Barack Obama

• WhiteHouse.gov converted to the Drupal content management system this week, marking a victory for the future of open-source software.
• I’ve always really hated e. e. cummings E. E. Cummings. If there was ever a poet who deserved to hear a hey-knock-it-off… If you’ve seen formatting as art once, you’ve seen it a thousand times, am I right? But I never realized he was so bad that his crap ranks right up there with YouTube comments. Wow!
• Chuck Klosterman on loving football: “Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.”

• Even Slim Thug is feeling the recession:

  The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
  Slim Thug Feels the Recession
  www.thedailyshow.com
  Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

• Drew Carey bids $1 million dollars for @Drew Twitter handle… but it’s for a fantastic cause.
• Barack Obama wins the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, NBA MVP Award, Tony Award, 2010 Nobel Peace Prize…
  

Not to toddle too far out of our area of expertise, but speaking of Obama’s websites…

The Drupal-based Recovery.gov is getting an $18 million overhaul from Smartronix, some super-well-connected “Net-Centric Enterprise Services” outfit.

Recovery.gov tracks the manners in which all that bailout stimulus whatnot money is being wisely invested. At least now we know it goes to pay for the thing that tells us where it goes. The problem with the current site is it isn’t transparent or intuitive enough. So we’re bringing in a company with a site that looks like SkyNet to clear things up?

Look at these cats. Try to make heads or tails of what it is that they say they do here. OPERATIONAL RISK MITIGATION! SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE DEVELOPMENT! It’s like Blackwater for nerds. With more scroll bars. And no 301 redirects.

Must be nice. $18 million? For a top-level .gov linkback, we’d do it for like $1.80. Back to work…