Looks like the Bush administration lied again, this time about how much they expected the Medicare bill to cost. Unsurprisingly, much like every other program they introduced that would cost money, they came up with a phony number that’s far below the actual costs. I will guarantee that this new higher estimate isn’t where it stops, either.

In a perfect world, Bruce Schneier would be working for the Department of Homeland Security, if not running it. His CNet piece on terrorism and security comes from the pages of Information Security 101 and yet we never hear politicians speak at this level. It’s going to be to the detriment of all of us in the end.

The state of Maryland commissioned a security firm to audit the security of their electronic voting system, provided by Diebold. The results were not encouraging. The full report can be found here. I’m beginning to think that the scariest thing about Diebold’s voting systems is that Diebold already has a huge installed base of ATMs around the country. If they’re this bad at security when it comes to voting, how much better can they be when it comes to banking?

My job hunt is over. A lot of people in my network passed along good leads, and I had a couple of opportunities to do cool stuff with smaller companies, but the timing turned out not to be right (they couldn’t hire me right away and I needed to be hired right away). So, I accepted a contract position that I found via Dice.com. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re looking for an IT job, Dice is the best site out there. Flipdog.com is also pretty good, but for me, Dice has been the most reliable for a long time. I don’t even bother with Monster.com or Hotjobs.com. I’ve never received a reply from any job I’ve applied to through those sites.

I was pretty surprised not to get a job through the “network.” I made contact with a lot of people that I know in the course of the job search, but nothing happened fast enough there.

One general observation I have is that it seems like nobody (at least around here) is doing anything ambitious. I didn’t see any job listings for big projects that are getting under way. The project I’m joining is a security review for code produced by contractors for a large government agency. I have a lot of experience reviewing code, and I’m looking forward to focusing on security. I’ve been interested in security in general and in computer security in particular for a long time, and if this turned out to be the first step in focusing on security as a career direction, that would be fine with me. Mostly I’m just glad not to be looking for a job right now.

I thought Democrats were the party that imposed massive, bureaucratic federal programs that impose on the sovereignty of states and generally make everyone unhappy? It seems like the shoe is on the other foot these days — I just wonder if voters will figure it out. The state of Virginia is trying to opt out of the “No Child Left Behind” educational morass, and Republican state legislators voted unanimously to ask to be removed from the program. I’m not saying that Democrats, if in power, won’t come up with similar hare-brained schemes to reform the educational system, what I am saying is that it’s high time for Republicans to stop getting credit for not being that kind of party.

I can see why politicians and political consultants are fascinated by polling. It’s as close as anyone can get to quantitatively judging what the people who vote care about and want from their politicians. Donkey Rising has an interesting look at the exit polling among voters in the Democratic primary and what they cared about and who it led them to vote for. As time goes by, I find myself increasingly fixated on whichever candidate will be the strongest competitor to Bush in the general election. I guess you could call that electability, but that’s not really what I mean. More than having the right stance on the issues, or the right mix of experience, I want the person who will electrify the voters to support Democrats. Increasingly, that man seems to me to be John Edwards, and that’s who I’ll be voting for in the primary. I still think he has an outside shot at best, but I like his message, and I like his charisma.

Josh Marshall’s New Yorker piece on imperialism is worth reading.

I, like just about everyone else that actively sends email to other people, have been bitten by the latest worm floating around. It fits the pattern of most other recent worms, in that it sends itself to everyone in the victim’s address book with the return address of someone else in the address book. I used to never be bitten by these things, but I’ve sent a lot more email to people I don’t know since I started my job search, and now they’re sending out email that looks like it’s from me. I assume this is the case because for job applications I use an email address that I haven’t used much before, and all of the returned email is coming to that address. Anyway, today I’m looking into what it takes to digitally sign all your email. That way, people who know me will know that any email you get from me that really is from me is signed. I have friends who have done this for years, but I’ve never bothered. Now I’ve had it. I just have to figure out which email signing protocol can be used within Thunderbird and will be accepted by the other popular email clients (mainly Outlook).

Update: right now I’m experimenting with PGP, or GPG as it’s known these days. You can find my public key here.

Lyn over at Medley made a nice catch this weekend on something John Ashcroft said.

Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of U.N. resolutions.

What in the world does this mean? Once again we see that the basic refuge of the Bush administration is simply to try to scare people. It seems pretty obvious that they key campaign theme of 2004 is that we live in a big bad scary world and only George W Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and friends can protect you. And as for the headline of the article, don’t let anyone fool you with the “war was justified even without WMD” argument. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t, but the Bush administration chose to justify it to us and to the world based on that argument, and there’s got to be some accountability here. If they wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein because he was an evil tyrant and was easy pickings, then that’s what they should have said.

I’ve gotten email from a ton of people about tax software, and they all said basically the same thing, which was use TurboTax in some form or another. A few people said they’d migrated away from TurboTax due to various misdeeds of Intuit, and those people said they used TaxCut. I’m going to use TurboTax, i think, and now I only have to decide whether to use the web version or the boxed version. I think I’ll probably use the web version because I’m a web type person.