Where I’m @

20031114

Open Source Candidates
Though we are pretty much a Dean-leaning blog, we have some reason to reconsider, now that we have found out that former Republican Wesley Clark’s campaign headquarters runs Mozilla (via mozillaZine-Fr, via Nitot).

Seriously, though, Dean’s been pretty good at maximizing the cool factor of the Web (yes, it still does have some of that outside the cynical world of geeks) to his benefit. We wonder what the impact would be if he publicly touted using Open-Source tech. His campaign’s main blog runs off MovableType and is hosted on an Apache server with a RedHat Linux OS. His main campaign site is hosted on Apache using FreeBSD (though with one anomalous Windows 2000 server). We don’t follow things as closely as we might, and we aren’t casting aspersions by any means, but maybe Dean should raise the volume on his using Open Source. Might motivate a bunch of geeks to do something on his behalf. While it’s true that nearly all the Democratic candidates and the DNC itself are running Apache on Linux/Unix, Dean’s pushing the issue would put him in the public mind as the Open Source candidate and the others as me-tooers.

20031110

Idle Fun
We recently read about a nice little diversion that is akin to the old Random Link link used by portals, but we can’t remember where we read about it. In any case, what one does is takes a link-shortening site’s link pattern and play around with it to see where one ends up. We find particular fun in using TinyURL’s pattern, since it seems to be just letters. Try your name! Try “meh” or “feh” or “ick” and see where you go! Whooaaahh! Hang on kids, it’s a thrillride, we guarantee!