Tossing and Bashing George W. Bush

Spencer was avoiding his deadlines and web surfing as usual when he accidentally hit upon the George W. Bush/ Albert Gore collectors coin at www.washingtonmint.com. The official-looking silver coin depicts Bush as 43rd president on one side and bestows the same honor on Gore on the other side. The Minnesota-based independent mint created the coin

to commemorate what its calling “the Worlds First Coin-Toss Election.”

“Heads I win, Gore you lose,” laughed the Lynx as he envisioned the coin being used at the Super Bowl.

A Katt crony was curious why a stand-up comedian bashed Dubya during the first 20 minutes of the general session at Lotusphere earlier this month. Maybe it wasnt so much a partisan gesture as a way to fill time during the announcement-lite user conference in Orlando.

Aside from one or two partner and service announcements, the IBM subsidiary baffled the Furry Ones friend by failing to mention or demonstrate the new Sametime 2.0 audio/video conferencing and broadcast features that were released in “public” beta at Lotusphere Berlin last September. “I bet attendees would have rather seen Lotus exchange the lame comic for a decent demo of their conferencing technology,” giggled the Lynx.

Tooling around Kaspersky.com, El Gato discovered a warning for an Internet worm named Ramen that is triggered to activate on systems running Red Hat Linux 6.0 or 7.0. The international data-security company says that the worm exploits three security breaches that were found and closed last summer. Although the Ramen worm activates on systems running Red Hat, Kaspersky says that the same breaches can be found on other Linux distributions (from Caldera, Debian, Connectiva and other companies) and that users should install patches for these breaches regardless of which form of Linux is being run.

The Puss hears that the National Automated Clearing House Association is working on a payment infrastructure with vendors, merchants and financial institutions that it says it believes will solve some big problems in the e-payments area. NACHA is going for board approval early next month and will move forward from there. While NACHA has been a not-for-profit membership organization for 26 years, the Furball hears it may be kicking around the idea of creating a for-profit subsidiary.

With Novells stock price hovering around $7 (down from a 52-week high of $45), a PR team that includes a full-time Brigham Young University undergrad and a hard-to-explain strategy called OneNet, Spencer wasnt surprised to learn that restrooms in Provo have free Tylenol. Less surprising is that the pain-relief dispensers are nearly empty.