Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Announcing Website 24

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I’m proud to announce the launch of a new major revision to Off on a Tangent, bringing the site to version 24.0. The last major revision, 23.0, launched on December 2, 2011, and went on to become the longest-lived design in the site’s history. It lasted more than two years and needed only one minor revision along the way (to bring it to version 23.1). It has served me well, but a lot has changed in the last two years! Browsers have progressed, web markup and style standards have progressed, JavaScript libraries have progressed, and the WordPress content management system has progressed.

This new version is a top-to-bottom redo. I built much of the new site from-scratch, and the pieces of code that I did carry over from the last version have been carefully reviewed and re-factored (if needed). This means that the site is now very modern and up-to-date, code-wise, but it also means there is a high potential for bugs and problems in these early days. I’m continuing to support the most recent two versions of all major desktop, tablet, and mobile browsers, so if you see any issues please contact me.

What I’m getting at is that this is a really big update. I mentioned more than a year ago that I was working on it, and in the announcement for the 23.1 revision last April I mentioned that it was taking longer than expected so I ‘backported’ some of the styling to the old platform to serve as a stopgap. Granted, there were big breaks during the dev cycle, but this definitely has a lot of time and effort invested into it over the last year. I expect much of this code-base to stick around for a while.

Read on for a detailed list of what’s changed, what’s new, and what’s improved!

Read more . . .

Easter Egg: Website 22-23 (Scott for President)

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With the launch of Website 24, I have retired the site’s ‘Easter Egg’ that was in-place for Websites 22 and 23. An ‘Easter Egg’ is a joke or hidden message in a piece of software or a web site. This one was a placeholder page for my 2020 presidential campaign, which has now been retired and replaced with a new one.

Enjoy.

Random Photos

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So here I am, returning from yet another unplanned Off on a Tangent hiatus . . . which, of course, happened right after I said I would be trying to be more active on the site in 2014. Go figure. Well, during that time (and even for a while before), I’ve still been thinking, following the news, snapping photos, and working on other projects. I’ve also managed to have two separate colds so far this year, which hopefully is not a sign of things to come, but did contribute to my laxness here.

What other projects have I been working on? In addition to my normal day job, I continue to volunteer with Saint Veronica Catholic Church as lead of the RCIA program (through which adult converts study to become Catholics), and Melissa and I also represent the parish on the Arlington Diocese committee of Parish Ecumenical and Interreligious Representatives (a group charged with trying to foster friendship and understanding between the Catholic Church, non-Catholic Christian communities, and non-Christian religious communities). Just last weekend, the group visited Beth El Hebrew Congregation—a Jewish synagogue associated with the Reform movement—for Shabbat services and an enlightening question-and-answer session with Rabbi Isserow.

Melissa and I also spent a lot of time over the last few months implementing a newly redesigned web site for our parish (as contractors), and I’ve been hard at work on the next version of Off on a Tangent (hopefully coming soon), and I’m also laying the groundwork for some other projects that I’ll be sharing more information about as I get them out of the embryonic stage. So don’t take a silent web site as a sign of idleness!

Anyway, in lieu of a long description of what I’ve been doing for the last two months or so, here, have some random photos.

Read more . . .

What To Do About Crimea?

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I have watched with interest as the Russian military, under orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin (United Russia), has invaded and occupied the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine. This is reminiscent of when Putin’s forces entered South Ossetia in Georgia back in 2008. Around that time, former Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA), then the Republican candidate for president, said that he considered Putin to be our greatest geopolitical foe. President Barack Obama (D) and a pliant media ridiculed him mercilessly for this . . . but who’s laughing now?

Anyway, back then it was not crystal clear who the ‘bad guy’ was in the South Ossetian war. Many South Ossetians have been clamoring for political autonomy for decades, which has been denied them by the Georgian government despite repeated independence referendums. There has been a long string of flare-ups in the region, which culminated when Georgian forces invaded South Ossetia in an attempt to reclaim political control. After an incredibly fast build-up of Russian forces, they too entered South Ossetia and effectively went to war with Georgia—including bombing Georgian targets elsewhere in the country.

The European Union brokered a cease fire between Russia and Georgia in a matter of weeks, and Russian forces had mostly withdrawn from the region by the early days of 2009. During the war, South Ossetian authorities and militias engaged in ethnic cleansing against their ethnic Georgian neighbors, expelling over 190,000, although all but 30,000 have since been allowed to return.

This time, in the Ukraine, violence began as simple civil unrest between Ukrainians who desire closer ties with the European Union, and those who desire instead closer ties with Russia. (Of course I am oversimplifying things for the sake of keeping this article at a readable length.) These protests continued to flare-up, becoming violent at times, with pro-European groups demanding the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (Party of Regions)—who fell solidly on the pro-Russian side.

Read more . . .

Election 2013: Reviewing My Performance

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The 2013 general election is now long over, and the declared winners of each race have each taken office and started leaving their official marks on the Virginia political scene. The Off on a Tangent election coverage went on through the evening of November 5, and then continued [as time permitted] until the final race concluded more than a month later on December 18. Overall, I am satisfied with my performance—both in my predictions and in my live coverage—but there was, as always, room for improvement. This post serves as a [very belated] look at what went well, and what didn’t, in Off on a Tangent’s 2013 election coverage.

Making the Calls: Successes and a Debacle

I am never afraid to make a call when the data supports making one (even when the major media outlets haven’t yet), but I am also very careful and will not make a call if the data doesn’t support it (even when the major media outlets already have). In 2004, I called the race for President George W. Bush (R) long before anybody in the media had the guts to. They were still overly gun-shy after the botched Florida call in 2000. However, in the 2012 presidential election, I refused to call North Dakota for former Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA)—even though most major media outlets already had—because the polls there were not even closed.

On this election night, many major media outlets called the race for now-Governor Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) around 10:00 p.m. I was reluctant to do so at that time for a number of reasons. The reported numbers coming from the Virginia State Board of Elections showed a nearly-even race between McAuliffe and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA), and the yet-unreported precincts were split three-ways between those that tend strongly Republican, those that tend strongly Democratic, and those that are true ‘toss-ups.’ There were strong indications that McAuliffe was going to win, and I said as much in my live update at 10:05 p.m., but I didn’t have enough confidence to make a formal call.

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Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.