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I think Don’t Vote is one of the most seriously focused and well-designed get-out-the-vote microsites I’ve seen in ages.

Check out some of the posters to download and print and downloadable banners for embedding into webpages .

And I especially like their little “Spread the Word” mouse rollover which definitely gives about every option I’ve ever seen for disseminating something on the web in a nice little compact rollover popup. Going to steal the idea for my own sites I think.

As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.

Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM, and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.

The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.

Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.

The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.

When I was a kid, before i got into power gaming and being a master geek, I used to read the “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories which were the forerunners of so many computer games and text adventures that were to follow. Ah yes, the path to being a high school social outcast…

And just in time for Halloween, someone has put together The Outbreak , a little video interactive adventure that is a hell of a nod of the head and petite homage to Romero’s ‘78 classic Dawn of the Dead .

Just a shoutout to my favourite Rails ninjas here in London, the bambinos at New Bamboo *(disclaimer: they’re working on projects with both AI UK and with us at the Secretariat right now)*a, who just launched AI UK’s new Protect the Human site after partnering up with Made by Many .

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Very nicely executed social networking site based on activism, sharing and discussion. Just wondering what they used to get the base done. They even managed to incorporate the new visual Global Identity and reconcile it with AI UK’s current visual scheme.

Back in the day, before graphics replaced playability (though let’s face it, the Wii has brought it back), some of the best games there were… in fact, the only ones, were text based interactive adventures.

Not to over-romaticize them but some of them were epic and such a critical part of hacker lore that they’ve entered the cultural lexicon.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Well, had a bit of a hard slog the last little while, so just reminding myself of a few important things. Great advice and a fantastic speech from The Steve.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life. And the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. And don’t settle.

From former colleague, Corey: post on the third approach to attracting the best talent you possibly can.

He’s got a point. It certainly is the number one thing that’s driven me to work at the places I’ve worked at. Those I’ve enjoyed the most, sweated the most for, and contributed the greatest to…

Oh, and I should mention, Core tells me they’re hiring , and well, if he’s working there, you do get to deal with atomic monster wrangler number one, which is kinda cool (not to mention, their obvious lack of criminal record background checks… ;-) ).

Absolutely cool, Tarentino-esque short about… Tarantino. Even in Brazilian, totally reads like one of his scripts. An excellent little homage to the master… Tarantino’s Mind:

I don’t think there is anything Joss Whedon has ever done that I haven’t liked; Buffy, Angel, and the brilliant, yet sadly gone-before-its-time by Fox Firefly have given me an appreciation of this guy’s writing (hell, I even like the “Grr! Argh!” of the mutant enemy animation at the end of all his shows.).

He works the web like few others do, regularly hangs out in fan forums and plugs into his reader and viewership like few others.