On the advice of commenters on my blog about the brokenness of Microsoft IE, I downloaded Firebird, an early build on Mozilla. The UI is minimalist but it has at least one cool feature: Hold down the control key when you click on a link and it loads the page in the background and makes it available to you as part of a tabbed interface.

I’ve been using Opera as my default browser, and I like it a lot. And it, too, has one very cool feature: by holding down your right mouse button and swiping your mouse this way or that, it does things like closes the page or goes back or forward. I’ve gotten used to it.

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Steve Johnson suggests that we ought to take our cue from our president when forced to lie. For example: “The British government has learned that those pants don’t make you look fat at all.”

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I thought the comments (21 so far) on Gov. Dean’s latest blog entry on the Lessig site are generally cogent and Yahoo-free. Maybe the trolls weren’t getting the response they wanted. Or maybe they’re just taking the night off. Anyway, it’s a good discussion of issues around how to widen broadband access and the role of wifi.

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In response to a comment questioning, in an unnecessarily nasty tone, whether Gov. Dean was the actual author of the posts at the Lessig blog, Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager, wrote:

Seth – can I ask you something – don’t you think that if we were ghostwriting this stuff we would have come up with something better than that?

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the entire Wed summed up in one line. Take it in the micro sense and you have the Web’s Theory of Authenticity with its corollary that Imperfection Is a Virtue. Take it to the macro and you get the Messy Network Axiom with its corollary that Efficiency is the Enemy of Truth.

Dean’s got a hell of a campaign staff, webby to its bones. This is apparent not just in the “end-to-end” architecture that staffer Zephyr Teachout describes at Lessig’s site today but in Trippi’s attitude. Put it together and you have the beginning of the real Internet revolution in politics.

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MSIE 6 has been crashing on me for several weeks now. I’ve installed the latest patches. I’ve turned the Java and JIT compiler off and on. But still it crashes on pages that, say, Opera has no trouble with. For example, I can get MSIE 6 to crash by sending it to this page from the Washington Post.

Weird. And annoying.

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Ever wonder what your Palm Vx would look like if you backed your car over it?

So, now I’m in the market for a replacement. I use it as a portable copy of my Outlook (shudder) address book. Battery life, easy syncing, and cost all count. (I am not looking for an integrating cellphone.) Suggestions?

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Chris Lydon, who hosted radio’s best talk show, audioblogged me yesterday. This time Chris has divided the interview into three 5-minute segments (1 2 3). We talked about the new enthusiasm for the Web, the Web’s effect on Big Media, and why the Dean blog at Lessig.com is historic.

We recorded it at Bob Doyle’s place tucked away in Cambridge. The hallway is cluttered. The rug is worn. You open the door …. and you’re in a mediatech’s pleasure garden. Forty-five computers. Three T1 lines. In the hallway is a working 5-foot model of Merlin, the early electronic game Bob invented – the altar on which I sacrificed too many of my not-so-youthful hours. He also wrote MacPublisher, was a lead reviewer for New Media magazine, has a doctorate in physics from Harvard, etc. He’s now founded a company called SkyBuilders the tag line of which I love: “We build community computers.”

Lesson: You never know what’s behind a door.

By the way, at Chris’ site is a photo of Mary McGrath, a name familiar to the listeners of Chris’ show. What a pleasure to meet her in the flesh!

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My column in Darwin Mag this month is about why panels suck so bad. Oddly, it includes two limericks.

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When I bought the extended warrantee on my daughter’s HP laptop, I read the contract but failed to notice what wasn’t there. I’d seen that laptops were excluded from the on-site service guarantee. But now that her hard drive has died 7 months into the contract, I’ve discovered that there’s nothing in there about how quickly they’re required to fix it. So, the company that provides the warrantee services for TigerDirect has just informed me that I will receive a box to ship the laptop within seven days, should expect the repair (slapping in a new hard drive: 5 minutes of work plus 40 minutes to reinstall from the disk image on a CD) to take “a few days” and then should allow another few days for it to be shipped back.

So the “We’ll send a technician to your house” promise has turned into a “We’ll eventually send you a box and you’ll be without your computer for two weeks, assuming the guy at the local shop we’re sending it to isn’t on vacation.”

Caveat emptor. Remember to read what isn’t there.

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The Ximian desktop feels better than the Gnome one that came with RedHat. So far I’m finding it easier to find things. Also, it’s done a better job finding my Windows machines on the network. But that good news is balanced by frequent freezes of keyboard and mouse. That may be because I was adjusting the sound properties. But with no mouse and no keyboard, my only input device is the off switch, which is not what I’m looking for in linux.

Another advantage of Ximian is that OpenOffice actually opened. And now that I know how to move files from my XP machines to linux, I could actually open a Word .doc file. Cool. OpenOffice’s word processor looks pretty good. Tempting. Very tempting.

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