Poor McCain’s having to re-think his approach at the Republican convention due to the coming storm–Gustav–towards Louisiana.

At least that’s what I read online. Poor guy.

I feel for the folks who have to evacuate.

Lower Ninth Ward resident Rev. Willie Calhoun looks over his belongings near his Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer before evacuating New Orleans, Louisiana from Hurricane Gustav August 30, 2008.

Can you imagine what Willie is thinking? I mean, it’s gotta include some thoughts in this order:

• Hurricane Katrina comes, wipes out my house.
• I’ve been living in a trailer from the federal government now for some two years…
• Here comes Katrina’s bad brother… and my new house isn’t even yet built.

I feel worse (of course) for the folks who are having to evacuate. For the changes their lives are about to face in the coming weeks, months… and (we can hope not) years. My own McCain jabs aside, I sure hope we don’t botch this recovery like we did the last time.

This is America, and we deserve so much better. I hope both candidates take a good look at what takes place and what can be done to improve the quality of life of the folks affected. And if good ideas come about from either one (as, no doubt, they will both not be able to fight the urge to make something political out of this), I hope the folks in charge now are smart enough to listen.

Today I saw a picture of John McCain and Joe Lieberman and wondered if he had chosen him as his running mate.

I ended up at one of the Republican senator’s websites, and was simply shocked at the poor use of typography I found. Consistency is not a hallmark at JohnMcCain.com.

In purple-red at the top, we have his logo set in Optima. I don’t have an issue with this, but let’s be consistent. That’s the last of Optima we find.

In blue, in the ad, we have Adobe Trajan. It’s poorly kerned, if you ask me.

In the white/light blue of the menu bar, of course, we don’t get to choose our fonts; we have to use some nice “web-safe” fonts. So here we get what looks like Trebuchet Bold. Not bad. But why not use it elsewhere?

Then in the “Biden” section, green and yellow, back to Adobe Myriad. The main title I surrounded in green could have been better done. I would have put the “Fact Center” blurb lower, and spaced it out… more.

In purple under “news” we get yet another sans-serif font! Nothing a like a little Arial to round off the page.

So, in short, McCain’s website suffers in the design department by breaking a basic, cardinal rule in print or web design: don’t use every damn font! You’re better off with a better, overall balance of design by a conservative choice from your font library. While any one of these fonts would have been great for the basic choice, save for Trajan which only has capitals, I would have kept the Optima for the logo, and used a more common web-font for the rest, with an emphasis on consistency between the different areas highlighted on the page.

In case you are wondering, Obama’s site isn’t perfect either, but it does have a more consistent use of Gotham, the font used for his logo throughout the site.

Our Promethean Users Group starts soon, and no sign-up is required. Each meeting will take place in the high school media center.

Participation in the group is also a way to satisfy your integration technology course requirement! Collect 12 PUG bucks by attending meetings and send them in an envelope to me (John Hendron) at the central office. 12 PUG bucks will equal 6 points and your requirement for a technology course.

The meetings will focus on your issues: questions, things to show-off, and tips and tricks. Each meeting will be led by either myself or Mrs. Cantor. We borrowed our little P.U.G. from Flickr.

This past summer I introduced a physical environment called Phun to our principals. We considered ways we could use the environment in the classroom. Now, there’s a game that’s loosely based on the interactive environment. It’s called:

Fantastic Contraption

When I was growing up in the 1980s, a popular television show was MacGyver. It became silly after time, because whatever adventures he got himself into, he always could put together some home-made solution to save the day and “stick it” to the bad guys.

Now, you can see all the tricks up MacGyver’s sleeves through a Wikipedia article. A comprehensive (but not complete, evidently) list of all of his escapes and how he accomplished them.

This is not something you would ever see in a traditional encyclopedia, but I am sure this information has value, nonetheless.