A friend of mine is wondering what happened to Pagoo. This is or was an Internet call waiting service for people using their telephone line for dial up. When you’re online, Pagoo intercepts voice calls and shunts them to an Internet location where the caller can leave a message. Pagoo then notifies you on your desktop that you’ve got a message. Click and you can listen to it. Pretty cool for $56 a year.

But now Pagoo seems to have hung up with no forwarding. Does anyone know what happened to them? And do you know of anyone offering a similar service?

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I usually haven’t done enough drugs that early in the day to really “get” the Zippy comic strip, but one the other day struck me as trenchant. Zippy is talking to a building shaped like a fish.

Zippy: Nothing bad can ever happen in my neighborhood.

Fish: Hey

Zippy: I live in th’ greatest neighborhood in th’ world!

Fish: Right

Zippy: Bad things happen in other neighborhoods..

Fish: Uh-huh

Zippy: If I’m so safe, why do I have this feeling of imminent annihilation?

Fish: Can’t imagine.

Now, I like that. But I liked it better before I started typing it in because I thought the last line was: “If I’m so safe, why do I have this feeling of immediate alienation?”

Safety and alienation go together like guns and fear.

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Jon Husband has published the text of an ad Sean Penn took out in Washington Post yesterday. It’s an open letter to W. After making nice in the first paragraph, Penn writes:

Many of your actions to date and those proposed seem to violate every defining principle of this country over which you preside: intolerance of debate (“with us or against us”), marginalization of your critics, the promoting of fear through unsubstantiated rhetoric, manipulation of a quick comfort media, and position of your administration’s deconstruction of civil liberties all contradict the very core of the patriotism you claim. You lead, it seems, through a blood-lined sense of entitlement.

It continues…

Penn paid $56,000 to run the ad and then he didn’t post the text anywhere on the Web, as far as I can tell. Someone quick get that actor a weblog!

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Vergil Iliescu blogs a column in the Sydney Morning Herald that has been running an informal contest: change or add one letter to a common Latin saying and come up with something amusing. Among the results (more on Vergil’s site):

Cine qua non – Nothing much on at the pictures.

Beau Peste – A unwanted admirer (Rina Hill, Seaforth)

Parsona non grata – Two Mormons at your door (Tony Turner, Tuross Head)

Bet al – Backing all the Cup runners to get a win. (Nigel O’Dea, Mosman)

Hores de combat- The girls are fighting again.
Persona non graba – Keep your hands off that woman. (Ian Johnson, Brisbane)

Gait accompli – The toddler’s first step. (Peter Maxwell, Berridale)

(I may have screwed up some of the attributions. Sorry. Well, you know what they say: “Et su, Brutus”: Go sue Brutus.)

Anyway, “Carpe Diet”: I’m going to start losing weight today! And one great way to do that is through “sex nihilo”: meaningless sex. Also, I’m thinking of getting a big car while I still can because, as they say, “Cars longa, vita brevis.” Of course, I’ll never lose enough weight to have meaningless sex in its bucket seats because “Arse longa, vita brevis.”

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DarwinMag.com is running a column of mine about why I’m sooo tired of hearing about information:

I’m on the Web all day. Do you know how much time I spend dealing with information? On a good day, none. I’m reading, writing, talking with people I know and am getting to know, checking my e-mail, avoiding work. Information is the last thing on my mind. So it seems odd to me that information is such a focus of interest when it comes to the Net, as if that’s what the Net is made of.

<snipping the entire body of the column…>

Why does this matter? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I’m just being cranky because it’s Election Day and I’m feeling particularly doomed. Yet, maybe it has everything to do with how we experience the Internet and thus with what we think it’s for and what ought to be done with it. The old idea that it’s an Information Highway made it appealing to governments and corporations but obscured the fact that it’s more about connection than the transfer of facts. It’s more about wet and messy humans doing all the things that can be done with words, pictures and sounds than about rational beings engaged in research.And that’s why the Internet is a world and not just a medium: Media are good for moving bits, bytes, facts and information from A to B. A world is a rich context, irreducible and unfathomable — the grantor of the space in which its inhabitants can split hairs, flame and fall in love.

The information that shows up on the Web is part of the Web’s world. But you could never get to the world of the Web if you started only with information.

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I received an email yesterday accusing me of supporting liberal ideas “reflexively.” I bristled at the charge only in part because it’s true. The rest of the bristling was due to the inaptness of the “reflex” simile.

“By reflex” is a pejorative meaning “thoughtlessly.” But I don’t believe it’s a matter of operating by reflex or by thoughtfulness. Our aim should be to develop the right reflexes. Even Aristotle — Mr. Rational Animal Guy — thought that the virtuous man (sic) is one who has developed the right habits. In the same way, someone who is politically virtuous has developed the right reflexes.

These reflexes are the result not of random muscle spasms but of having a complex context that gives ideas and experiences a richness they would not have taken in isolation.

Besides, hard-headed rationality — which, of course, has its place — is the signature of the CE0 Conservativism that has taken over US politics, with a balance sheet written in the economics of fear.

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Ten ways today is worse than yesterday:

Global warming

Energy conservation and clean air

John Ashcroft

The Supreme Court

Preemptive wars

Staggering debt

Health care

School testing replaces education

Internet freedom

Arrogant, smirking ex-CEOs are now the world’s sole super power

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Bruce Kushnick has sent me some links that related to the filing he submitted to protest the US Telecom Association’s demand of the FCC that phone record-keeping be eased up.

To check out the materials on the Regulatory Flexibility Act see: This material was created for our Small Business broadband initiative. http://www.teletruth.org/FCCbroadband.html

To check out more about the audits I mention see: (Check out the cartoons as well). http://www.teletruth.org/audit.html

And to read the other comments about the Biannual Review — I’ve attached the USTA filing. In order to read the comments about the “Biannual review” go to http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/comsrch_v2.cgi and type in the “proceeding” part (top left) “02-313″. Then go to the bottom of the page and click on ‘retrieve document list”

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According to Teletruth.org‘s Bruce Kushnick (from a mailing list):

I just went through the “Biannual Review” materials, WC Docket Number 02-313. I’ve attached below what the Bells’ lobbying group and association, the USTA [U.S. Telecom Association], is asking for the removal of all documentation and accounting requirements, just to name a few items.

I consider this entire process an outrage and the FCC should immediately halt this proceeding and start all over again. Record Shredding should be illegal and not sanctioned by the FCC.

The FCC is in violation of every conceivable part of the Regulatory Flexibility Act (as amended). It has gotten only 17 comments and reply comments (6 from the same person) for one of the most important discussions — making sure that the Bell companies keep accurate accounting books.

There was no effort on the part of the FCC to make sure that small businesses were included in these discussions, a condition of the Reg. Flex Act.

Teletruth recently conducted a campaign in New Jersey, with phonebill auditing firm LTC Consulting, to collect phonebills. We discovered that 50% of all phonebills had mistakes — mistakes that cost the customer money and which they can file for a refund. — and it can be thousands of dollars.

I can’t find information about this at the FCC site, but Kushnick is respected by people I respect.

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Make sure you vote today, assuming, of course that you are a US citizen, legally registered to vote, and in basic agreement with me.

If you do not agree with me, then please do vote anyway. But keep in mind that if you push the chad all the way through, you have destroyed your ballot. So you just want to lightly “dimple” the ballot with your choices, as per this official instruction sheet from the US Dept. of Elections:

(But seriously, if you are a Massachusetts resident and you want to register your disagreement with Senator Kerry’s spineless vote in favor of the Let W Declare War When His Popularity Flags Act, you can write in Randall Forsberg. But you have to do it as follows to have it count as anything other than a vote for “other”: “RANDALL FORSBERG, 950 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.”)

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