Nothing to hear here, please move along. No, really.

[Chocolate and Vodka]

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one of the shexxshiest voices in audioblogs around, why isn't suw a dj in some enlightened part of the world? i mean come on people, everything is there with an appropriate skew. i know friends that would just get excited listening to her voice, accent, etc. so pay attn. well worth it.

dodgy dossiers, astroturfing, they the media.

Becky Howard, a colleague of mine, was asking the other day about how she might publish something she's been working on, and publish it quickly, since it's relevant to the Presidential race. After talking about it a while, and coming up with nothing, she's decided to self-publish it on her website. My first response was: well, of course, you blog it. Which would be the perfect solution but for the fact that Becky has no blog. Oops.

So my second-best alternative? I blog it. Becky, as some of you probably already know, is one of the country's foremost experts on plagiarism, and the essay in question is a close look at the process by which the Brits and the Bush Administration set about justifying our actions in Iraq. It also makes no secrets whatsoever about its own position: Plagiarism and Fraud in George W. Bush's Foreign Policy. Check the URL if you think I'm joking about this.

[Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy]

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interesting paper, worth the read

IETF News. The IETF, despite the fact that it keeps the Internet running, doesn䴜t get much news coverage. I suspect that䴜s partly because its structure is pretty well 100% opaque and incomprehensible to outsiders (and it seems to not a few insiders, especially newbies like me). There䴜s actually no such organization as the IETF but there are (in alphabetical order) CNRI (who run the Secretariat) and Foretec and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and the Internet Research Task Force and the Internet Society (ISOC) and the RFC Editor. Anyhow, there䴜s news. Big news, I think. Most of it I don䴜t understand and the parts that I do I may have been told in confidence. The fairly severe angst coming out of this spilled over into the Jabber channels from Thursday night䴜s plenary session. I think it may be as smooth and simple as the IETF trying to do the same thing more efficiently, or it could be a lot more complicated and ugly. Don䴜t ask me to explain it; but I think it matters. [ongoing]

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interesting happenings, i wonder why, probably money related…. major changes are almost always money related.

ummm, well, perhaps there is.

this might help, but who knows.

Larger SUVs are Illegal on Many California Streets. There's an interesting article over on Slate titled California's SUV Ban: The Golden State has outlawed big SUVs on many of its roads but doesn't seem to know it. Andy Bowers does a good job of explaining how the largest SUVs often weigh more then 6,000 pounds, the traditional cutoff between light and heavy trucks. It turns out every big SUV and pickup is too heavy for my street. Here's just a sampling: The Chevy Suburban and Tahoe, the Range… [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

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now if they would enforce the law, increase the fines, and thus make the tax break appropriate to those that need it.

it is going to get us in trouble. it verily is.

i'm not saying what they believe is right, but i think the rule change which allows her to wear skirts as she wishes is right.