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August 13, 2003
Chip sends us to a page with a running counter toting up the cost of the war in Iraq, based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office. It also lets you choose form a list of US towns to see how much it’s costing viewed locally. Sure, the page is a gimmick, but it’s a useful one, helping us to get our heads around some 8-figure numbers.
August 11, 2003
Terrific, considered, moderate, fair, personal and funny assessment of Dean’s electability in Salon today by Joan Walsh. She asks the questions we all have when we first look at Da Gov. (A paid membership is required, or you can choose instead to look at an ad.)
There’s also a straightforward story by Joanna Weiss about Dean’s use of the Internet on the front page of the Boston Globe today (and gone tomorrow). It goes way past the “Candidate Uses Internet to Raise Money” story that initially got the attention of so many reporters.
August 10, 2003
Eric Norlin warns Democrats that opposing the war is a losing political issue. Could be. But reminding Americans that we were systematically lied into it and that our President is a phony hero — I hope he goes campaigning with Ahnuld in California — and that the President’s backers are getting rich while our soldiers are dying may not be such a losing strategy.
Meanwhile, Michael O’Connor Clarke recommends a Flash on the Bush Administration’s actual policies towards the men and women it’s placed into battle…
August 8, 2003
Gary Unblinking Stock points us to the W action figure from KB Toys. The subject line of Gary’s email about this: “WMDs sold separately.”
August 7, 2003
For those who, seemingly reasonably, told me during my Computer Troubles that I should have bought my computer from a reputable dealer like Dell in order to avoid problems…
My friend Carol bought a Dell computer on my advice a week ago. For under $500 she got a fast, capacious new machine, sans monitor. It arrived a few days ago and yesterday she set it up. (The fact that Carol was able to wait a few days before uncrating it tells you that she is not the technofanatic most of us are.) She plugged in her old monitor, a Sony, flipped the switch with the confidence of someone who has bought a pre-built, pre-loaded, pre-configured machine … and watched it fail. As soon as Windows XP Home loaded, the monitor displayed three images of the desktop in horizontal bands.
After assuring her that this was not some new UI scheme from Microsoft, I walked her through some of the basics over the phone, although the fact that each of the images was cut off at the bottom made it rather difficult. After 45 minutes, I was ready for her to reinstall Windows but decided that this would be a good time to call Dell. Perhaps they’ve run into this before. Perhaps something on their utilities CD would fix it. After all, because the monitor worked fine before Windows booted, it was pretty clearly a driver issue.
Carol spent four hours with Dell Support going through jumping jacks until the support guy finally decided it was a driver issue. He gave her the URL to download a new driver and hung up because Carol connects via dial-up on her single phone line. The URL led to a 404.
Carol called me. We searched for the driver on Dell’s site, and sure enough, the page was down. We found the driver on Intel’s page (it’s an Intel graphics card) and she downloaded it. She installed it. Unreadable display.
After arguing for half an hour with Dell Support that she needs to talk with a supervisor and not do more jumping jacks, she finally was connected. They’re sending someone to her house. So, presumably this will end happily quickly unlike my own protracted struggle. At least, let’s hope so.
August 5, 2003
The PayDemocracy.com site may turn out to be a good idea, but the page that lets supporters aggregate their small contributions to Howard Dean is at this moment the very definition of optimistic:
Goal: $1,000,000,000.00
Needed: $999.999,995.00
Hurry up, folks, only 4 months, 28 days, 11 hours to go!
Ed Cone runs an email-based exclusive interview with Sen. John Edwards.
Dan Gillmor puts well what’s different and right about the Dean campaign’s approach to the Internet.
August 2, 2003
From a review in the New Yorker of Thirty Days: Tony Blair and the Test of History by Peter Stothard:
Faced with the overwhelming might of their American allies, the English take refuge in irony: When Blair asks how he should begin a televised speech justifying the war, his right-hand man suggests, “My fellow Americans…”
August 1, 2003
I liked the article in Salon by Jeremy Heimans and Tim Dixon that says the way to defeat Bush is to expose him as a phony, a macho man who says “Bring ’em on” from behind the safety of his desk, a warrior who gets flown onto a aircraft carrier but who went AWOL during his cushy tenure in the military, a CEO who never ran a company that his Daddy’s pals didn’t have to bail him out of. If leadership and character count, then this is a legitimate complaint.
…Oh, and his policies — economic, environmental, diplomatic, security-istic — have been disastrous.
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