Waldo Jaquith

Archive for June 2011

Links for June 27th

WordPress Publisher Blog: A complete publishing system on WordPressThe Bangor Daily News managed to turn WordPress and Google Docs into an entire newspaper publishing system, by using a bunch of plugins to create an editorial workflow. Having written a lot of code to perform this very task, I'm really impressed by this. Better still, it [...]

My new adventure: The State Decoded.

A little project that I started a year ago now has been eating up a lot of my time, especially in the past eight months or so. I decided that, as Richmond Sunlight improves the display of legislation, I should create a new site to improve the display of the state code. It could hardly [...]

Links for June 16th

InterAction MagazineKen and Roberta Williams provide PDFs of every issue of Sierra Newsletter / Sierra Magazine / InterAction, from June 1981–Spring 1999. Not that anybody much cares about them past 1992-ish. Wikipedia: Hundred twenty-eighth noteTurns out they're a thing. Beethoven used them, as did Mozart. Much like the entire skill of drumming, I imagine that [...]

Links for June 15th

Wikipedia: “A” size illustrationThis is a simple chart demonstrating how “A” sizes of paper (e.g., an A1 sheet is similar in size to an 8.5"x11" sheet) are sized, from A0–A8. It's a golden spiral! I'm really impressed by the elegance of this. USPS Postal Addressing StandardsEver wondered what the proper format is for an address [...]

Creating an API for the commonwealth.

In perhaps a misguided effort, I started work a few months ago to create a site to round up all of the APIs for government data in Virginia. That inglorious website is Open Virginia. It’s easy to catalog all of them, because right now, I know of exactly two: Richmond Sunlight’s legislative API and my [...]

Links for June 11th

Lynchburg Police: A Look at Citizen’s Arrest in VirginiaLike most states, Virginia has a concept of "citizen's arrest." But you'd best know what you're doing if you're going to try it. The crime has to be a felony and you have to have actually observed the criminal commit the crime. Otherwise, you're setting yourself up [...]

I got an award from the White House.

Yesterday I went to the White House and got a nice award from them. They have an award called “Champions of Change” that they give out to a few people every week. The White House describes it as “a weekly initiative to highlight Americans who are making an impact in their communities and helping our [...]

97° of global warming.

The Republican Party of Virginia, February 2010: If it’s cold, there’s no such thing as global climate change. It’s very hot, therefore global climate change is real. Just a reminder of the logic brought to you by the Republican Party of Virginia.

Links for June 7th

Chris Frashure: Virgil Goode Running for President?Remember when Goode was a Democrat? Remember when he was an independent? Remember when he was a Republican? Well, now he's a member of the Constitution Party, and he wants to run for president. This should be hilarious. ThinkProgress: Herman Cain Pledges Not To Sign Any Bill Longer Than [...]

Jeff Frederick running for senate.

My favoritest RPV chair ever, Jeff Frederick, is running for state senate! (Or, apparently, he and some friends will be sharing the seat, because in his e-mail to supporters, he wrote that “we’ve decided to run.“) This is for the 36th district, Toddy Puller’s open seat. I don’t know the dynamics of the district well [...]

Links for June 2nd

TPM: ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Opens Fire On Store Because It Ran Out Of Crawfish42-year-old Larry Wayne Kelly—yes, middle name "Wayne"— opened fire on Pensacola's L&T Seafood Market with an AK-47 after they sold out of crawfish. When police tried to arrest them, he tried to run them down with his car. But it's OK, Kelly says, [...]