howard dean
Already : Hatachi Archives
howard dean Sunday December 7
i just finished talking with zack rosen, a friend who lived in the dorm with me two years ago. zack came to my room frequently, and we were far better friends then than we are now. but that's not to say that i don't like him anymore, in fact, i often wonder why we stopped hanging out when we stopped cohabitating the same dorm floor. he's a good guy.
but he messaged me the other day to show off: he's taking this year off from school to work on howard dean's campaign, and while i don't think i maintain the political gusto necessary to leave school for an entire year to work politically, i must say that it is inassailably cool that his picture is on the front page of the new york times' website (on the bottom right, if it's still there). in fact, it was just enough to make me jealous.
so, when he messaged me today, i mentioned that i was doing PHP work as well in my free time. and SQL work. and that's what they use on the dean campaign. he asked if i would help. so, before i signed myself up for anything, because i don't even know who i want for vote for yet, just so long as they are not republican in the bush sense of the word, i looked at dean's stance on the issues. truly, he's got the same visionary statements as any other presidential hopeful about the environment and education, and i don't believe it's possible to do everything as president. the system needs some help, too. but, his policy on campaign finance reform is sexy, and the grassroots campaign is equally interesting.
now, back to me. i don't know anything about RSS. i know what it can do, but i don't know how to integrate RSS and XML into PHP. for those of you who don't program, just assume any three-letter combination of capital letters is another language of information exchange. thus, on a trial basis, i am going to design an RSS dashboard interface that will theoretically integrate all of the individual (not-so-good) RSS interfaces that the software on deanspace.org already has. this software will be used in the synchronization of the deanspace.org sites, which are sites that are "underneath" the dean campaign: iowa has a site, new hampshire has a site, and so on. it's not entirely based on states, but think of it as small support groups for a larger cause.
i'd say that last sentence is what was most interesting to me about the dean campaign. there was a rhetoric that the campaign is not solely about presidency, it is about the attempt to use new social networks (i.e., the internet) to help america rediscover its sense of community by introducing people who have similar interests. america has a dwindling, suffering public life. it would make me feel better to do anything i can in any attempt to counteract that tendency.
