New Year's rip-off

Spammers, phishers and other miscreants are increasingly inventive. A couple days ago, one of my relatives forwarded to me an e-mail warning me of a virus threat. In this case, the threat is bogus and the warning itself is the scam, although I don't know what purpose it serves. Maybe it's the modern-day equivalent of calling the corner store and asking if they have Sir Walter Raleigh in a can.

Today I got what looks like a PayPal receipt for the purchase of a cellphone for $474.99. There was a helpful link I could click if I wanted to dispute the amount. If I were to click on the link, it would squirt my PayPal log-in information to the scammers.

I get dozens of these a year, although this was the slickest so far. My e-mail program, Thunderbird, flagged it as a possible scam, but even without the warning I wouldn't have been taken in because we all know never to click on the links in a commercial e-mail or one from an unknown sender, don't we?

If you have any doubts, Google some of the unique phrases in the e-mail. The purported vendor on this one was LWPELECTRONICS. The phone was being sent to Bill Chang, 202 N Magnolia Dr., Saco ME. Google that address and you get 961 hits, nearly all of them warnings about the scam. Now, with this, make that 962 hits.

Resolved: I will get smart enough to understand this book

With prophecy in the narrow sense of foretelling the future we have no concern, and we have not much concern with it as an appeal for righteousness. What will interest us today -- what we must respond to, for interest now becomes an inappropriate word -- is an accent in the novelist's voice, an accent for which the flutes and saxophones of fantasy may have prepared us. His theme is the universe, or something universal, but he is not necessarily going to "say" anything about the universe; he proposes to sing, and the strangeness of song arising in the halls of fiction is bound to give us a shock. How will song combine with the furniture of common sense? we shall ask ourselves, and shall have to answer "not too well": the singer does not always have room for his gestures, the tables and chairs get broken, and the novel through which bardic influence has passed often has a wrecked air, like a drawing-room after an earthquake or a children's party. Readers of D.H. Lawrence will understand what I mean.
-- E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Optimism

"This VCR will accurately maintain its calendar up to Dec. 31, 2096, 11:59 PM."
-- Panasonic Omnivision VHS Model PV-8451 Operating Instructions

Jeter! 

Belatedly

Been to Mexico. Returning to France, my gall bladder melted down and was removed. A pretty routine operation, made somewhat more interesting by the fact that most of the people involved didn't speak English. But more on that later.

And Herself and her fille have taken up residence in my apartment. So the question of the hour is: How often can I ask "So, how long did you say you were staying?" before I get slugged? Ten days and counting.

That byline again

I just had another piece published in the IHT, here. I interviewed a couple folks from the science-fiction field to write it, which was fine, but could only use a fraction of what I got, which was frustrating. But it's a fill-in column, and the space is fixed -- you can't get even one extra line. I suppose I could put together a "director's cut" for, say, the SFWA Bulletin.

The other one

Here's the other little product announcement I did for the IHT. It was published on March 19. Unlike the phone, I actually bought this gizmo. And the paper paid me enough for this piece to actually recoup most of the VAT the French authorities slapped on it, oboy. Here it is:

If your bookshelves are bulging, the IntelliScanner bar-code reader can help you catalogue your collection. The scanner itself is about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Once you have purchased the scanner, you must visit the Web site of the manufacturer, Intelli Innovations, and download any of several software packages, including Media Collector (for books, DVDs, CDs and video games), Wine Collector or more specialized programs intended for businesses and heavy-duty online auctioneers.

After the software has been configured, you read the bar codes of your old papery media and shiny new media with the IntelliScanner. The scanner transmits the codes to your PC or Mac via a Bluetooth connection, your computer hunts in Intelli's online archive for the corresponding data, and on your screen appears a wealth of information on each item, including author, title, publisher, price and genre (for books); artist, label and track list (for CDs); and stars, distributor, format and theatrical release date (for DVDs) - plus the cover for each book and disc.

You can tailor the list to include or exclude any of three dozen fields of data. For peripatetic types, the "location" field will be of particular interest; you can indicate whether that copy of "A Moveable Feast" is on a shelf in Paris or in Pop's attic in Peoria, Illinois.

The IntelliScanner is available at www.intellisw.com for $299.

Gadget review

I've published two short gizmo reviews in the International Herald Tribune in recent months. Well, they're more product notices than reviews. I'd point you to the URLs, but the IHT search function is a little dotty today. Here's one of the reviews, before minor trims and copy edits:

Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone

The latest cellphone from Spark Fun Electronics does not feature MPEG-4 video playback. It does not have a VGA camera with digital zoom, nor Bluetooth wireless capability. It does not have even one color display, let alone two, and it is not sheathed in anodized aluminum. If you want those features, you'll have to buy a Motorola RAZR V3 cellphone.

What the Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone has is heft. Lots of heft. About two pounds of it, against the RAZR's 3.26 ounces. The Spark Fun also has a rotary dial, a thick black plastic casing and a coiled cord, all of which the RAZR lacks. And while the RAZR may have a certain bling factor, the Spark Fun has a ring factor -- as in clanging metal bells, for those tired of the "Crazy Frog Axel F" ringtone.

Spark Fun, a Colorado company founded in 2002 by some college students, takes old-style rotary phones and retrofits them with a custom-made circuit board, an off-the-shelf but expensive cellular module and a hand-built ringer circuit to bring 1950s technology gasping and wheezing into the 21st century. To make the phone go, all you have to do is insert the SIM chip from your overcomplicated, delicate, fly-weight, easy-to-lose cellphone. Spark Fun says the Portable Rotary will work with 90 percent of the world's cellular systems.

Spark Fun (at www.sparkfun.com) sells its phone for just $399, a bargain compared to the RAZR's list price of $599. And when you consider the price per pound, the Portable Rotary Phone's cost advantage becomes even more obvious.

Hey, kids, let's put on a show!

Watch this.

Then send Andy Bobrow money so he can do another one.

User Manual

Instructions: The 12-in-1 PCMCIA Adapter is easy to use. Simply insert your Sony MemoryStick, xD PictureCard, SmartMedia Card or SecureDigital miniSD card into the adapter, then remove it once you have transferred the data to your computer. (Hammer and screwdriver not included.)  

Remaining true to their heritage

Lisbon. That Peruvian flute music you can't get away from these days, no matter where you go. And American Indian headresses. Okay. Well, Paris has a chain of Indian-themed restaurants called Indiana.

They do things behind my back

As I am wont to do, after I got home from work last night I settled down on the couch with a DVD (from the second season of Babylon 5) and the ThinkPad, because of course I can't remain fully absorbed by just the DVD and snacking, I also have to be playing Risk and occasionally checking e-mail, and surfing. (The web-surfing is usually related to the DVD. Like, "Hmm, I wonder what Mira Furlan has been doing since the last B5 movie. And who's that guy who plays Kosh?")

I was using wi-fi again for this, of course, which is how I noticed that the long-running problem of the ThinkPad's wireless gimcrackery bogging down my CPU had somehow resolved itself. I'm wireless right now, and the CPU usage is flickering between 2 percent and 15 percent, rather than spiking at 80 or 90 percent, as it had been. I hadn't done a thing to bring this about, unless you count thinking really hard about uninstalling all the IBM wireless software and using Windows XP's.

Meanwhile, all the tasks on my Palm Tungsten E spontaneously put themselves into different categories. Rather than wait for them to put themselves right again, as the ThinkPad had, I put them back myself. Took 25 minutes. Then I backed up all the data on an SD card. Then I ran a HotSync.

The PDAs are usually well-behaved (though short-lived: I've somehow killed two Sony T615Cs, and my Tungsten T3 died, too, though it seems to have resurrected itself), but Windows machines just do stuff. We've all experienced it. You go away from the machine for a half-hour, come back, and the disk drive is just whirring away like crazy. "What are you doing!?" But of course it never tells you.

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.

The inside story

Yesterday I had an endoscopy, where the doctor feeds a tube about a half-inch in diameter down your throat. There's a bright light and a small camera at the end of the tube, so the doctor can look around your esophagus and stomach and anywhere else he'd care to virtually roam. Step One of the procedure is swab your mouth and throat with a local anesthetic. Getting a general anesthetic was also an option, but that seemed a little extreme for a little endoscopic look-see. Also time- and money-consuming. So, a local.

Step Two is to put a small plastic apparatus in your mouth so you can't bite down; it's held in place by a big rubber band that's wrapped around the back of your head. It was at this point that I thought to ask how long this procedure was going to take, but with the plastic bridle in my mouth it was too late.

Step Three is getting the camera down in there. They made two attempts to feed the tube down my throat, and I gagged impressively both times. The doctor allowed as how this was a matter of physiology, not willpower, and I'd have to be put under. Which meant delay, and a bigger investment of time and money than I cared to make, so I asked him to try it again. This time I managed not to choke. He looked around for maybe 30 seconds, then the tube was gone, the mouthpiece removed, and I was left with a fresh appreciation for Jenna Jameson's skill set.

The bill was an American-sized 950 euros, but then, this was the American Hospital outside Paris. I'd decided to seek treatment for the hiatal hernia there so that if I said, "Everything is going dark...." someone would understand me. On Friday, Herself and I saw a surgeon there, who declined to immediately pop me open and wrench my stomach back into place. Instead, he sent me along to the endoscopy guy. Who confirmed that I have some small ulcers, and some pain in the wallet. Next step comes tomorrow, when I get the acidity level in my esophagus checked. I can't help but think I have better things to do with my time and money.

I haven't been writing, but I did bestir myself sufficiently to download two note-taking and thought-organizing programs, BrainStorm and NoteMap 2. I first read about BrainStorm in Hitchhiker, M.J. Simpson's biography of Douglas Adams, and was all hot to try it. Later, it occurred to me that the fact that Adams used the software might not be much of an endorsement -- he seems never to have gotten his shit together as a writer, although what he did write, on those rare occasions when he could, was often wonderful. NoteMap's target audience seems to be lawyers and other besuited types, and its web site is much more corporate-looking than BrainStorm's. And though I've just started to explore both programs, their approaches seem to reflect an artistic vs. corporate approach. BrainStorm seems looser, like a comfortable flannel shirt. NoteMap seems a bit more hierarchical and better organized. It remains to be seen whether one is better than the other for taming the megabytes of notes, lines, scenes, excerpts and other junk that accretes around one of my story ideas. Also, whether either program is better than, say, a stack of 3x5 cards.

Tomorrow's news today

Having temporarily exhausted medical chores to deal with, I turned to the towering pile of writing projects on my desk and knocked off the easiest one. On my lame, creaky web site I've posted a little project that was commissioned but never published, and a short intro explaining how it came to almost be. Take a look here.

Warranty expired

I'm hale and hearty now, but was sick more or less continuously from early February to early April with a variety of ailments, including the aforementioned infection, followed up by a bad cold, the flu, another cold, sinusitis and bronchitis. The good news is I ran up just under 1,000 euros in medical expenses. That's good news because in the States it would easily have been four or five times higher. Doctor visits, of which I indulged in many, are 30 euros here, or about 39 Bush-era dollars. Prescription medicines cost 5 or 10 euros, instead of 50 or a 100 dollars. And I'm not even covered by the French national health care system yet, so I'm paying full boat instead of a token co-payment. (Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who has been pantsing the administration for years, is currently writing about how much the U.S. pays for health care, and how little we [or, I guess, you] have to show for it.)

I am covered by a CIGNA health plan the New York Times Co. has for its overseas employees, and I'm eager to see how well its employees can parse French-language receipts and what the reimbursement will be.

Amidst the microbial onslaught, I missed two weeks of work, had to cancel a one-week vacation in San Francisco, and was forced to pass up an REM concert.

The only pending health challenge is that I have to get a hiatal hernia repaired sometime soon. My stomach has decided to migrate north of the diaphragm, and one-third of it has made the journey. Unfortunately, hiatal hernias are so common that I get no street cred for having one, and the surgery will certainly be laproscopic, so I won't even get a good scar out of it. Oh, I also have to lose mumblety-mumble pounds, I'm told. But, we knew that.

Blizzard!

I've been here two and a half years and this is the first snowfall that's stuck around more than an hour.  

"A pool of mermaids"

It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine, he recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine.

"I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," he told Playboy. "So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody."

Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and phone calls from people calling it "a breakthrough in journalism," an experience he likened to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids."

-- New York Times obituary on Hunter S. Thompson (1939-2005)

The Spleen Cafe

Florence, December 2004 

Dawn Patrol

I'm heading back to work this morning, three kilos lighter, after four days off. I've felt better ... though not usually at 6 a.m.

Observation: From the tenor of the birthday and post-birthday e-mails I've received, my closest friends and relatives do not read this blog. (Total strangers do. Herself does.) So I've decided to pull a Dr. Phibes on you, salting these entries with clues. So that will teach you ... though not before a couple of you end up as poodle-chow.