It occurred to me as I was looking through some of the various documents and such related to my candidacy that some people might get confused by the whole Jack/John thing if they happened to look at those documents.

My official, on the birth certificate, name is John. However, I was named after my dad's favorite Uncle Jack, who was a Jack/John, and my parents always called me Jack, and that is how I have been known pretty much all my life. Jack is a common nickname for John, but seems to be a little less well known than some others such as Bob/Robert, Bill/William and Jim/James. The one obvious real-person example that I know of that pretty much everyone recognizes immediately is Jack/John Kennedy.

Just in case you were wondering. More meaningful commentary to come in the next couple days.

Random Thought #1:

It's amazing how much time I've spent on the jackforassembly.com website so far and it still doesn't look as nice as I would like. Mainly I just don't think it looks professional enough. This isn't too surprising because I'm not an artist and I don't do website design for a living but it's amazing how much time I've had to waste on silly stuff. A couple days ago I spent about 3 hours fiddling with the picture that asks you to vote for me that's the header on top of the website pages. It's really easy to put a picture there. The flaw is that Internet Explorer 6 has a bug that causes the picture to not display right. Since about 40% of the population has IE6 it pretty much meant I couldn't ignore it.

Random Thought #2:

One thing that has really surprised me so far about my candidacy is that I've received multiple invitations to events where I can meet with some group (either to attempt to get their endorsement or to meet their members) but they want me to pay in order to be there. I find that very odd. It makes me feel like they are more interested in getting my money than in actually hearing what I have to say. It seems much of the time they give you five minutes to speak. I'm also not sure how much I could say in a five minute window that would give them much of an idea of what I'm about. It would pretty much have to be one of those empty political speeches I think.

Random Thought(s) #3:

If I had some huge campaign fund theoretically neither of the above would be a problem. I could hire someone to do the work on my website (although I wouldn't get the experience of actually creating it, which while annoying at times is also pretty interesting) and it wouldn't be a big deal to pay to meet people (but I'm pretty sure I still wouldn't do it). I still haven't figured out what I would do with a big campaign fund even if I had one. I don't think I've ever seen or heard a TV or radio ad for an assembly position so how much more is there to spend on other than some signs and some mailers? The mailers would have a reasonable cost associated with them I'm sure but not enough that $100,000 would be needed. Actually I don't have time to look into it now because it's pretty late but I'm going to have to look into this more. I started to look into the Contribution and Expenditure reports and apparently you can spend money on some interesting stuff. In 2007 the incumbent in my district seems to have spent about $500 in campaign contributions on pictures and frames and that's after only looking at the first couple pages of expenses. There's also a lot of expenses in there that seem pretty vague like "Visa". No idea what the money was spent on. He also spent over $80,000 in 2007 which seems like a lot considering it wasn't even an election year.

If you want to go look at the various reports that candidates and incumbents have to file you can go to the Secretary of State's website. Here's the link to the Financial Disclosure and Contribution and Expense Reports:

http://nvsos.gov/SOSCandidateServices/AnonymousAccess/ReportSearch/BrowseReports.aspx

After having registered to run for the State Assembly I've already run into some interesting things that I thought it might be interesting to write about so I figured I might as well create a blog so I can write about my run for Assembly. Hopefully there will end up being some interesting information here.