed operationally, due to a [...]

Beagle Puppies for Adoption

In Charlottesville, Misc. on 14 January 2011 tagged foster, pets with 20 comments

We’ve been fostering four little beagle mutts for the past couple of weeks (and puppy-sat their two litter mates last weekend, which was three days of chaos). It’s time for them to go back to the Charlottesville Albemarle SPCA to be altered, and then they go up for adoption. Naturally, I want to promote them [...]

links for 2011-01-12

In ShortLinks on 12 January 2011 with 3 comments

Jalopnik: Virginia DMV Revokes World's Greatest License Plate Too bad—it was a really funny license plate. (tags: humor)

links for 2011-01-11

In ShortLinks on 11 January 2011 with 3 comments

A List Apart: A Simpler Page Craig Mod ruminates on adapting book design to HTML—something I've spent a lot of time doing in the past year—and introduces a design framework that he's put together for presenting long-form text on tablets. (tags: design typography css) The Fisher King Why is "The Fisher King" not getting a [...]

McDonnell straps on his redistricting fig leaf.

In Virginia Politics on 10 January 2011 with Comments Off

Mere hours before this year’s short session of the General Assembly session, Gov. Bob McDonnell has finally decided to act on his campaign promise of bipartisan redistricting. Having allowed last year’s legislative session to go by without a word in favor of any of the bills that would have reformed redistricting—back when it would have [...]

links for 2011-01-10

In ShortLinks on 10 January 2011 with 14 comments

OK Cupid: The Mathematics of Beauty More great data-crunching from the folks at OK Cupid, this time looking into how men rate women about whom they collectively disagree about their attractiveness. In a nutshell, men don't really like women who they *all* find attractive, but they go nuts for women who some guys think are [...]

links for 2011-01-07

In ShortLinks on 7 January 2011 with 7 comments

Aham: Egypt's Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as "human shields" On Coptic Christmas Eve—last night—thousands of Muslims showed up at churches throughout Egypt to act as human shields to protect Christians from attack by Islamic militants, as happened last week in Alexandria. Participants included two of the president's sons, a pair of movie stars, and [...]

links for 2011-01-06

In ShortLinks on 6 January 2011 with 5 comments

NPR: Gov. Scott, Ex-CEO, Aims To Run Fla. Like A Business Columbia/HCA paid the largest-ever fine for Medicare fraud. The CEO who presided over that fraud was just sworn in as governor of Florida…which he promises to run like a business. Oh, Florida. This will end badly. (tags: florida republican business) Metafilter: A living document? [...]