Good discussion of virtual sociality over at Misbehaving.net

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From Slashdot:

tassii writes “Looks like Diebold is in yet more trouble. In this article from Wired.com, an audit of the Diebold E-Voting machines revealed that the company installed uncertified software in all 17 counties that use its electronic voting equipment. While 14 counties used software that had been qualified by federal authorities but not certified by state authorities, three counties, including Los Angeles, used software that had never been certified by the state or qualified by federal authorities for use in any election. And in this article, Wired.com is reporting that at least five convicted felons secured management positions at a Diebold, including one who served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that ‘involved a high degree of sophistication and planning.'”

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From Michael Daizman comes a link to EastGate, publishers of “serious” hyperlinked text.

And at ArtBrain you’ll find an argument map, plotting a discussion in graphicalistic form.

Thirdly, Kevin Marks writes:

Also, you were looking for a bookmark manager a while back – have you seen http://del.icio.us yet? You add a button to your toolbar, and hit it when you want to bookmark a page – it goes instantly to their page where you can edit the name, type in keywords and a note. It goes into Joshua’s backed up db, and you can get feeds back by keyword, day and person, html or rss, and even embed in a your blogroll

You can see it at work on Kevin’s site.

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Mark at the McLuhan Program Home comments on Rebecca’s piece in The Guardian about blogging (and my comments on her comments). Good stuff. I studied with McLuhan for a year as a grad student and found his core methodology capable of uncovering important truths, although it also can turn up lots of shards, and the occasional old broken button.

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NASA unveiled the first images from the $670 million Spitzer Space Telescope today, spectacular infrared glimpses of the optically-hidden heart of a distant galaxy, the dusty cradle of an infant solar system and a peek at heretofore unseen stars lurking inside a vast cloud of gas and dust.

From an article by William Harwood at SpaceFlight now.

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It’ll be light blogging for me this weekend because it’s our son’s bar mitzvah. He’s a seriously religious boy, um, man and this is a much more meaningful event than it was for me. At my bar mitzvah at our reform temple, I basically read a couple of lines of Torah and then announced I was accepting gifts. At the old-school orthodox shul my wife and son attend, he is entering the adult embrace of the community through observance and scholarship.

I couldn’t be prouder of him.

Halley blogs about a different passage into adulthood: finding out that Santa isn’t.

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Sven just IM’ed me through Skype, the P2P telephony system. Sven seems like a nice enough guy, but I don’t know him. He was just looking for someone to talk with. I was busy paying bills through Quicken and probably was brusquer than I intended. But what sort of IM system lets any and all of its 4M users ping you? Or do all IM systems lay you open to spontaneous global chatting? And if they all do, why don’t I have more people pinging me? Is it my breath?

(Yeah yeah, I’m sure there’s a way to turn this off in Skype. Can’t I just complain about it irrationally?)

Then I went back to Quicken. I’ve been using it for 15 years and have gotten worse and worse at it. My Quicken work environment is so screwed up that it’s beyond cleaning: I have uncleared checks from ten years ago, a bank balance that shows me to be $41,000 overdrawn, multiple entries for online payees that I can’t figure out how to delete, and a column in the “Split” dialogue box labeled “Exp” that seems to be entirely undocumented. But that’s not what I want to whine about.

It occurred to me that the way I’ve been entering deposits is probably wrong: I go to the registery and create a “deposit” line. It works, but it’s totally inelegant. Surely the UI gives us a better way of doing it. So, I click on “Help” and type “deposit” into the index. What comes back is

If you receive payments for invoices or cash sales but don’t deposit the payments directly into a bank account, you can set up an asset account such as Undeposited Funds and use it to track the cash and checks until you deposit them into your bank account.

Ok, but how do I make a deposit?

If you click on Contents > Finances > Entering transactions in the account register > How do I … > Enter a basic transaction in the register, step 4 tells you: “In the Payee field, indicate who receives this payment or gives you this deposit.” So the instructions are there, but buried and only slightly incomplete: It neglects to tell you that in the “Num” field you have to click on “Deposit.”

Man, Quicken’s documentation sucks.

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David Isenberg and Bob Kopp of Scientists for Dean are looking for scientists who are ready to get behind the Governor. After all, this administration is bad news for science in this country. David and Bob are particularly searching for some scientifical leaders who would be willing to lend their credibility to the effort.

So, do you know a Nobel Prize winner — and not in one of them wussy humanities categories! — who’d be interested?

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This is a funny site about downloading music, along the lines of SendThemBack.org.

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A seller on eBay with many thousands of deals under its belt sold me an expensive graphics card. The tracking number they gave me didn’t work and they didn’t respond to 4 emails on the topic. The board arrived in a relatively timely way, however. Unfortunately, the board was Dead on Arrival – huge artifacts in graphical games. I notified them of that the day that it arrived since their return policy only gives you two days to let them know.

Four emails later, they haven’t replied. Nothing. Not a word.

Two additional points: 1. I foolishly left them positive feedback while the board worked for the first couple of hours. 2. I’ve sent the board back to the manufacturer under warrantee.

Any suggestions about what I should do to let other eBayers know that LVCONSIGNMENTS is refusing to make good on the bad board they sent me?

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