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Ohio Purge Watch Gets a Facelift, “The Owl” Gets Retired

Published / by Scott Dahlstrom / Leave a Comment

I stopped developing, artistically speaking, somewhere around age 10 or 11. Maybe that’s because by the time I was 12 I was diving into the BASIC programming language on my Atari 400 home computer (yeah, I’m that old) and rewiring my brain to predominantly work with logical structures as opposed to creating things that were more oriented toward aesthetics. No matter the reason, whatever biological or psychological trait one needs to look at a blank page and see what could be, I don’t have it.

Ohio + binoculars = owl

Case in point: When I originally set out to come up with some sort of logo for Ohio Purge Watch, I thought I’d just take an image of Ohio and combine it with binoculars.  The result was something resembling the face of an owl.  Sadly, it was the best I could come up with at the time, and the owl was allowed to perch at the top of my site for several weeks.

Today, however, thanks to the generosity of artists who publish their work for the public to use freely,  I am pleased to announce the retirement of the owl.  May this blog post be its final public viewing.  Now, onto the owl’s replacement…

This before and after image gives you a full view of the transformation:

Old site header vs. the new design. Say goodbye to the owl!

Like I said, I’m rather bad at this “making things look pretty” part of web site development, so anytime I’m able to actually overcome my artistic challenges and create something that falls more on the non-hideous side of the spectrum, it’s grounds for a happy dance.  Excuse me while I go privately put my white-boy rhythm on display!

 

Millersburg – Where More Voters Have the Same Name than Any Other Zipcode in Ohio

Published / by Scott Dahlstrom / Leave a Comment

While working on my Ohio Purge Watch project, I wanted to determine an efficient way for someone to search for their voter registration record without having to type in too much information. The goal was to find a field combination of hopefully no more than 3 fields (2 of those of course being first and last name) that would provide few enough results so they could be displayed on a single page.

I opted to try a zip code, last name, and first name combination, but needed to find out if this would get the number of search results down to a manageable 1-page selection. Running a query which counted voters grouped in such a way, I discovered there is one zip code in Ohio, 44654, which currently has 24 men named David Miller who are registered to vote.

One would assume this anomaly would occur in one of the more highly-populated urban areas of the state, but you’d be wrong. Millersburg, located in Eastern Ohio, has a population of around 3,100 people.

Odds are, if you visit Millersburg and ask any of the residents if they know David Miller, they’ll answer “yes”!