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Saturday, July 15, 2006

all the king’s men

The New York Times has an interesting article tomorrow: Lieberman Hopes His Fate Isn’t Sealed With a Kiss. “He is in his 18th year in the Senate, where he has prided himself as being moderate, collegial and willing to work with Republicans. He has built the kind of seniority that often leads lawmakers to consider themselves invulnerable.”

He feels so entitled to the Senate seat he was elected to fill three times that he’s forming the Lieberman Party to run in the general election should he be defeated in the primary on August 8. A vanity party.

Let’s end the reign of this arrogant, sanctimonious King George stooge once and for all. Vote for Ned Lamont on August 8.

Here is an interesting story:

“It certainly makes it a lot harder to make your case that you’re a real Democrat as you’re packing your bags.” Bill Curry, who ran for governor against Rowland.

posted by lee on 07/15/06 at 11:54 AM
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Sunday, July 09, 2006

they got hitched without a hitch

Kris and Matt’s wedding was beautiful. Kris was beautiful and looked so happy it made my heart ache. Here are Matt and Kris (click to enlarge)

I put a bunch of pictures of the wedding (taken by me, Stanley, Cara, and Brian) and you can find them here on Picasaweb (the three gallery that start out with the word “Reception”): http://picasaweb.google.com/wordsilk There are several pictures of Kate here—she looked lovely as well.

I was ok until the part of the reception where Dad danced with Kristine. When Kris’s mom Jamie got married all those many moons ago, Dad and Jamie did the father-daughter dance to “Sunrise, Sunset.” Well, that’s the song that played as Dad danced with Kris. It meant a lot and of course I couldn’t keep the tears out of my eyes.

James Fleming dances with granddaughter Kristine Mitroka Downey at her wedding

All of my mother’s sister were there except for Aunt Joan, who is recovering from cancer. Brian snapped this photo of them. Aunt Anne is on the left, next to Aunt Grace, then Aunt Connie, then my mother, Alice. (click to enlarge)

It was a good wedding, and I’m glad Matt is a member of our family now.

posted by lee on 07/09/06 at 11:16 AM
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Monday, July 03, 2006

update: teva programmers finally get a clue

At last, at last, my dad got his gift certificate from Teva. It turned out that there was a glitch in the forms they use for processing—for some reason, the state of the shipping address was showing up as the state for the billing address in the receipt. Which means that, if the state is not your billing state (such as for a gift sent to Michigan from Connecticut), the credit card company will not process the transaction. As it shouldn’t.

With a lot of perseverance on the customer service rep Gina L.‘s part, and her willingness to tell the programmers that they had made a mistake (and telling them again and again until they fixed it—programmers never believe that laypeople know what the hell they’re talking about, do they? Even though I told Gina what to tell them, it still took a while to sink in. The fact that it just didn’t work should have been the tip-off, but programmers, particularly asp jockies, are often among the most arrogrant frecks on the planet.)

What’s really weird is nobody was ever notified of a failed transaction—not the customer (me), not the service reps—nobody. So I bet they lost thousands in sales over the 12 days the problem persisted. All those gift certificates that should have been sent ... on all the carts we manage, every single one notifies us if there is a failed transaction and, here’s a concept, even provides an error report so we know if it’s the customer who screwed up (like a mis-typed number) or if we did (like forgetting a piece of info that needs to be submitted). And we test test test before deploying a new system.

I would say that all’s well that ends well, but I’ll wait and see if my dad can successfully use his gift certificate on http://www.teva.com before I decide it’s ok. They did send him an apology for screwing up our father’s day present.

posted by lee on 07/03/06 at 10:00 AM
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Tuesday, June 13, 2006

kaleidoscope site launch

Time is definitely flying by. A lot I’ve been wanting to write about, but when I think about firing up the blog, everything I want to write about sort of clumps together and clogs the pipes. So, I’ll catch up, a bit at a time, as the mental Drano starts working (which, in my case, is working in the garden and forgetting there is even an internet while I get my hands dirty. Which is what I did over the weekend.)

(Click on the image to see it larger) What I want to write about now is a new site we just launched last night: http://www.kaleidoscopekid.com for a store, Kaleidoscope, in Stamford. Kaleidoscope sells kids clothes and gifts.

For now, it’s a brochure with contact information and directions to the store. Down the road, the site owner wants to set up a store on her website, which will be interesting to work on, with the goal of making it as easy as possible for the owner to add new products as the seasons change. I’m not sure which shopping cart we will use yet other than it will be based on a PHP/MySQL platform and not Perl/CGI.

One thing I’ve been learning a lot about is shopping carts and ecommerce. We’ve been using PayPal for years, as well as RTWare for http://www.charlieandgrace.com, which is pretty much a “you build the buttons” solution though is getting a bit hard to manage as the company adds more and more products. So we’re thinking about moving it to Zen-Cart. We have http://www.famous-artists-school.com and http://www.cursos-ingles-cortina.com on Zen-Cart, and it’s working really well on those sites. The bitchy part about Zen-Cart is setting up the zones—a tedious pain.

We’re building a “shopping mall” with osCommerce, which might be finished some time in this century. In this case, it’s a lot of different storefronts with the same back end database, and is pretty tricky, especially since the site owners keep moving the goalposts. On some sites, we’re stuck using ClickCartPro, which is a clunky Perl-based application that can’t handle lots of traffic. I find it extremely difficult to use. I’ve been curious about really trying CubeCart—I installed a demo and like it so far but haven’t really needed it yet (it didn’t do the mall stuff, which is what I was looking for). The price is right (under $100 gets you a LOT of bells and whistles), and this might be what I use next, just so I can test it thoroughly.

Besides working on Kaleidoscope (which was a lot of fun and will get an About Us page pretty soon), working on the shopping mall and storefronts (skins), and working on what’s turning into a gorgeous site for a resort in Mexico, we’ve had a lot of activity going on for most of our clients.

Oh, I nearly forgot, there’s another website we launched recently, http://www.fearlessmountainfilm.com—which is a work in progress. Tony Anthony made a documentary about some Buddhist monks. More about that in a later post. (But check it out!)

posted by lee on 06/13/06 at 09:56 AM
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Monday, May 15, 2006

ned lamont - the video

Ned Lamont’s campaign just released a video, produced and directed by Robert Greenwald, the guy who made Outfoxed and other documentaries about Wal-Mart and the lies that led up to the Iraq invasion. You can watch the video here—it’s available in three different formats, so one of them at least should work on your system.

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with Ned Lamont and what he stands for, be patient—he finally shows up a little more than halfway through the video. And be sure to view it on a system where you can crank up your speakers as the volume is way too low for comfort on the web (in each of the formats). I had to listen to it on Stanley’s computer because he’s got a good sound system set up on his, where the harmon kardon speakers on my Toshiba laptop suck—and even on Stanley’s system, I had trouble hearing it (note to the Lamont media folks: some of us are hard of hearing. And we vote.)

I am a solid, active, supporter of Ned Lamont. I even changed my voter registration from unaffiliated to Democrat so I can vote for him in August (yes, I actually remembered to do this!) I’ve done some volunteer work for his campaign (such as putting together and hosting Connecticut Choice Voice), and with Stanley, getting the voter history records from Westport, and we will probably do even more as the need arises. His bumper sticker is on our car. So my “review” of the video is meant to be constructive.

My comments: The video takes way, way too long to introduce Ned. It’s way, way too negative. (As is most of the Lamont campaign literature I’ve seen.) Ned’s website is so much better as presenting him and his positions on the issues that the campaign would be better off just sending people to the home page than spending the money on slick mailings and videos that waste too much space Joe-bashing. What’s the closing shot on the video? A picture of Joe and Bushie. It’s clever and funny, but only to those already in the say-no-to-Joe camp. What it does is evoke sympathy for Liebermouth. Bash, bash, bash, and not nearly enough about Ned.

The montages are so choppy that I was never sure what issue was being discussed—why not a straightforward sequence of Issue, Liebermouth’s stand (non-solution), Ned’s solution. You know, problem-status quo-solution. Make it crystal clear why Ned is the better choice. Ned is charismatic, articulate, and easy on the ears (vs. Joe’s whine)—the video should start with Ned and end with Ned. The campaign literature should follow the same format: Ned has a better way. It’s all too much about Joe sucks and that gets old really fast (no matter how much Joe sucks)—I want to support a candidate, not vote against an incumbent. And I want the candidate I’m supporting to be better than the incumbent, not buried by the mud. A little Joe-bashing is fine, but not something to base an entire campaign on.

When watching the video, I wanted to know more about what Ned’s program is in the Bridgeport high school, and more about his views on paying for healthcare, and to know more about how he thinks we should get ourselves out of Iraq and what he thinks shoud be done about enery—I already know what Joe’s positions are. I’m just worried that the over-focus on Bad Joe will evoke more more people to vote for him out of sympathy than belief in him. I think Greenwald’s video should be remade into a video about Ned and the issues and presented without the cute intercutting that makes it confusing—the issues are certainly compelling enough. The campaign literature should be focused on Ned and his proposed solutions more than DINO Joe.

And that’s my two-cent’s worth. Stop feeding my depression about the way things are now—give me some hope.

posted by lee on 05/15/06 at 07:47 AM
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Sunday, April 23, 2006

catching up w/ the lamont campaign

Petition training for the Ned Lamont for Senate campaign is on Wednesday at the various campaign offices around the state. Don’t know yet if we’ll be able to get to it, but we will certainly try.

A question for the campaignmeisters: why is it so hard to find the addresses for the local offices on http://www.nedlamont.com ? And the phone numbers—I had to call headquarters to get a phone number for the Norwalk office. Seems like a no-brainer to add this info to the main site, with maybe a name or two and contact info. Sheesh. And who are the people in those photos? And where is stuff I can use to push Ned on my website? (Go ahead—ask me to help!)

I need to remember to go to the Registrar’s office and affiliate with the Dems. I’ve been an independent so long I keep forgetting that I have to do this in order to vote in the Primary. And the only reason I am doing this is to vote for Ned Lamont. I am not looking forward to unleashing the dogs of campaign donation seekers—Stanley is a registered Dem and he gets so many phone calls begging for money he’s getting really pissed off. So, you can see how committed I am to Lamont, to risk double the number of begging calls.

Aldon sent me a bunch of links to recent postings and news articles re: Lamont & Liebermouth. It’s much more than I have time to deal with (I get Google alerts about the campaign as well), so I settled for looking at http://www.firedoglake.com (here are the search results: http://www.firedoglake.com/index.php?s=Lieberman). And I think it’s cool that Aldon is getting some notice for his behind the scenes work.

Liebermouth lost even the remotest chance I would ever vote for him with his comments about driving to another hospital to get Plan B. Just shilling for the Catholic vote.

posted by lee on 04/23/06 at 02:14 PM
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Sunday, April 02, 2006

the vehicles are gone!

The people came yesterday and took away the van and the Nova. Yes! They were happy, Stanley was happy (he hates giving old cars to the junkyard—“Why should they make money off of my car?” He’d rather give them to someone who will use them.), I’m thrilled.

It’s so pretty out today—I’m about to go out with my “new” Kodak Duoflex III (the one Stanley gave me for Christmas). And I found a place that develops 120 film via mail order, and even one that I THINK will develop my 620 film (which is really just re-rolled 120 film—I just need the spool back and I don’t know if the place I use for processing the 120 film will return it ... )

I would like to test out my new roto-tiller. But guess who wants to try it out first. He said he hasn’t given it to me yet.

Oh, and Stanley sez there is an area of lawn that was indeed reclaimed from the dust—he said the grass is growing fierce and fast around the birdbath. Hmmm. Not exactly a huge swath of lawn, but nice to know it’s possible.

I guess I forgot to say that my roto-tiller was delivered by Fedex on Saturday morning at 8:30 am. Maybe the delivery person knocked because Ginger sure went crazy—she even went downstairs to see who was at the door—and she rarely goes down without me. I’m glad he left it—I managed to drag it into the foyer and then went back up to bed. I didn’t know Fedex did Saturday deliveries for ground shipments—they must’ve wanted to get it out of the way or something.

posted by lee on 04/02/06 at 09:33 AM
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Thursday, March 09, 2006

lamont will formally throw his hat in the ring

On Monday, March 13, Ned Lamont is going to announce his candidacy for the US Senate. He will do so at 4:00 p.m. in the Court Room of the Old State House at 800 Main Street in Hartford. Good.

I’ve already written about meeting Lamont, and why I can and do support him (I volunteered to work on his campaign and I made a campaign contribution). You can read it here. I’m excited that he’s running because, for a change, I want to vote FOR a candidate rather than against one.

It’s hard for me to articulate all of the reasons I cannot and will not support Joe Lieberman. But I read some posted today on My Left Nutmeg, which was a repost that, I guess, has been floating around the CT blogs, that really sums up a lot of the reasons why Liebermouth has gotta go:

Maybe you realized Senator Joe Lieberman had to go when he voted for George Bush’s war in Iraq. Or maybe it was for the poor job he did vetting Bush’s FEMA appointee Mike Brown when he chaired FEMA’s oversight committee. Or maybe it was his vote for cloture on a bankruptcy bill that will impoverish families unlucky enough to lose a job, or lose a wage-earner to illness or death, while enriching credit card companies. Or maybe it was his flirtations with privatization of Social Security and with joining the Bush administration. Or maybe it was his opposition to universal health care in 1994. Or maybe his flip flops on school vouchers. Or maybe his support of ruinous free trade agreements in Central America. Or maybe it was his countless appearances on Fox News, undercutting opposition to the Bush regime. Or maybe it was his op-ed piece in the Wall St. Journal with wild claims of success in Iraq. Or maybe it was his vote for the Defense of Marriage Act and his unenthusiastic support for civil unions for gays and lesbians. Or maybe his reluctance to condemn George Bush for misleading us into war, even though he loudly condemned Bill Clinton about misleading us about an extramarital affair. Or maybe it was his vote on giving huge tax cuts to oil companies in last year’s energy bill. Or maybe it was kissing the President after his State of the Union speech last year.

Or maybe it was his vote yesterday to clear the path for Judge Samuel Alito to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. Twenty five Democrats sought to have an extensive debate on the merits of a judge who would roll back Roe protection, a judge who is a proponent of giving limitless power to President Bush. Predictably, Joe Lieberman wasn’t one of them ... (read the rest here.)

Earlier today, I got a message from Aldon Hynes pointing me to Six Questions for Senator Joe Lieberman on Connecticut Local Politics blog. What I read was him citing a bunch of hot-button issues that he says have to be dealt with, but no positions on those issues, plus his continued support for the atrocity of the Iraq War, but his complete misreading of what it will take to get Dems back into the fold—which he says is assuring us that the Dems have national security covered. Hmm. Somehow I don’t think this is the answer—I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, Dems want the Democratic Party to field (and here’s a concept) Democrats and not a bunch of career politicians busy fleeing to the right of center lest they lose their jobs. What I did really like in Six Questions ... was a comment by posted by TrueBlueCT, listing the real questions that Liebermouth needs to answer:

Is Sean Hannity really a “wonderful American”, and how do you reconcile your friendship with Sean and the hate-filled bile he spews? Do you regret your comments in support of the Terri Schiavo intervention by Congressional Republicans? Will you die a Democrat, or is there a chance you might quit the Party? (you hinted that you would be on the November ballot, one way or the other.) Your house in New Haven is for sale. Where do you intend to live during your next term? Are we in another Vietnam? What if Iraq isn’t winnable? (the Humpty-Dumpty principle.) At what point do we admit a mistake? Hamas just won the Palestinian elections. Do you think our occupation of Iraq played a part in the extremists’ rise to power? What do you think of Saudi Arabia, and their repressive regime? Should we be pressuring them towards Democracy? Torture! Is it an American value? If not, how do you square your vote in favor of Alberto Gonzales confirmation? Are all the Gitmo detainees guilty? Shouldn’t there be some system of due process? The Bankruptcy Bill. You voted for it before you voted against it. Why didn’t you join the filibuster attempt when so many Democrats were strongly against it?

Yep, Liebermouth has gotta go. And we have a real Democrat running against him. DIANE FARRELL Diane said she supports Lieberman. Why she did this, or felt she needed to come out in support of ANYBODY at this point, has me baffled. The main plank in her platform for her run against Shays is the war. So how can she support a flaming hawk? I planned on volunteering to do campaign work at her headquarters and I planned on sending a contribution. But I’m rethinking this—especially since I have yet to receive a response from her aboout why she did this. It served no purpose: why announce in support of anyone so early in the game? Did the party big shots (you know, those geniuses who managed to lose the last two presidential elections) threaten her with a funding drought? What did she have to gain from this? I am so disappointed. If someone, preferably Diane herself, could explain why she did this, I would appreciate it. And explain how it isn’t shooting herself in the foot, and how she’s going to regain some credibility. Her campaign always bothered me because of the exceedingly expensive fundraisers (way out of my league—I can’t afford a grand to hear what Madeline Albright has to say), but now there’s this Keystone Kops element: support the hawk, then challenge your opponent to a debate on the war. Sounds like great advice—for losing.

posted by lee on 03/09/06 at 08:59 PM
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Friday, February 24, 2006

surviving bullies is launched

At long last, we’ve launched The Surviving Bullies Project (http://www.survivingbullies.com)—a new anti-bullying resource site. It’s just the beginning of what’s planned for the site, which is the brainchild of Dickon Pownall-Gray. Dickon and other Project staff are working on developing a comprehensive anti-bullying school program and, as mentioned in an earlier post, have published the Surviving Bullies Workbook.

We have more stuff to include in the site now, and fairly soon, we’ll include multimedia content. It’s extremely interesting, and I really hope it helps in the battle against bullying.

posted by lee on 02/24/06 at 03:20 PM
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Monday, February 13, 2006

now it’s definite: i support ned lamont for senator

Stanley and I went to Stamford this afternoon, to the home of Aldon and Kim Hynes (a fantastic, rambling log hunting lodge in North Stamford), where we got to meet Ned Lamont, who, as I mentioned earlier, is planning a run against Joe Lieberman. Aldon arranged the meeting for bloggers, and invited us along with several other bloggers.

I liked Lamont before, just based on what I read of his position on his website (http://www.nedlamont.com)—but now that I’ve had a chance to meet him and to hear what he has to say in person, I can honestly say I am very glad to be actively working to support a candidate for a change rather than just voting against someone.

Besides his support for universal health care and his opposition to the wombat war in Iraq and to pork, I agree with Lamont when he says, in essence, that serving in Congress should not be a career, and that the Founding Fathers had never intended it to be a career. The FF intended that citizens serve for a term or two, doing the best job that they could, bringing their experience and perspectives to bear, representing their constituents, and then go home. That it’s when politics becomes a career is when things start to go wrong and corruption can set in.

It was an interesting meeting. Aside from the Hynes, there were other bloggers, a campaigner from Massachusetts, and Tom Swan, who is on a leave of absence as the executive director of Connecticut Citizen Action Group to work on Lamont’s exploratory committee, and a blogger named Matt Stoller out of DC (http://matt_stoller.mydd.com) who interviewed Lamont (film at 11 ... er, he had the interview videotaped and said he will make it available via mydd.com and announce it on http://www.myleftnutmeg.com).

I would’ve like to have been able to ask Lamont some more questions, or Tom Swan some more questions, but felt steamrollered by Matt Stoll and his questioning and and his interview taping (for a blog I’d never heard of until today!) ... wish that could have been scheduled some other time as it immediately made me feel like an outsider in my own state, shoved aside by some beltway blogger. I’m not saying that was the intention—that was just my reaction, reasonable or not. It’s not a reflection on Lamont—he gracefully went along with it all. Note to Lamont’s event organizers: don’t invite actual voters to these meetups and have them shut up while some out-of-stater hogs all the meetup time—that ain’t grassroots organizing! UPDATE: Aldon wrote in a comment that the meeting was actually for beltway bloggers. I didn’t know this—I thought it was for local bloggers. So my complaint is not relative—other than to say next, PLEASE be clear about the purpose of the meetup (my feeble brain needs it!)

That said, I did like Lamont’s answers to the questions that were asked. Or else I wouldn’t be writing this. Lamont has a grasp of what our national priorities should be, I think.

As soon as I got home, I went to Ned Lamont’s contribute page on ActBlue (https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/entity/9354) and made a donation. And I will work at his campaign office when it opens up here in Norwalk, and do whatever else I can do to get out the vote for Ned Lamont on August 8th (the CT primary). I’ll even change my voter registration from independent to Democrat—something I’ve NEVER felt compelled to do until today.

posted by lee on 02/13/06 at 02:44 PM
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