·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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I am officially declaring my intention to run for the office of President of the United States in 2012 as an independent candidate. Here’s my platform:

• Change laws so that all federally elected officials will no longer receive pay during a government budget shutdown, the same as military personnel.
• Change the retirement plan for all federally elected officials to a standard contribution match style instead of a defined benefit plan.
• Change the health care plan for all federally elected officials to be similar to those provided by many private companies today, with plans being reviewed annually and shopped around for better rates.  Elected officials must select from a set of chosen plans like most everyone else where a choice of higher deductible versus cost or coverage is weighed.
• Place term limits on senators and representatives so that no one individual can serve longer than twelve years.
• Lower the federal tax rate on businesses from the 35 percent range to a 20 percent range.
• Increase the number of federal income tax brackets to cover personal incomes up to one billion dollars with graduated rates similar to current ones.
• Set limits on the amount of time that campaigns for federal office can be held to a period of months.
• Require that all contributions to federal election campaigns be split 50/50 between the campaign and a fund to back social security and medicare costs, with all contributions recorded publicly and available online.  Require the same of state campaigns for a fund to back Medicaid costs.
• Amend the constitution to provide for a congressional budgeting process that requires a balanced budget each year where spending that outstrips earnings must be made up from one budget line to another within the same fiscal year or from one fiscal year to the next, not allowing a debt to be carried past two fiscal years.
• Streamline federal income tax laws so that individuals should be able to reasonably complete their tax forms in one or two sheets of paper, while requiring that all taxes be filed electronically.  Make similar changes to corporate tax laws in order to eliminate all tax loopholes of any kind.
• Create a medical records clearing house similar to today’s credit bureaus where a certain number of private, government checked companies manage all medicals records.  These records will be stored in a standardized, electronic format so that any medical provider can access and update them easily, with digital security measures in place for access, protection, monitoring, backup, etc.  Individuals will be able to audit their own medical records at any time and invoke a federally managed process to investigate inaccuracies.
• Provide a federal process to the FDA, EPA, NIH and other food and health related agencies to be able to marshal the resources of the federal government to step in for cases of extreme duress under their purview.
• Require by law the reduction of the use of foreign sources of fossil fuels at increasing percentages over the next ten years.  Simultaneously, heavily fund research grants and loans for the development of alternative, sustainable energy sources over the next ten years, with accountability measures in place for receivers of those grants and loans to be reviewed annually.
• Establish a maintenance budget process whereby all states are required to track and plan for the periodic maintenance of bridges, roads, electrical grids and other high value infrastructure items.  The federal government will be responsible for overseeing this process for interstate assets and ensuring that states have funding for proper maintenance and upkeep of important infrastructure.  State and local governments will be encouraged to create similar processes for their own infrastructures in order to foster forward thinking and long term planning.
• Reorganize the federal government departments and reporting chains to optimize efficiency.

I’ve got plenty more on my to-do list, but this batch will probably eat up the first term.

We had a couple of users complain about our fancy, new Outlook plugin that provides mail, calendar, contact and task list synchronization goodness with our mail server.  Their complaint?  “Old mail is automatically disappearing from my trash folder!  How am I supposed to keep anything now?”  One even asked if we could change it so that the “Delete” button filed the message in a folder for them instead of actually deleting it.

It is a sad day when you have to add a bullet point to your instructions to remind a person that yes, mail that they choose to delete will, in fact, be deleted.

While I was messing around with several other things, Lindsay managed to brush her teeth, finish her bath, turn down her bed, turn on her lamp, get into her pajamas and get into bed with a book without any help from me.  I said You are such a big girl, you don’t need any help, do you? to which she smiled and replied Nope!

So to tease her a little, I asked How about mommy and I will move out and you can have this house all to yourself? She thought very seriously for a few seconds and said If you can give me a machine that makes pancakes for breakfast, I think I’ll be OK and then a few seconds later added Oh and one to make spaghetti for dinner!

Jenny does a good job of recording some of Lindsay’s funnier comments in her blog, but there was one “sparkling” moment that tickled me recently.

Early one morning when it was still dark, Lindsay came running down the hall to our room.  She was wearing her Kit nightgown (a la American Girl stuff) and came crawling into our bed.  You know how you can generate a lot of static electricity when it is cold?  Well, as Lindsay crawled up between us, she got her nightgown bunched up.  It let off a bunch of crackling sounds and you could see it popping in the dark.

Lindsay gasped and whispered excitedly “Wow!  I accidentally sparked my nightgown!”  I got quite a chuckle out of that one.

Digital signage is a hot topic in higher education and elsewhere.  Information is king and the more ways you can put it in front of more eyes, the better.  Of course, there’s all kinds of signage options from expensive to free… but you know which way I lean!

Concerto is free, open source digital signage software.  It is a web based solution with a web interface for configuring your displays and content.  The final product is simply a specialized web page designed to be displayed in a full screen browser.  Here’s a shot of the web interface where you upload image content and an example of what you can produce with it (click for larger versions):

Concerto is a pretty slick system with lots of features.  Management of content is designed around the idea of feeds, where you assign feeds to each area of the screen.  You can set up groups of users and give permissions to control particular feeds.  One feature that I especially like is being able to designate an emergency feed.  Any content placed in this special feed overrides all others, essentially taking over the display to broadcast an emergency alert.

Concerto comes with several attractive screen layouts – ours above is based on one of the default ones with the colors changed.  You can design your own background and provide an XML file to define the coordinates where the content should appear, but the documentation for doing so is thin.

Concerto has a live CD “player” that you can configure to boot and launch a signage display.  Their discussion forum is very active, though hosted on Google Groups which I find to be a feature-poor discussion medium in comparison to Yahoo Groups and others.

Like any other open source alternative, Concerto does require a little elbow grease and is not without a few issues.  Here’s some tips that might help if you choose to pursue it:

• An RSS feed is a great resource to include in your signage display – our campus news rolls on the right side of the screen you see above.  However, the web interface currently offers no way to set up an RSS feed as content for your displays.  Instead, you have to manually poke some information into the database.  Look in the discussion forums for instructions on how to do this or let me know if you need some help.
• The Live CD is great as long as you have video hardware that matches its drivers.  But, don’t get caught up in having to use the CD.  You can simply point a web browser at Concerto and get the display, and you may not even need HDMI to drive a TV monitor.  Many newer monitors have a VGA input that can handle a full 1080 lines of input to maximize your display.  So, there are many options for driving your signage displays from old PCs to thin clients.
• Likewise, you don’t have to use TV monitors to show good looking digital signage.  A vanilla PC monitor can do the trick and may even be preferred for a smaller venue.
• Make sure you shop for commercial grade monitors if you plan to run your signage displays all day long.  You may wear out your off the shelf TVs pretty quickly.

On a side note, it is getting more and more difficult to come up with witty puns for the titles of my posts…

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Here’s a later update… we roll an RSS weather feed from rssweather.com in the ticker section, and we now use a feed of shortened versions of our news articles on the right side.  Some articles are long, so the shortened version fits the signage format better and has a static prompt at the bottom to “visit our news website for more”.  Below, we created a mobile version of our signage installation for use in our athletics facility so that it can be moved into the lobby during ballgames and events.