Thoughts and reflections plus the 2008 elections

Elections 2008

It's hard to believe that the elections for President of the United States have kicked off already. Today is the first official vote in the primaries (Iowa votes this evening). The primaries will whittle down the number of candidates to one candidate per party. For example, on the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd are all running. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney (boo), John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson are all running. And apologies to all those oh-yeah-you-ran-too people that I couldn't even remember. But anyway, starting today and for the next six months or so, it will be interesting to watch as the candidates start to gracefully withdraw from the race. It has been a LONG time since a race has been this interesting to me - there is no sure candidate for either side, and no candidate with whom I'm completely in love. Anyway, it will be an interesting next few months. A company called MapLight.org has an interesting graph of fundraising, by candidate. I'm pulling in the live data, so this graph should remain accurate as the months pass.. [updated Fri Jan 4: breaking news with the Iowa results.. the second graph shows the results of the Iowa Caucus, graph credit to WSJ Online.]

Email to Post

I've been looking for a service for quite a while that lets me send them an email and they print it out and physically mail it to the recipient. I travel a decent amount and it frustrates me to no end the number of businesses that still require a hard-copy of a letter before they will take action on a request. This ranges from banks that won't change your address to Sky Satellite who won't cancel your account without a physical letter mailed to them. It would take me about 15 seconds to write them an email, but no, it's not good enough. So I was thrilled this week to find a company called Postful that does exactly what I'm looking for. I'm just starting to play around with it, but it does look pretty cool. You can upload letterhead and they will print out all your letters on the letterhead (full color, of course), and you can set up bulk distribution, email aliases, send a regular email or attach a .pdf if you want perfect control over the formatting. The cost to mail to the US is under $1 and it's under $2 for international. I'm staying cautiously optimistic, but assuming this works as expected, it will be a livesaver. I've just send about 5 test letters to various destinations to get a better sense of exactly what I should rely on, timing, etc.

Free User Interaction Tools

At the bottom of most pages on this website, I'm using two free widgets from online companies. The "Add This" bookmark widget (from AddThis.com lets users easily bookmark, blog, and share a piece of content. The "Comments" functionality on most pages is powered by a company called JS-Kit. They provide inline commenting service, specific to individual pages (as determined by unique URLs). I've been very happy with both of these free services and wanted to make sure people knew about them.

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