Chatopus has a nice article about using bots with a Jabber client and introduced me to a couple of new (to me at least) bots.

My favourite is the weather service, add <CITY-CODE>@weather.jabber.zim.net.au to your Jabber roster, and this user will display the current weather at that location in their status. To find your the city code, go to weather.yahoo.com for example, and use the code that forms part of the url as the user part of the Jabber ID e.g.

The city code's pretty simple to find out, and it's a nice lightweight way to find out the current weather.

Still astonished here that Bush stands any chance whatsoever in the US elections - a colleague who's worked in New York keeps telling me that Americans are certainly unusual, but still...

Perhaps that's why global outrage and protest against Bush is rather muted, we really can't understand why anyone would vote for him. The prospect of someone so visibly flawed and incompetant being neck and neck with another sane looking candidate is just surreal.

One possible reason for Bush garnering any vots is that the US Govt and media have been systematically lying to the American public, Diego's questions for Bush supporters certainly tests about this theory. If you're American and you don't get it, please read Diego's article.

Global internet polls, whilst far from being statistically valid (similar to voting in Florida I suppose), certainly provide significant indications of how unelectable we think Bush is, circa 10% of the vote and only ahead in Niger and Lichtenstein is hardly a close run thing.

Given that the Bush administration's attitude towards the world is clearly shown by their mal-administered website, I guess the antipathy is mutual