Gordaen’s Blog

Two days after the FBI announced they had apprehended two people who were believed to be responsible for the theft of a laptop containing over 26 million records of veterans (including names, addresses, social security numbers, etc.), the VA has found out that a subcontractor (Unisys) has “lost” a desktop containing 38,000 veteran’s records.

As usual, the records were not encrypted, because that would make sense and government organizations don’t like logic or precautions that don’t directly benefit the government. I read another article about the incident, telling about the politicians who are speaking out against VA Secretary Jim Nicholson. At first (even after reading that there have been other recent instances of lost VA records), I thought, “Yeah, something should be done but maybe it’s a bit harsh to totally oust him.” Then I read information about Jim Nicholson.

He had no experience working in the VA prior to “running” it. That’s what I would do if I owned a company, I’d hire someone to run it who had no experience with the company at all, because promoting someone internally makes no sense… Then I read that he did indeed have the supreme qualifications necessary: he has been an important part of the Republican National Committee and that’s all it takes for party favors. Their site forwards directly to the GOP site which is spewing propoganda like “Weak and Wrong: Meet the Defeato-crats.” I’m sure at least one of them thought that was clever and at least on the third-grade level, so they must all be very proud. Then I went to the Democrat site thinking, “What kind of crap are they going to have on their site that could possibly out-do the childishness of the Republican site?” Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see factual news headlines. No wonder they aren’t running the country. People don’t want truth or facts, because the truth is: the world sucks right now and mankind needs to step up and do something about it.

From a web-designer perspective, the GOP site is an attempt at HTML 4.01 with 142 errors. It also has a bunch of hideous flash (at least I assume it is hideous as I have flash blocker on and don’t want to click to find out what other propoganda they are spreading). In comparison, the Democrats’ site is an attempt at XHTML 1.0 Transitional with just 14 errors. From a merely mathematical perspective, I’d have to call 14 errors less than 142 errors, though, to be fair, neither webpage admitted to any markup mistakes made… typical politicians!

Both sites had a Page Rank of 7 (out of 10). The Republican site scored higher in marketing (9.4 compared to 8.3) with the Silktide Sitescore Tool. The Democrat site scored higher in Design (9.4 vs 8.4), Accessibility (6.2 vs 4.6), Experience (9.9 vs. 8.2), and overall (7.9 vs. 7.5). The Democrat site appears to be more popular according to Alexa, but is rated worse… probably due to highly intelligent reviews like this: “Nothing but a bunch of hippies in suits; they try to win elections by slandering the opposition without bringing any new ideas to the table. Straight up idiots, nothing else needs to be said.” As you can see, that website review tells you a lot about the website.