At least outside of Northeast Ohio. The budget Gov. Taft signs today will eliminate the E-Check program in southwest Ohio. Only 7 northeastern counties will continue the E-Check program and those tests will be paid for by the government, drivers will no longer have to cough up $19.50 to get their car tested.
The two-year state budget Gov. Bob Taft will sign today, in a ceremony at the Rack Processing Co. in Moraine, contains a provision that would prohibit any new contracts in the 81 counties not required to have E-Check, said state Sen. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek.
...
Austria, a longtime E-Check critic who has been pushed the issue since 1998, said 14 counties should not have to carry the responsibility of improving air quality for the entire state, and that the E-Check program is too invasive."I have always felt that the E-Check program was ineffective and unfair to many Ohioans," Austria said.
--DDN
I saw Phantom of the Opera yesterday and I'll just say this... There wasn't anything wrong with it that couldn't have been fixed by eliminating Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher from the equation.
A man has submitted a request to start the process to take Justice Souter's home by eminent domain and build a hotel on the site.
The Dayton Daily News wants you to register with them if you're going to read their stories. That's a bit of a pain, but completely understandable. It's how they go about it that's simply infuriating. The system they have is completely bass-ackwards.
When you click on a story link and you're not logged in you're redirected to a screen with a registration form and a link off to the side directing you to another page if you've been there before and already registered. This SHOULD NOT BE! The users should be redirected to the login screen and presented with a link to the registration screen they need to use if they have an account.
The majority of users who go to view a story there are likely to have been there before and to already have an account. Forcing the majority of your users, and especially the dedicated ones that come back again and again, to waste their time and effort to click a link and load another page every time they log in is just unacceptable. It's bad practice. What's worse, they just redid the registration page and it's still the same damn thing.
I tried pointing this out to them a while back in an e-mail and they were quite obtuse about it. It boiled down to "Thank you for contacting us. We have a link to the login page on the registration form."
I visit their site daily and every damn day I have to see that registration page and click the link to log in. It's a waste of my time and the time of every person who visits their site more than once.
Dave Miley and Don Gullett have been fired.
Let's take 'em one at a time...
Miley: He wasn't the reason the Reds were losing. He was however one of the reasons they couldn't turn it around. He just seemed to no longer have any authority in the clubhouse.
Gullett: Now Gullett I think was one of the reasons the Reds were losing. He's skated by on his reputation as a guy who can turn around the career of a has-been pitcher for quite some time but really what has he done in the last few years? He hasn't turned around a has-been in quite some time and he doesn't seem to have done anything for the young pitchers we've had the last few years... not to mention Milton. There have been too many problems with the pitching staff for too long for Gullett not to go.
Now, looking to the future...
It'd be hard to have a firesale. Anybody making enough to dump for salary reasons isn't good enough to trade (I'm looking squarely at you Milton).
I don't see any trades coming immediately. This is a vastly underperforming team, on paper they should play a lot better than they have. I think the front office would like to see how they do under new management for a while and then really come to a decision around the trade deadline.
If things are still this bad at the deadline then Randa's the most obvious choice to trade and they'd bring up Encarnacion.
Beyond that... if they trade a pitcher it'll be Mercker.
And at some point the outfield situation still needs to get worked out. If an outfielder goes I suppose the most likely is Kearns, but the rumor-du-jour is that Casey will go, allowing Dunn to move to first. So who knows?...
In his second game as a Met Danny graves gave up 3 runs in 1 inning. His ERA as a Met is currently 13.50.
They finally brought tabbed browsing to IE with the MSN toolbar... but boy is the flicker/flash of the window every time you switch to another tab ever annoying.
... must not read too much into it... I mean, the Reds offense has look good for a few days but it's just the Devil Rays.
Try this Reuters report on for size. The author isn't reporting on the United Nations' release of an atlas showing pictures of how the earth has been changed by humans over the last 30 years, instead they're trying to make the point that the atlas is meant to make.
