RI Politics: Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? So my wife tells me the Democratic Primary for Rhode Island Office of the Secretary of State is a choice between a guy who's reported to be mobbed up, and a trust-fund baby posing as a Democrat, but whose wife has written big checks to Cheney.

Since Sec of State controls elections, I think I'd go for a mobbed-up guy rather than a stealth Republican. At least with a mobbed-up guy, I have a good chance he'll fix the elections in a way I like.

UPDATE: The allegedly mobbed-up guy won. Hooray for democracy.  ¶ 2:02 PM 1 comments

  More from my social fashionista daughter Scene: trying to get ready to leave the house to go visit friends of ours, who have a little girl our daughter's age named Sara. My daughter is dawdling as only a three year-old can.

Me: If you don't cut it out, we're not going to Sara's house at all.

My daughter: (breaking into tears) But I want to go try on her shoooooooes......  ¶ 9:09 PM 0 comments

  Book review: jPod Just read jPod by Douglas Coupland. I think the pitch must have been "Microserfs....on Acid!" It's a fun read and has all the usual Coupland pseudo-hypertext fun with fonts and non-sequitors. But the setting (group of coders), the cast of characters (smart oddly sexy girl, non-entity guy, weird guy, etc), and the descriptive devices (character sheets and ebay ads instead of "dream Jeopardy categories) are almost straight out of Microserfs. But this time there's murder, mayhem, Chinese gangsters, drug-dealing parents, and the author himself as Deus Ex Machina.

If he was going to do a pseudo-sequel to Microserfs, I wish it had been set during the boom rather than after it. Microserfs was just pre-boom (all the hype was OOP, not Web 1.0) , and, as someone who rode the outer edges of the boom for a bit, it would have been fun to read his take on it. But I guess I'll have to keep waiting for that one, or else read that Po Bronson book. It's listing for $5.25 used on Amazon...  ¶ 7:16 PM 0 comments