The Smalrus Web Site

im always kind of interested in who’s visiting my website.  since i switched to wordpress, i installed a new stats manager, firestats on the new pages. firestats offers a few different sorts of things that i really wasnt used to looking for, particularly since the stats are integrated into the wordpress dashboard.

so ive noticed a couple of repeat visits coming from france, a couple from the netherlands, a couple from chile, one guy in belgium from his psp, even japan, romania, korea, and taiwan.  and of course theres the stats like 5.6% of visitors use linux, 0.3% use debian, 19.2% use firefox to browse and 3.5% use konqueror.

so if youre surfing through, feel free to drop a comment and let me know where you’re at and what you think, im interested in dialoguing…

now that the presidential race for 2008 has opened up, i thought id weigh in with my own thoughts. first of all, this past weekend has hearkened us with the news of exploratory committees formed by hillary clinton and barack obama, the two front-runners for the democratic party. the rest of the field is distinguished among chris dodd, john edwards, mike gravel, dennis kucinich, tom vilsack, joe biden, and bill richardson.

if i may… there has been a lot of discussion this time around of first and second-tier candidates – those who are in the election to present a balanced approach to the creation of party platforms as opposed to those who actually stand a substantial chance of winning the elections (let alone any sort of showing in the state primaries).

quite obviously, obama and clinton are the first-tiered candidates for the democrats. as i see it, obama stands the best chance of winning a general election. not only is he a smart man who was not in office to be criticized for involvement with the iraq war, but he holds massive ‘electibility’ (see: buzzword of the campaign) among red state and other republican voters. they see him as a pragmatic democrat who is above the insider politics of mrs. clinton. obama is oft quoted as being charismatic, but the charisma transcends the usual party politics and is, in fact, merely an extension of his personal intellect. (more…)