Wired?

Originally published at Salon.com (requires either membership or the viewing of a brief commercial to view the article; I take the commercial, it's bearable.)

I'm not going to say what it is about, read it for yourself. I do think it would explain a number of things . . .

2nd debate polls

all seem to agree that Senator Kerry - and that's Kerry, Kennedy, Mr Bush (search page for "Kennedy" to see that is about) - won the second debate as well, by even larger margins than the first, with mostly 80 - 90% going to Kerry, though even republican AgitProp machine Fox "News" concedes a 70% lead for Kerry:

CNN poll
CBS poll
MSNBC poll
Fox "News" poll

I can't find one from ABC just now; I'll add that when and if it comes out.

Surprise: I actually like something that was caused by the biggest dick in DC . . .

And yes, I am as surprised myself as anyone who knows me will be in admitting that, but just this once I find I LIKE the results of something that Dick Cheney did:

according the the Sydney Morning Herald's "Slip-up sends people to anti-Bush site", his mistaken identification of FactCheck.org as FactCheck.com - I've not linked to them because those poor guys probably have all the stress they can handle already - has lead the owners of the latter site redirect all the hits their site got after the mis-dick-rected traffic to the site of George Soros, who, as we all know, just so very much loves the Dick's own George . . .

One so has to admire competence and accuracy . . .

For those who still use Hotmail . . .

Charles Wright of the always interesting tech news at the Syndney Morning Herald points to a better alternative, that provides Hotmails soon to be for pay non-webinterface service:

The cool word on Hotmail.

Beyond that, even those who use webmail only should leave, IMO, the hotmail spam machine is so very uncool by now and better alternatives easily available.

The reason to change, graphically demonstrated

The reason to change from IE to Firefox, that is, through their pages at Secunia, a online security advisory website:

Secunia product summary for Internet Explorer.
For comparison, their summary for Mozilla Firefox.

They also feature the latest highly critical IE vulnerability, reported on August 19th, 2004 - that is 50 days ago, as of this writing - prominently on their main page. Furthermore, a closer look at IE's summary page reveals that microsoft currently has one extremely critical and four highly critical vulnerabilites unpatched, the oldest of those from August 14th, 2003.

An excellent demonstration of mircosoft's concern about security, I believe - or rather, their lack of it. Nor do I think that will change.

spreadfirefox.com again - I'm getting fed up

I still love Firefox but I am seriously thinking of removing all my spreadfirefox.com affiliate links on all blogs and sites that I administer and advise all my friends to do the same (and replace them with a simple download link to mozilla.org): There is almost no day when not something or other gets changed - the latest being the affiliate referrals list numbers - without any announcements, explanations and most of all without even the shadow of the ghost of a hint by what criteria all those changes are made. Even claiming that the site is still in beta format - which it shouldn't be in the first place if it is the primary marketing tool for Firefox - it's screwed up, it's annoying and the ever more obvious incompetence of the webmaster will probably hurt Firefox' image more than they'll help promote it. Idiotic!

"Pastor-in-chief"

Pastor Bush is a lengthy article by Jonathan Raban in The Guardian that should be required reading for those trying to understand the contemporary US.

Personally, I found it both enlightening and disturbing: enlightening has it does a very good job explaining the - for any mostly rational individual, as I count myself - the intellectually unexplainable - why people vote for a man whose very core actions are diametrically opposed to their self interests - and disturbing because frankly, that in this day and age such a worldview should be held by so many people, who furthermore due to a freak accident of history can wreck havoc and destruction not only on themselves - if that was the only issue, I'd happily advocate leaving them to that - but the rest of the world, is a thought that scares me.

Now I wish there was some outer space equivalent to Canada or Mexico . . .

Annoyed

It's been one of those days again (as all too many in the last two to three weeks - and yes, I know things come in waves and will go away again after a while, but still): heavy rain all day when it's supposed the brilliantly bright days of autumn, and on top of that lots of little annoyances. Nothing really bad, but enough of small stuff that needed to be fixed to prevent me from sitting down and do what i really had planned to do, like writing the next part of my Firefox extensions series.

One thing I got done - not because I particularly wanted to do it, but because the new guy in charge of getting my themes transfered via my bugfile at bugzilla to Mozilla Update isn't moving exactly speedily - is add install links to my Firefox themes on my own website. A big thank you to my friend nosebleed for helping me get that right, and him and Samourai for testing that it worked. :)

PS: Another thank you goes to Hendikins from UMO and irc.mozilla.org for looking into it and trying to speed it up!

Really, thanks, guys!

"Faces of Frustration"

After a weekend away and looking - not! - forward to a day of meetings, and a forecast of pretty much continous rain for the next 3 days here, I thought I'd just share one things that made me chuckle this morning:

On the US Democrats website, an advertisement for the presidential campaign:

Faces of Frustration - depending on the connection, it may take a bit to load, butit's well worth the wait!