Word of the day

ventrilitone - n. Sound that is mistakenly taken for the ring of one's own mobile phone.

You anonymous Gwyneth Paltrow fans are brilliant

I got firecupped as part of a Tui Na massage I had recently. It was a really great massage. The masseuse kind of rocked me and shook me around in an attempt to even up the right side of my back with the left, and at the end she decided my back was fucked up enough to merit firecupping. It's kind of stingy, but in a good way, and when I was done I drank a bunch of sangria and mojitos and checked out the most amazing collection of paint-by-number art I've ever seen. I felt like I was king of the world... even if I didn't quite look the part.

Can you guess what this is?

Product Plug

I think everyone should download Firefox. I've been using it for a couple of months now, and I love it. It's free and fast and has a couple of nice features that you don't find in IE, and, most importantly, it's an alternative platform for the internet. Perhaps the main reason why Netscape was valued so stratospherically and taken down so painfully back in the 90s, was because their view that the Internet, and not Windows, would be the next major platform for software developers was basically accurate. Before Netscape, most of the popular new interesting software was written for Windows. But what are the most interesting computer applications in the last few years? Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo, Blogger, Ultima Online. These aren't just Web sites -- they are applications, written to a brand new platform.

The problem is that if the only way we experience this platform is through Internet Explorer, we've basically handed a brand new monopoly to Redmond. That's why Firefox is so important. If Microsoft decides to get into the online auction business and suddenly, and if while Microsoft auctions is humming along, Ebay stops working properly for people, people have a choice: they can switch browsers. But if nobody uses Firefox, the project dies, and with it choice.

Firefox has about four percent of the browser market, but it has been gaining and it seems like a lot of people in the industry who remember how the desktop monopoly was handed over would like it to succeed.

If you do download it, don't delete your copy of IE. Some Web sites don't work with it, and though I've found that to be a really minor problem, it's good to be able to launch IE as a backup when you need it. And be sure to download the Google engine if you do try out Firefox. Couldn't live without it.

Anyhow, don't take my word on it, take The Wall Street Journal's, which says you should dump your PC while you're at it.

But you'd be insane not to vote for Kerry

I'm so glad that the Kerry campaign has finally discovered a real issue to campaign on:

In California, for example, Democrats are suing the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Menlo Park for preventing activists from talking to residents and homeless veterans. Lawyer Scott Rafferty, a member of presidential candidate John F. Kerry's steering committee, said he was turned away on the grounds that residents have dementia.

Rafferty said that most of the residents were of sound mind -- and that most were Democrats. He charged the Bush administration with suppressing Democratic turnout. The Department of Veterans Affairs said it was protecting patients and was required by law to keep out partisan activity.

This guy is so going to lose in November. Anna and I watched The War Room the other night. What a difference... to have smart, passionate people who think for themselves working on your campaign. I got to meet some of Kerry's staffers first hand when he came through the Bay Area a few months ago, and they definitely weren't the same caliber of people. Dumb corporate attorneys in blue suits... that's how they seemed to me. As an example of their brilliant thinking, John Kerry was in the Bay Area to unveil his technology platform. Not a bad idea, go to the heart of the high technology industry and tell people working there how voting for you will be good for their jobs, and good for the industry.

So who does Kerry get to introduce him at this event? Bill Gates (Bush supporter), Scott McNealy (Bush), Carly Fiorina (Bush)? No. Retired Detroit auto industry executive Lee Iacocca.

Clinton was widely supported by Silicon Valley during the 1990s, but Kerry hasn't done much to give people in my industry a reason to vote for him.

Project Censored has an interesting list of some of the top unreported stories of 2003-2004. I guess this is particularly remarkable to me because I got a taste of corporate censorship, when an IBM pr executive threatened to cut me (and IDG) off completely for a story I filed last week. What I was saying in the story wasn't even controversial, I was just reporting it based on some documents IBM had accidentally posted to their Web site and information from an un-named source, and my story ran before spoon-fed coverage in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times could be posted -- something that can piss off the Journal and Times reporters and make IBM look bad. In retaliation, IBM has threatened to no longer spoon feed me any embargoed stories... or even talk to me anymore.

If this is the kind of shit you have to go through just for reporting something early, imagine what would happen if you were reporting something controversial?

To tell you the truth, the idea no longer prebriefing me on upcoming stories is kind of liberating. It means I'll be forced to go out and seek better, non-sanctioned, sources to report on IBM and while it will be more work for me, it probably means I'll do better stories.