I’m sick as a dog today, but that doesn’t stop me from bringing you a page that causes our college-freshman daughter to shake her head ruefully and say, “So this is what people do with the Intermenet.”

Note, after the bit with the snake, it just repeats. Don’t expect anything else to happen. I tell you this as your friend.

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I’m sick as a dog again — my second cold-y/flu-y thing in two weeks — and was being kept awake by the sound of my own mucus (hey, you asked!), so I turned on the TV at 4:30 this morning. And I’m so glad I did! I may have stumbled on the worst movie ever.

Is there anything worse than a really bad pot-head movie, one that takes drugs to make the jokes funny? Head, starring the Monkees and written by Jack Nicholson was my old favorite bad pot-head movie. But it’s been rudely elbowed aside by Pandemonium, a film that confuses the randomly unexpected with the hilarious.

Judge for yourself. Here’s a link to a page with a link to the trailer. And keep in mind that the trailer is showing you the highlights.

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My Vonage phone arrive yesterday afternoon. I followed the simple instructions for plugging it into my cable modem and now I’m making calls to anywhere in the US or Canada – 500 minutes/month for $15.

So far, the sonic quality has been as good as a “real” phone. Yep, them Voice over IP bits can hold their own. And the plain ol’ telephone company, the one with the network that’s too smart for it’s own good, ought to be worried.

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X1 is the best desktop search engine I’ve found for Windows. It indexes your email, your contacts, and all the files on your desktop. Want to find that email talks about phlogiston? By the time you’ve finished typing in “phl,” X1 will have found it. I use it maybe 5 times a day.

Now X1 is starting to market itself. Good. It’s worth the $100 in time savings alone. It’s held up well as my email archive has grown to 110,000 messages. And the company has been very responsive to bug reports and enhancement requests. So, go X1! I hope you make a bundle.

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Ed Cone writes about what conclusions to draw from the fact that Maryland’s use of electronic voting machines on Tuesday seemed to go well: “‘Election officials will think that this validates the system, that now we can all see that it works just fine – but that’s not the case,’ says Michael Wertheimer, a systems-security consultant…”

My favorite bit:

A sampling of voters at Lutherville, Md., on Super Tuesday showed that the systems worked well on the surface. “The machine was easy to use,” says Charlie Mitchell, 49. “The only thing I wondered about was what I had read about these machines – were the votes getting counted or not? I don’t know.”

Oh, I see. Let me paraphrase: “The system worked perfectly and I was very happy with it, except for the gnawing fear that it disenfranchised me of my most basic right as a citizen.”

Electronic voting, without a voter-verifiable paper trail, inevitably introduces doubt into the system that should be the paradigm of lock box security.

(It is inevitable because the digital only has a symbolic relationship to the real, analog world. But that’s a different story…the same story about why computers that model thought aren’t themselves thinking. But I digress.)

Cross-posted at Loose Democracy

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Massachusetts’ old-style (= corrupt) House Speaker, Thomas Finneran, no longer backs a compromise amendment to the state constitution that would permit civil unions but ban same-sex marriages. Instead, he wants two amendments. The first would say: “It being the public policy of this Commonwealth to protect the unique relationship of marriage, only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Massachusetts.” According to the report in the Boston Globe, the second amendment “would include language saying that the Legislature ‘shall establish civil unions,’ but would call for the Legislature to define at a later date exactly what rights and benefits those unions would include.”

Ah, excellent. Let’s limit rights first and then maybe get around to supporting some, maybe, oh look, the cat’s coughing, what were we talking about?

But those of us who support the right of loving adults to marry can learn from this strategy: We should break our push into two parts. First, we should make it legal for same-sex couples to marry, but only if they’re hot lesbians. That’s something this great nation has obviously shown it can get behind. And then we can expand the right to include all those whose love dares not speak “I do.”

Cross-posted at Loose Democracy

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I listened to Kerry’s victory speech last night and was impressed. Perhaps because he’s an opportunist (yeah, this is going to be a left-handed compliment at best), he has absorbed the best messages from the other candidates. I thought his rhetoric and the set of issues he propounded were right on. (I wish the Internet and innovation were on his radar screen, but that’s my own little “special interest.”)

I just hope that he hasn’t peaked. All three Boston Globe columnists today worry that his shallowness will be exposed over the long term. Why is he running, other than to dethrone King W? I believe Edwards and Dean had issues that kept them going, in addition to their personal ambition of course. Edwards cared about the immorality of there being two Americas. Dean had an inchoate vision of what a great country set free from special interests could do. I honestly can’t tell you what gets Kerry going. And I’ve been paying attention.

I desperately hope Kerry figures it out.

The item on his list that struck me as having the most potential — keeping in mind that I have never ever once been right about this sort of thing — is the idea that Bush the Uniter has been Bush the Divider. Maybe Kerry’s announced destiny is to pull America together again, rejecting the wedge politics Bush has been practicing here and abroad. Of course, I’m predisposed to this message as a registered Deaniac and Netiac.

Mini Bogus Contest: What Kerry bumpersticker would be worth driving down the re-sale value of your car?

Cross-posted at Loose Democracy

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HP yesterday announced further moves to bring it to the forefront of user-hostile digital restrictions management.

Palo Alto, California-based HP said that it had licensed Intel’s high-bandwidth digital content protection technology, which is designed to ensure that video cannot be intercepted and recorded as its travels between devices, such as between a personal computer and a TV display screen.

Felice Swapp, who heads up much of HP’s digital rights management work, said that the Intel technology is invisible to consumers, and that it made more sense for HP to license that technology from Intel rather than to develop it itself and possibly create a competing standard.

Let’s argue about DRM later. For now, let us all join together at the felicity of the name of the person who heads up HP’s DRM initiative…

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Yoism is a made-up “open source” religion that replaces God with an impersonal Divine Mystery that seems to be loosely defined as “The Stuff that Is and the Scientifical Laws It Follows,” so that the proof of Yo’s existence consists of saying that the universe exists. Yoism pledges to build Heaven on Earth, and, best of all, without self sacrifice!

I’m confident Yoism is built on the best of intentions. I’m just having trouble getting past the unintentional self-parody. I guess that makes me a small person.

Thanks to Ross Knights for the link.

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The audio blog of the Berkman center has an interview with John Perry Barlow about the future and present of ideas…a reflection on his “Economy of Ideas” article in Wired ten years ago.

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