Here is a screenshot from a game of Scrabulous (Facebook online Scrabble) in which a single word, deshypothequiez, scores 1797 points.

My French is rudimentary, and I don’t know the rules by which this particular game was played, but impressive nonetheless. And remind me never to play Augustin, though I think I could take Edouard.

This post has been removed in accordance with the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.

Thanks to my BFF The Everywhere Girl for the pointer to these great hints for new parents:

The web sucks.

At four this morning my daughter woke up sick, with an apparent fever. I had a Vicks V971 digital thermometer, but could not get temperature readings that made sense. In between tending to her, I searched online for operating instructions for the thermometer and could not find them, even on vicks.com. (Shame on Vicks. They advertise the thermometer on the site, but they won’t tell you how to use it. Do they really think I would go to vicks.com to make a buying decision on a thermometer? Please.)

One solution? Paid search with micropayments. Charge me a couple of cents for every search and don’t give me any advertising or paid links. Another? Don’t put money above all else. Make the first page of links for any search (except the search with the keyword “buy” in it) non-commercial. It won’t give you a $600 stock price but it might make search useful again.

We live in a small town and there is nowhere nearby to get a new thermometer at this hour. And I can’t leave my seven-year-old here either. I’ll go out in a few hours when the stores open. In the meantime, I’ll curse the lie that is search. The real digital divide is between what the web could be and the piece of crap it has become. That’s what happens when everything has to have a business model.

Social media, like most technological advances before it, has become a highly effective tool for bigots, racists, and revisionists. It is up to those of us who wish to rise above prejudice to respond and correct “misinformation” (a gentle word for lies) when we see it.

I just came across an excellent post On Reem Abeidoh’s blog on this very subject. Reem asks:

“The real people in the online world bring their prejudice to the communities they belong to. However, if there is a strong enough brigade who shuns and demotes these people, would their muscles deflate? Can the community establish an internal code to ensure that everyone feels comfortable online?”

I am not sure how enforceable a code would be. I do agree strongly that those of us who are intelligent and skilled writers and researchers (bloggers), sometimes with sizable audiences, can do much to counter the lies with a reasoned, well-researched response.

I am Jewish, and recently found myself on a Facebook group where a conspiracy theorist was explaining how the Jews control the media, the government, the banks and big business. They also incidentally helped found Nazism! In this case, one of the “sources” used to prove this was The Protocols of Zion, a book that has long been recognized by scholars as a fraud, but which is still popular with anti-Semites.

Conspiracy theorists claim that the Protocols of Zion are a master plan by “the elders of Zion.” This is patently absurd. The source material was written about Napoleon III, and was not written about Zionism, nor influenced by it. How then could it be what propagandists claim it to be? It isn’t. The Times of London exposed the hoax of the protocols in 1921, but over the years it has been convenient to ignore this, and subsequent evidence, that the protocols are bogus, because the fraud is the foundation of so many claims of a vast, global Zionist conspiracy.

When I posted this information to the Facebook group, the person I was arguing with eventually conceded this point and went on to quote other sources. I feel I made a small victory, and either embarrassed the author for his being so easily dran into this 100-year-old scam, or perhaps influenced others who might have thought his claims valid.

Based on my Facebook experience, here are my suggestions for responding to online hatred:

• Respond factually and unemotionally
• Cite reliable, unbiased sources. There are no truly unbiased sources, but don’t for example, quote a Jewish source in a Jewish argument.)
• Be logical and methodical
• Choose your cause, become an expert on it and use social media tools like RSS, Google News Alerts and Technorati blog search to track interesting conversation
• DO NOT link to racist sites and material unless you have to. This only propagates this information and improves its search engine ranking. Obviously if you are responding to someone, you have to link to that person’s blog or web site, but don’t succumb to the temptation to provide a number of links to racist content to illustrate the problem. Don’t help these people.

I’ve just started thinking about this in the past six months or so, and I would love to hear your comments on the seriousness of this problem and what bloggers can do about it.

I saw this in the store last night and found it rather disturbing. It’s a bag of Pepperidge Farms Goldfish crackers, and they appear to be Baked Baby flavor. It reminds me of a line about baby powder. “How do they get the babies in powder form?”

“Who bakes the babies, and did they really think this flavor would sell, and is anyone investigating this?”

Interesting and thought provoking post on The 463 tech policy blog on a dirty tricks email campaign launched against Democratic presidential contender Barrack Obama, targeted at Jews, claiming Obama is a radical fundamentalist Muslim.

I knew it was only a matter of time before the hate campaign started against Obama. It’s the nature of our country. It’s the nature of the right.

I hate to say it, though, but with all of the idiotic urban legends that arrive in our inboxes daily, the Nigerian 419 scams, the chain letters, and the lottery winnings awarded to people who never entered a lottery, why haven’t people become more discriminating about what they believe when they see it in their inbox?

“It’s in an email. It must be true.” It certainly doesn’t ring true for me. People need to think about what they pass on to friends, no matter the source. Here’s why email works so well for these disinformation campaigns: people are lazy. And they want to be seen as clever by their family and peers. So with a few clicks of the mouse they can forward these dire predictions and ground-breaking revelations to dozens of people. And I guess they are trying to be helpful. But they should cut it out.

My immediate family owns an iPod Mini, an iPod Nano, a video iPod, an iPod Touch and an iPhone. And two PowerBooks. And a Mac Mini. And a Lisa. And an Apple I. And an Apple II. I became an Apple developer in the early 80s on the Apple II, and was a Mac developer for 12 years. Loyal? I was also a Newton developer.

Enough about me. I am so fed up with Apple. They are tragically uncool. My iPhone experience has been a nightmare. First, no one can activate it for you. You activate it from iTunes. But you have to have the right version of iTunes. To get the right version of iTunes you need the right version of Mac OS X, 10.5. If you don’t have it, it will cost you about $139.

So I updated my OS to 10.5. Guess what that did to most of my Macromedia graphics apps and PowerPoint? Yep. They don’t work anymore. Adobe Fireworks is available from Amazon for $297.99, $1.01 off of list! Mac Office 8 upgrade? $240.

Estimating conservatively, I have spent close to a million dollars over the years on Macs, Apple laser printers, CD ROM drives, software, etc. I ran my own business and we both developed Mac peripherals and software and bravely ran the company on Macs. I’m not talking about managing some corporate budget worth close to $1M and spending it on Macs. I was an entrepreneur. This was money out of my own pocket. But I digress.

In addition to a couple of thousand dollars in recent investments in iPods and the iPhone, I HAVE PURCHASED LEGITIMATELY THROUGH ITUNES several hundred songs. Great stuff. Buzzcocks. Clash. Snow Patrol. Bummer I can’t put them on my iPhone. That’s because Apple forces people to update iTunes so they can introduce hardened and more insidious digital rights management (DRM). DRM is designed to keep people from playing music they have legitimately obtained. You thought it was designed to thwart music theft? No way.

Last week I heard 27 Jennifers by Mike Doughty and I loved it. I came right home to buy it from iTunes and put it on my iPhone. I paid my .99 and downloaded it. I connected my iPhone and tried to sync it. (I have yet to get the calendar to sync). I was alerted to the fact that I needed to update the iPhone software. I downloaded it. I then updated the iPhone which took a LONG time. It also failed to install the update. I tried several times with repeated failure.

I also could not get 27 Jennifers or any of my purchased tunes onto the iPhone.

So tonight, I fixed it, or at least, I got 27 Jennifers onto it. I booted LimeWire, searched on the title of the song, found it in 10 seconds, downloaded it in under a minute, dragged it to my iPod and iPhone and guess what? I can finally listen to the god damn song I bought a week ago.

Apple … what is THAT all about? With the cost of the phone, the tunes I can’t play because of your hideous DRM, the OS upgrade, and all the apps that broke with the upgrade, I had to spend $1000 JUST TO GET MY IPHONE, MAKE MY FIRST CALL, AND RESTORE THE APPS THAT BROKE IN THE PROCESS!

Steve Jobs came out in February of last year and said he opposed DRM. What does that mean? The DRM that plagues iTunes and the iPhone must be the most onerous ever. Jobs explains Apple’s DRM policy in an elucidating 1800-word plus Thoughts on Music on Apple’s site. Despite the title, it is not about music. It’s really Thoughts on Greed. There’s not a word about musical genres, the joy of good music, the artistic experience. It’s an explanation of why iTunes music has to carry DRM even though Steve doesn’t want it. (He would also prefer to give away all of the company’s products, but that decision is ultimately up to the Board.) Jobs writes “all iPods play music that is free of any DRM.” A friend of mine told me, never buy your music from iTunes and you won’t have a problem. I guess that’s the answer.

I know this is a story that has been told thousands of times, but it’s infuriating, and it’s my blog, so there.