Shoestring Theory » politics

New ways to freak out customers

thetheorist — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:30:17 +0000

I’ve been having an ongoing political discussion with a friend via email for most of the week. Quite often, I’m working at the same time I’m writing replies to him. There are certain messages for my customers that I keep saved in text files for handy reference. Things like our detailed return instructions, some standard guides I haven’t got around to formatting for our website, or a short thank you message that gets sent out to all of our customers along with the tracking info. I just copy-paste when I need one of these.

A couple of days ago, I was sending two of these boilerplate messages to customers and *thought* I had copied them out of the text file. I was about to hit send when I suddenly realized what I had really pasted was part of an inflammatory political analysis regarding Gov. Palin. I had copied it earlier to send to my friend as part of our ongoing political argument.

A fine lesson on why work time and personal time should be kept separate. It keeps you from sending angry political rants to your customers.

Bidding on candidates: eBay employees presidential contributions

thetheorist — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:28:57 +0000

The Huffington Post’s FundRace 2008 tool taps into the public records of campaign finance to let anyone find out who contributes to presidential candidates. You can search by name, location, occupation or employer. A company as large as eBay is bound to have employees with a variety of political opinions, so I wouldn’t take the following numbers as any kind of indication about eBay as a business, but it’s still some fascinating data. Of course, I can waste hours with a tool like this.

Just a couple of other notes before we get to the numbers. All of the information in this database is self-reported, so it can take a little work to track down a list like this. As an example, the searches [ebay], [eBay, Inc.] and [eBay Inc] all created different lists of donors because of how people list their employer. I tried a variety of search terms, but this still may not be a complete list.

Summary of total contributions to Democrats:

Barack Obama – $17,705
Hillary Clinton – $12,100
John Edwards – $2,100
Bill Richardson – $250
Total: $32,155

Summary of total contributions to Republicans:

Mitt Romney – $13,730
John McCain – $535
Total: $14,265

Below, you’ll find a list of individual contributions. They are ranked based on amount given. The persons job title follows their name and is what was listed in the public record.

Barack Obama

Hillary Clinton

John Edwards

Bill Richardson

Mitt Romney

John McCain

Updated – CNN: You Vote, We color coordinate

thetheorist — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 06:14:33 +0000

Screen capture of Feb. 5, 2008 video stream from cnn.com.

So I’m in full political junkie mode, watching the live stream from CNN while surfing the web looking for more SupTu (that’s how the cool kids say it) info.

The colors on CNN’s Republican Super Tuesday map floored me:

McCain: Republican Red, the color of a patriot’s blood
Huckabee: Pinkish (or coral as CNN called it), the kind of color you deck the guest bathroom out in, not what comes to mind when one names “Presidential colors”
Romney: Sh*t brown. Sure, CNN called it bronze, but we can all see who they’re taking a dump on

Glad I got a screen shot of this one, as I couldn’t find the same map on their site.

[Update: So the ladytheorist tells me that I'm color blind and that Romney's color is in fact "Rusty Red." Still not a presidential color. What does everyone else think?]

[Update numero dos: The Daily Show ran a bit mocking all of the map colors the TV news channels used to identify SupTu candidates. I feel vindicated now. They don't have an embed code for the color map bit, but you can check out the intro after the jump or head over to thedailyshow.com.]

Rockin’ Barack at the Jayhawk Kansas Caucus

thetheorist — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:43:02 +0000

I still don’t know who I support the most, but no doubt Kansas Dems love Barack.

Lord, that’s an obnoxious headline. Someone stop me. The alternate headline for this was, “Slinging mud in Kansas politics.” Weather forecast: wet, white and disgusting. Quite a few people had problems getting out of the fairgrounds after the caucus.

Anyway, so I did go out and caucus tonight. After twelve years of being a proud independent, I registered as a Democrat just to see how a caucus worked. Quite shocking that 2,218 souls from my district braved disgusting weather to go out and support their candidates. My district heavily favored Barack. Make sure to check out the full results for Lawrence and Kansas.

Not a lot of mutual love between the Hillary and Barack camps. Technically Kucinich and Edwards were still on the ticket here. When their representatives gave speeches, pretty much everyone cheered and clapped, same with Barack’s rep. When it came time for Hillary’s rep though, the only sounds of support came from her camp (mostly grumbles uttered under breath around me while her rep spoke).

I’m glad I went out, though at the end of it I feel more like I attended a social event rather than took part in some historic process. Maybe that’s good though. Normally, I hurry about my daily routine and sandwich voting in between other responsibilities. This was a relaxed, thoughtful process that engaged and connected people. I ran into some people I knew (oddly all former or current journalists), talked with some random strangers and had a little mini-adventure. Regardless of who I end up voting for, I’m definitely pro-caucus now.

The line of cars I followed to escape the Douglas County Fairgrounds got lost, meandered through some trees and eventually exited through some driveway. I think it was the maintenance shed, I really hope we didn’t end up wandering through some poor sap’s yard.

I’ve got the next piece of analysis on eBay’s changes done, but it’s pretty boring. Going to try to liven it up some and get it up tomorrow.