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As if things aren’t exciting enough (we start our cross-country jaunt Tuesday), my Scottish brother-in-law, Ronnie, is in town for his U.S. acting debut in the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival. (Promotional commercials for the festival are here.)

The flick, “In A Man’s World” is described thusly:

A true to life account of survival on the streets of gangland Scotland. Based around the emotional tale of four street wise youngsters in search of the perfect score to earn them their goldon passport towards a brighter future. A gritty portrayal of hope, desperation and betrayal charting the progress of these youngsters as they embark on their journey into the unforgiving heart of the Celtic underworld. As time goes by they soon discover that life in this business is not as glamorous as it seems as they continue to spiral deeper and deeper into a world of ruthless gangsters and criminal overlords.

In case you’re having trouble with the concept of “gangland Scotland,” think “Trainspotting.” Anyway, Ronnie plays a bad guy and I think he just has a small part, but it’s still pretty darned exciting. There’s even talk of a write-up in the New York Times (not sure when but I’ll link if I can find it). Screening is Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Village East Cinemas — 2nd Ave at 12th Street in NYC. Tix here.

Testing my moblogging abilities. Looks like I can send photos from my phone (thanks to Flickr!) but not the accompanying text, for some reason.

Probably won’t be blogging much over the next couple of days as I’m at the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media show this week. Then, next week, it’s Ad-Tech. (Then I’m off on my cross-country jaunt.)

Will be sharing news and thoughts on ClickZ News and Experts. For those of you at these shows, I hope to see you!

Here’s hoping that all my U.S. readers will be experiencing some variation on what I did this morning (but maybe without the same level of chaos). The crowded gymnasium at PS9 in Brooklyn grew more and more crowded as I picked through the masses to find the correct line, chatted a little with my fellow voters, and got chastized by a bullying election worker with a West Indian-sounding accent. Things would have gone much more smoothly had there been more such workers (bullying or not) helping people through the process. Still, as is usual in NYC, people peacefully self-organized and got on with their business, with a little grumbling here and there.

The line inched slowly forward until I, too, found myself in the booth under the basketball hoop, to flip the switches, check and doublecheck my vote, and, finally, crank the lever. It’s done. At least for me. And you?

Other voting stories:

Tom Watson (I’m with you, Tom. I got a little weepy leaving the polling place this morning. So much emotion! So much at stake!)

Jason Chervokas

Fred Wilson (+ here and here)

James Wolcott

Jeff Jarvis

Howard Greenstein

Jason Kottke is collecting more voter “user experiences”

A moving tale from Charlie Suisman’s Manhattan User’s Guide

Matt blogs about Vonage and other VoIP services. I tried Vonage when I moved to the apartment where we’ve been for the last year and a half, but we decided to quit. At the time, we were having to pay for a phone line anyway, because we had DSL (no cable was available in the area). It was also a little buggy. We had to do resets way more often that I would have liked.

Now that we’re moving again, I signed up to try Vonage with our new area code. I’ve had the service working in my current apartment for several weeks now, and it seems to be pretty darned reliable. The dial tone is there, it works when I need it, and it even makes that super annoying sound when my cat knocks the phone off the hook. The only problem I had setting it up was my own problem — I had stuck the phone line into the wrong jack. Looking forward to getting it up and running for real in the new home.

As Matt says:

I hate to sound like an ad for the thing, but it’s just a better way of having a phone at home. The only real risk is an outage with your cable modem, and while that does happen from time to time, most people now have cell phones as a backup, and if your modem is out, calls go straight into voicemail.

A tidbit from a piece I wrote about LookSmart’s earnings. A new Furl.net is coming this week, says new CEO David Hills. New functionality will let users search across all of the public URLs that users have saved. Interesting stuff.