It's a small world after all

And now you will have that tune running through your head for the rest of the day, demonstrating the fearsome power of the Internet.

It's pretty cool when you can read about some software in a book (a book I saw reviewed on the Internet, although in this case I bought it at Brentano's, not Amazon), order and download the software, and then have the creator show up in your blog. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see evidence a stranger has passed through here, since a lot of my friends don't, ferchrissakes. The best bit of Internet serendipity came a couple years ago, when my long lost half-sister e-mailed me after a distant relative stumbled across my main and sadly neglected site.

This whole blogging thing would be even more interesting, of course, if the entries concerned, say, the completion of my 23rd novel, or my new deal with Dreamworks. Or perhaps not necessarily more interesting: Kevin Smith has a blog and his topics include the quality of his bowel movements (also spoilers on "Revenge of the Sith," so read with care).

Another Internet-related goodie that showed up this week: Yet another once-in-a-lifetime moneymaking opportunity from a Nigerian lawyer representing the estate of an oil executive who died in a car crash. The roads of Nigeria must be littered with the carcasses of intestate millionaires. Hard to believe people fall for these scams, but they do. And I have a vision of half the population of Nigeria hunched over their keyboards every night, sending out e-mails to unsuspecting Westerners.

More tech: We saw Mark Knopfler in concert here in Paris last month and I noticed that the flicked Bic cigarette lighter has been largely supplanted by the small glowing square -- that is, the screens of cameraphones pointed at the stage. This phenomenon has manifested itself just in the past two years; it was then that we went to our last concert, Bruce Springsteen, and there were no cameraphones in evidence. In a couple years the phones will have full quality sound and video capability and there will be a couple hundred simulcasters in the audience.

And, lastly and inevitably, a tech annoyance: Like any good ThinkPadder, I check IBM's update site regularly and download and install all the recommended driver and software updates. And once again I seem to have touched off a conflict, this time involving the vast array of wireless gimcrackery my T41 ThinkPad claims to need. The beast can latch on to and hold a wireless connection with blinding speed, but it burns up so many system resources to do it that it bogs everything down, including e-mail and web-surfing. So I've turned off the wireless, dragged an Ethernet cable out of the closet, and am now operating at flank speed once again, and growling softly.