The media that has convinced many people that John Kerry is a dull and boring campaigner is the exact same media that convinced a lot of people that Dean was a dangerous scary angry man. Kerry did not win Iowa by accident; he won Iowa by having a kick-ass machine on the ground and by campaigning his heart out and by attracting people on his own merits. It wasn’t media. The media wrote him off as dead. The media storyline challenger for Dean was Clark. ...

The next BloggerCon is gonna be free. Big thumbs up. I’m pretty sure I’ll attend that.

I take no responsibility for the following list of eight names, other than that they’re in a notebook I own. His fault. Jack Dandy Man of Steam The Gurkha Ironclad The Boffin Bright Young Lad, his robotic sidekick/assistant Bulldog Jill Diamond Jubilee

Huh, my predictions weren’t too bad. Kerry took 40% of the votes in Wisconsin; Edwards took 34%, and Dean took 18%. I underestimated the Edwards surge again. The undecided voters went for Edwards in a big way. This is no doubt energizing for the Edwards campaign; he’ll be in at least until March 10th. Super Tuesday will tell us a lot. He’s not going to take on Dean as his Vice President, and if he does he’ll lose — you don’t want a VP who’s going to draw controversy and in some ways outshine you. Dean will also have more influence if he converts his campaign into a 527 and becomes a political center for grassroots populism, so I’m not sure Dean would bite on that either. ...

Wisconsin is voting today. Kerry was polling (original) way high. Figure in the Edwards surge, and Kerry wins with Edwards coming in second by a decent margin (I’d say he beats Dean by around 5 percentage points). Edwards sticks in the race till Super Tuesday to see if he can beat Kerry head to head. It wouldn’t surprise me if Edwards wins Georgia, but that’s the only Southern state on March 2nd. If Edwards wins Georgia and still has money flowing, he may keep it going till March 9th to take advantage of a Southern slate of primaries. If Edwards surprises everyone, which is possible, he could catch fire. ...

Warning: the post ahead touches upon devil’s advocacy regarding recent gay rights events in San Francisco. Dan Gillmor wonders whether the Mayor of San Francisco should be ordering city clerks to disobey the law. Larry Lessig chimes in (original). His argument is that the executive branch has a duty to disobey unconstitutional laws. I find myself pensive. Ashcroft and Bush no doubt feel that it is unconstitutional to force them to provide counsel to Jose Padillo. ...

Vernor Vinge was right. Again. There is a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 5 that can be triggered by loading a bitmap image. No Javascript, no ActiveX, nothing fancy. You load the bitmap, and arbitrary code runs on your system. Or you load a page with the bitmap embedded in it. And it’s not a particular bitmap, it’s a general technique. If you are currently browsing the Internet with Internet Explorer 5, you can be owned at any moment. ...

It would be great if Ecto was actually working, instead of getting caught in some messed up state where it can’t remember my accounts. And losing data. Seriously: it seems like the worst thing you can do when transitioning from shareware to commercial product is to make the commercial product less stable than the old version. I’m looking forward to Zempt for the Mac.

Adriaan Tijsseling posted a comment about an hour after I bitched about ecto (original) and offered to help. So kudos; that’s good support. If I’d read the help files, I’d have found the support email address, albeit it doesn’t appear on the ecto home page. Good things about ecto: Textile (original) preview support. Customizable HTML tag insertion. Per-blog default settings. Debug console. Things I don’t like as much: Can’t see the continuation and the main entry in the same window. Still somewhat confused about the local copies vs. posted copies of any given entry. Current blog should be displayed somewhere so I don’t have to guess/remember. No free beer. ...

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes: WISH 84 asks (original): What five games would you love to run/play if you had a willing group and a weekly time slot? I’m going to leave out games I’m in or running now, of course (yay, Champions and Buffy), and also games I expect to be able to play in soon — I’m looking at you, Star Wars and Charnel Gods and espionage game! You can also assume that I wish I could go back and play in Carl’s games again. Those disposed of: ...