Happy Birthday to Dori!

Happy Birthday to my beautiful wife Dori, who is mumble years old today (and doesn't look it!). She's sporting some new amethyst and white gold earrings even as we speak, and she's got some nice new opal earrings, too.

Turn that Bluetooth Off!

We love using Bluetooth; with the help of iSync, it's extremely handy to sync our address books wirelessly between our Macs and mobile phones. But Security Cavities Ail Bluetooth discusses the problems you can have with your Bluetooth-enabled phone, if you're not smart about using it. Speakers at the recent Black Hat and DefCon security and hacker conferences in Las Vegas demonstrated how they can sneak into mobile phones and suck out phone books and other data. The key is that these phones, from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola, are vulnerable if they are left in discoverable mode. So turn it off when you're not using it. Our Sony Ericsson phones have cute blue lights that flash while Bluetooth is active, which reminds us to turn Bluetooth off. We save battery life by turning it off, too.

Safari addons and plugins

I'm working on a project that involves a roundup of Safari addons and utilities. Here's the ones I've got so far that I think might be worth including. Got any other recommendations?

• Saft 6.5.8 ($10)
• Hetima SafariStand 1.0b8
• Safari Icon Manager 0.7.1
• SafarIcon 2.1.2
• sfri Tools 1.2
• Safari Magic 1.0 ($20)
• Safari Enhancer 2.5.1
• Safari Debugger 2.8
• Safari Helper 0.5
• PithHelment 0.7.3
• Safari Extender 1.3.6 ($10)
• PDF Browser Plugin 2.0.2 (free for non-commercial use)
• AcidSearch 0.11
• Safari Aquafier 4.1

If there's any others that you like, or if you have a strong opinion on any of the above, please let me know in the comments. Note, though, that this list doesn't include bookmark managers; that's a whole different thing, and one that I'm not taking on as I don't use bookmarks myself.

Vote for Change Tour

I love living here in Sonoma County, but I kind of wished I lived in a battleground state. The Vote For Change Tour is around 40 concerts in 30 cities in 9 battleground states over 10 days. They've signed up a bunch of great artists, such as Springsteen, REM, Dave Matthews Band, Dixie Chicks, and many more. The scheduling of the concerts is especially interesting to me; they mean to blanket a state with concerts on the same day. For example, on October 3, the tour is in six venues in Michigan; on October 8, they're in six cities in Florida. That should get a lot of news coverage, and get the message out.

So I Didn't Have To

It's bad enough that the mainstream media and their talking heads can't be bothered to check the GOP's talking points before spewing them out onto the air, but it's really pathetic when the likes of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher have to be the ones to set the record straight. I saw both the shows mentioned in this post from The Gadflyer, and I thought that I should get around to blogging about it. Cliff Schecter did it, so I don't have to. Thanks, Cliff.

Post-convention bounce?

Was there a post-Democratic Convention bounce? The SCLM talking heads say both no and maybe, but the numbers say YES.

There's also a great graph here of how the electoral college has swung since May. Overall, Kerry's looking pretty good.

Wednesday note: the tally when this was written yesterday was Kerry 328, Bush 210. The graphic I pointed to changes each day to show the latest numbers, so it's now something different. I may add it to the right-hand nav bar so that this site always shows the current forecast.

TechWatch

Are you a technology professional interested in election integrity? A geek who believes every vote should be recorded as intended? A techie who stands for reliable and publicly verifiable election systems?

If that's you, go volunteer for TechWatch, part of VerifiedVoting.org.

We also have an urgent need for php programmers who want to assist with development of an open-source Election Incident Reporting system from now until September. If you are interested, please let us know

SafariStand

New to me: Hetima SafariStand. That page is (unfortunately) all in Japanese, but here's an English description of what it does and how to install it.

Recently updated

Recently updated pages on this family of sites:

• The JavaScript World FAQ
• The JavaScript World errata
• The Ultimate List of Safari shortcuts

SFU shout out?

Tom and I were watching Six Feet Under last night, and saw a scene in which Michelle Trachtenberg was dancing at a bar. Something about that shot looked familiar, and I realized that it appeared to be a duplicate of a bit from the opening credits of BtVS.

Anyone else catch that? Was it my imagination, or a deliberate shoutout? Hey, it's not as if SFU hasn't previously done shoutouts to an actor's earlier roles.

Backup Brain wishes to Steve

We here at Backup Brain wish to send out our best wishes for a speedy recovery to Steve Jobs. We're happy to hear that it was caught in time and that the surgery was a success. Text of message from Steve Jobs.

Reagan vs. Bush

If you were impressed, as I was, with Ron Reagan's speech on stem-cell research to the Democratic National Convention last week, you'll probably love his takedown of Bush and his lackies in Esquire. Cutting, smart, funny, devastating. Well worth reading.