Cd Form 301: Fill & Download for Free

I'd check out the incredible Putumayo (www.putumayo.com) compilations available. In the past 17 years, the label has become known primarily for its upbeat andmelodic compilations of great international music characterized by the company's motto: “guaranteed to make you feel good!”Title/street date/cat #AFRICAN PLAYGROUND 2/25/2003 PUT-CD-207AFRICAN GROOVE 4/22/2003 PUT-CD-210WOMEN OF AFRICA 4/27/2004 PUT-CD-223NORTH AFRICAN GROOVE 5/24/2005 PUT-CD-237ACOUSTIC AFRICA 9/5/2006 PUT-CD-254AFRICAN PARTY 4/29/2008 PUT-CD-276AFRICAN DREAMLAND 4/29/2008 PUT-CD-277African Reggae 1/27/2009 PUT-CD-287South Africa 5/18/2010 PUT-CD-301All are available at their website, www.putumayo.com or amazon or wherever you buy music.Hope this helps!Best,Eric

This is so embarrassing, but my bad code story involves a terrible coder called “Me.”In 1994–97, I was doing a lot of work creating training and How-To CD-ROMs — using Macromedia Director. Stop laughing!I was pretty good at this, and eventually built some sophisticated-at-the-time projects that used the “programming language” in Director to do a couple neat tricks. Yes, I was fluent in LINGO.Stop laughing! I’m telling a story!!!I had been working for a tiny multimedia company in Burlingame (south of San Francisco), and an in-box CD-ROM we did for HP got the attention of the CD at CNET Networks, and they hired me as Director of Multimedia. Employee #301. Loved those low-exercise price stock options!My first task, after hiring a team of four people, was to build a promotional and help tool in Director for a new search service CNET was about to launch, called… Snap!The idea was that Snap! was going to take down AOL and become the middle-America online portal that everyone’s parents would use. We were going to build a CD-ROM that would teach old people what an Internet was. So we got to work.I had never managed a team before. I had never hired anyone for a real company with real jobs… now I was doing this at a publicly-traded, peak-dot-com era corporation. The three people I hired were specialists in audio (we narrated the whole thing), video (for the tutorials) and art direction (for, uh, art.)I didn’t hire anyone whose expertise and focus involved Macromedia Director, or the creation of consumer software using Director. Or anyone who was a LINGO pro. Two of the new hires knew their way around Director, but neither knew LINGO.Guess what? I decided, “I’ll do all the LINGO coding! I can do that!”Okay, you can laugh for a little while. I’ll wait.So we were banging away on this goofy “How to find a web page with Snap!”, designing stuff, recording VO, and all that. I was using the spare time I had in my 16-hour days to write the LINGO that would trigger audio, control buttons, preload assets, all that.If I’m charitable to myself, I can describe the coding as “jazz-inspired”. Or maybe “Comment-averse”. Who needs naming conventions for variables? Not me! Who organizes subroutines by function and using consistent coding structures? Not this guy!So here’s where it gets real:Remember the part where I told you this was my first big job at a big company? And the big tech company was CNET? About a third of the employees were engineers, developers and back-end folks in the Technology Division. These were serious, profession, real people. The guy who led Technology, Jonathan Rosenberg, invented PRISM. This was the first Content Management System that was being used on a major website with serious traffic. It eventually was merged into a new product called Vignette, which almost anyone who has published online content is familiar with.I didn’t work for Technology. I worked for Creative Services. They hated Creative Services, because we were a bunch of punks freaking out over 1 pixel border decisions. We resented Technology because they always wanted us to document stuff, define new products in detail, and other stupid things that are essential to effective product development.When I was hired, nobody told Rosenberg or Technology that (a) I was building the CD-ROM with my own team under Creative Services or (b) that the CD-ROM relied on a large amount of quasi-code of dubious quality (not knocking LINGO).This created a gigantic scandal — Rosenberg and Technology clearly ‘owned’ the back-end and coding of anything CNET did, and Creative Services was halfway through creating the CD-ROM by the time they were told about it. I just kept coding.Then the emails started coming: Technology wanted a copy of my SRS and/or “Requirements Specs”. They also wanted to see my bug report database, deliverables timeline, functional requirements doc, my QA plan, validation standards, Data Structures reference… basically, the SRD that ensures the product is fully defined, testable, organized and bug-free.I had none of these. Bug reporting was a mix of someone telling me “The sound isn’t playing”; Post-It Notes surrounding my monitor; and the master bug list was in my head… ‘Remember to fix that thing where there’s no video when the mouse moves’.My deliverables timeline was “finish this in four months.” My functional requirement was “please don’t crash.” And the data was structured like the shelves of a Sears store: haphazardly, sloppy, random and without any forethought.I kept promising them I’d send it as soon as I got through “a serious deadline”. When I didn’t, a more senior person from Technology started emailing and calling. Some VP told me to do a code drop by the end of the day. He was not happy.I knew what my ‘code’ looked like. It was miserable. One of the Technology guys forwarded me a set of the docs they recently used, and included were several pages of coding standards (down to the number of asterisks comment blocks needed). I looked at the neat, robustly commented and intuitive naming convention scheme… I was totally screwed.I missed the code drop. The SVP of Creative Services (the wonderful Cotton Coulson) called me: I was going to get a call from the #3 guy in the company, and I needed to do whatever he told me to do. The CEO was involved, and most of the executive team was discussing the ‘CD-ROM problem’. Do not screw around.That’s when Jonathan Rosenberg’s name appeared on my work phone display as it rang. I was bracing for hell to rain down, because I heard from about 20 people that he didn’t mess around. Technology always met deadlines. They never missed a deliverable.I am eternally grateful that Rosenberg didn’t destroy me, which he could have and frankly was something I deserved. He was very courteous, and within a couple minutes I’m sure he heard the fear in my voice: the sound of someone who screwed up and was panicking. Maybe it was clear that I was covered in flop-sweat.I took the cue and did what I easily could have (and should have) done weeks earlier, before the entire company was monitoring my ‘crisis’ and introducing myself as What An Idiot in my first big break job.I told him that I was sorry. I laid out the whole mess: I was used to working on my own, and didn’t realize that I was stepping on the toes of his team and the mission of his division. My code was a mess, and I had no documentation. I told him the whole truth, and didn’t even try to put anything in a good light.Rosenberg thanked me for explaining everything, and told me that he understood where we were and how we got there. The important thing now was our plan to fix it: was I ready to sit down with his people and build an action plan? Could he count on me to make sure Technology had what they needed to do their job?Yes. Yes, yes. Thank you. Yes. I’ll stay all night if you want.No, he said. Get a good night’s sleep. Be in the executive conference room at 8am sharp the next day, and bring everything. The room was reserved for the day, and lunch would be brought in. Dinner if we needed it.That was so cool of him, and it changed something in me: I was among professionals now and this was the real deal. I decided to step up, and never screw up again. I’d been given a free pass that I hadn’t earned. Time to step up.Full disclosure: My vow to never screw up again was aspirational, not a matter of fact. But I’ve sure screwed up a lot less and with more awareness since this happened.

Correction: After writing this, I realized that the numbers for 2000 were based on how the districts were drawn AFTER the election. The main point of my answer still stands, but the numbers for 2000 are incorrect.I could only find data for the last 3 elections (http://www.swingstateproject.com/diary/4161/), but it's still interesting. In each case the Republican candidate got a large boost.2000By CD: D-238 R-300Actual: D-266 R-271 (1 Democratic elector didn't vote)2004By CD: D-220 R-318Actual: D-251 R-286 (1 Democratic elector voted for Edwards)2008By CD: D-301 R-237Actual: D-365 R-173Sequentially, this method gives the Republican an additional 29, 31, and 64 votes. In terms of impact, the biggest change would have been the 2000 vote wherein Bush would have received a decisive lead in the Electoral College with 56% of the electors, despite losing the popular vote.The reason this method favors Republicans is due to how districts are drawn. Democrats tend to be heavily concentrated in urban areas. So there are many districts that vote 80%+ Democratic, but they get the same vote as districts that vote 51% Republican. So in a competitive election, Democrats are at a disadvantage because most of their voters are in concentrated in a relatively small number of districts.