Posted by Jim at March 19th, 2004

I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit.

The end of the semester nears and I’m trying to finish a class project, arrange an advisor for my master’s project, and somehow handle work.

Work, at the moment, is the biggest concern. The place that I work (GRACE) runs a yearly conference called “Summit on Racism.” This results in my working days becoming longer.

Basically the idea of Summit on Racism is to bring together people in the community to work on the problem of Racism in Grand Rapids, MI not for just one day, but throughout the year. We’ve got representatives of many of the major businesses in Grand Rapids attending (and in some cases sponsoring) the Summit plus people from local government.

This year though, the registration was an online php based form.

One observation about online forms… Putting everything online is much cheaper for the organization in that you don’t end up printing and mailing 6000 booklets, but rather mail one small post card and take care of everything that follows that postcard via email or a web page.

It means that you no longer have to puzzle out some truly atrocious handwriting (not that I should complain). It also limits the people who can easily attend to those who have access to a computer.

In years past, we’ve occasionally had some interesting individuals register. One person called himself “Designer Corsair Switzerlord.” He wrote “Volunteer Lake Dweller” in as his organization.

I do not know what this was supposed to mean.

One of our staff asked him, but as I understand it, the reply was not entirely rational and involved a number of people who were forced to live in a lake (merpeople?).

Alas, we’ve had no people like that this year. Online registration makes it harder for random individuals to just come upon the conference.

In any case, I look forward both to the conference and look forward to the end of it. I need to lower my level of stress.