calling all geeks

I’m in Head Down mode while I race to the ~~finish~~deadline for the introduction to Your Hate Mail Will be Graded, which collects ten years (!) of John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever. I care about this particular project more than I do the average project (which is already a lot, mind you) because John is my friend, and letting him down is not an option.

So there’s not going to be a whole lot of stuff here (well, stuff with any deep commentary or extended content) until the deadline passes.

However, in this hour’s (hours’? hours? stupid grammar is almost as hard as math) 12 minutes of “do whatever I want” time, I wanted to share a new group I created at Propeller 2.0, called the Geek Group:

This group is for me and my fellow geeks. There will be overlap with Science, I’m sure, but we can watch and share stories about comics, science fiction (books and movies), hobby games like D, geeky television shows like Heroes and LOST, and events like Comic-Con, GenCon, Dragon*Con and PAX.

This, I think, is the coolest part of Propeller 2.0: users can create and join groups that are tailored to our various interests, so we can find stories, information, and other people who have those interests in common. It dramatically improves the signal to noise ratio, and creates a more “social” social news experience. We’ve got 67 members, and some cool stories are starting to fill up our “stories this group is watching” thing, so come on down and get your geek on!

the ghosts in the machine

SpamSieve is the best spam filter I’ve ever used in my life, and it’s made my e-mail reading much more efficient and pleasant than it once was.

A few bits of junk sneak through, but it’s probably one every two or three days, instead of several daily offers for luxury Rolex watches at 80% off, or various ways to take advantage of the ATTRACTIVE PRICE on Cializ and Viagre, so she won’t laugh at my noodle every day.

Recently, however, this managed to evade the filters:

mort You computer was infected by our software!
If you will not buy our software – you will bee lost all data on your PC!

It closes with a URL to purchase the software, presumably so the e-mail’s recipient can respond to the comical extortion attempt.

I laughed when I read it. I mean, it’s obviously a load, so I junked it and went on with my day. I kept thinking about it, though: an intelligent person will see right through this and junk it. I’ve already updated my corpus to catch future attempts to convince me I “will bee lost all data” on my PC. But the spammer isn’t looking to ensnare an intelligent person; the spammer is looking to ensnare exactly the kind of person who reads the e-mail, and sees it as a serious threat.

“This was clearly written by an idiot,” the victim would think. Then, after a moment’s consideration: “But what if he’s serious?! I don’t want to bee lost all data on my PC! I’d better do what he says!” Click. Boom.

There are a lot of us who have been online since the Internet was a series of networked BBSes. Some of us remember closed systems like Compuserve and GEnie. We remember what it was like to wait twenty minutes to download a GIF at 28.8, and how magnificent it was to see a weather satellite image on a university’s T1-connected computer.

We see through these scams because we pre-date the scammers, but there are lots of people — and I’m not just talking about our parents and grandparents — who just don’t know any better. They run unpatched machines, leave their routers set to their default passwords, and are prime phishing targets, simply because this technology is, to them, indistinguishable from magic.

As the Internet becomes a more integral part of everyone’s lives, we’re going to encounter more and more people who don’t understand its inner workings any more than I understand how to take apart my car’s diesel engine for fun and profit. I believe that we have a responsibility to these people, to help educate and enlighten them, so they understand how to protect themselves online.

Think of this another way: if we don’t help people understand how to protect themselves from spammers and phishers, how can we expect them to understand the importance of network neutrality?

squawking like a pink monkey bird

After the great post-eating disaster of 2008, I’ve elected to experiment with offline composition tools until I get distracted by shiny objects or I find one that I really like. My two candidates are Ecto and MarsEdit. I actually used Ecto quite a lot until I upgraded to Leopard and it expressed its allegiance to Tiger by refusing to work. Luckily for me, the developers gave it a nice talking to and the most recent version appears to play nicely with 10.5.x. I suppose we’ll really test that theory out when I hit publish, won’t we?

So, rather than make this one of those “testing . . . testing . . . is this thing on?” entries we all make from time to time, I thought I’d take a moment to share some links:

I’ve begun playing pmog. I figure that if I’m on the goddamn internet all day, I may as well rack up meaningless badges and add an extra layer of fun to my whole experience. I’m a mighty level 3, and I’m not quite ready to reveal my player name.

Warren Ellis has been doing a free weekly online comic called Freakangels. It’s been running for a couple of months now, and I absolutely love it. Unlike most of the serials I’ve read over the years (Green Mile, I’m looking in your direction), this one works in both short weekly installments and as a longer narrative arc when you read several episodes at once.

There’s a new version of Propeller in the works. I’ve seen it, and I’m just blown away by what it can do. There’s some official talk about it on Newsquake. Hear me now: Propeller is the future of social news, and the new Propeller is going to redefine the standard for a social news community. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about something like this. Disclosure for the seven people who don’t know this: I work for Propeller as a scout.

Some dipshit at TBS thinks that it’s a really great idea to interrupt a show — by pausing the show in the middle of dialog — to run annoying interstitial advertising. This has to be seen to fully appreciate the magnitude of idiocy on display here. I submitted the link to Propeller a few days ago, and posted the video in my Vox blog.

Yes, I have a blog at Vox — mostly for pictures and videos — because what I really need is another fucking blog.

Ecto is as easy and full-featured as I remember it. I especially like how it handles creating links. Just for grins, here’s an Ecto-created Amazon link to Interzone by William S. Burroughs. There’s a story in Interzone called The Junky’s Christmas that is one of my favorite things he ever did. I was introduced to it when someone gave me the CD Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, where Burroughs performs some of his work. Unlike a lot of authors who really should stick to the writing, Burroughs, like Charlie Stross and Neal Stephenson, just make their work something — well, the best I can come up with is more — when they read it. In fact, I think the best way to experience Burroughs is to listen to him perform it.

I just found out this very moment, through the magic of the googles, that The Junky’s Christmas was adapted into a weird and avant garde claymation movie in the early 90s. There’s a short clip from it on YouTube.

Have I mentioned before that Burroughs is one of my primary influences? It’s a little strange, because I don’t write anything like he did, but something about reading and listening to him accelerated my desire to write more than just a series of journal entries when I was in my early twenties. My first short story, called Scene Missing was heavily inspired by stories in Naked Lunch.

Okay, I am not making this up: in the middle of the last paragraph, my machine’s screen saver turned on, and it refused to wake the screen up. This is the second time it’s happened to me this week, and I had . . . an episode . . . while I shut down the motherfucker and restarted it. I thought it was the second time in two days that I’d worked on a blog entry and lost it to the land of wind and ghosts.

But! It turns out that Ecto has an auto-save feature which meant I only lost half a paragraph instead of an entire entry. For that reason alone, Ecto is a HUGE SUCCESS.

I’m off to lunch with a friend of mine who just got laid off from TokyoPop. I think we’re going to plan global domination together.

. . . I am now hitting publish, and hoping for the best.

in which a book builds a bridge

Earlier today, I spent about an hour composing a post, filled with links to groovy stories I’d found in the last couple of days while I found links to submit to Propeller. I added brilliantly trenchant commentary to each link, in what was destined to become a post for the ages.

You, dear reader, would have been so awed by the majesty of this post, you’d sign up for Propeller, and join me in the world of social news bookmarking. We’d form a network of like-minded people — a social news Voltron, if you will — and soon all of our stories would find their way to the front page, for great justice.

Satisfied with my work, I hit publish, and began clearing my shelf for the inevitable awards that would soon follow.

When I returned to my computer, the browser said, "Hey, Wil, just thought you’d like to know that the post you made has been saved. Enjoy your awards!"

I thanked it, opened up my blog to bask in the glow of my brilliance, and saw that the post wasn’t there.

TypePad ate it. Destroyed it. Sent it off into the land of wind and ghosts. I stared at the computer, agog, until my mouth dried out and my jaw grew sore. I couldn’t believe that it was just . . . gone. It was like it never existed.

After much furious . . . behavior . . . and fruitless searching for the post in question (which TypePad claims just doesn’t exist, like I didn’t spend an hour putting the goddamn thing together) I will now attempt to recreate the part of the post that was the most important to me:

Have you read Little Brother? I tore through it in about 4 days, and absolutely loved it. I gave it to Nolan when I finished, because I thought he’d enjoy it, and it would give us something cool that we could share.

I don’t know what it’s like for other parents of teenagers out there, but getting Nolan to pick up a book for more than three pages has been nearly impossible for the last eighteen months or so. He used to love reading, but . . . well, there are new friends at school this year. ’nuff said.

I don’t have scientific data to back me up, but I’ve anecdotally witnessed a direct relationship between someone’s willingness to read and their level of education, success, expectations for themselves, and general, uh, interestingness they bring to the table. I guess that makes me one of those "elitists" we keep hearing about, but with that in mind, you may understand why it’s been pretty damn important to me that I instill a love of reading in my kids.

"I read this in about four days," I told him when I presented the book to him, "and I would have read it faster if I’d had more time. Once it gets going, it’s hard to put down."

"Okay," he said, "I’ll give it a try."

"I’d really like to have this thing to share with you, and I know that you’re haven’t been all that inter– What?"

"I’ll give it a try," he said.

"Wow. That was easier than I expected." I thought.

I didn’t ask, but I secretly hoped that maybe he wanted to have something like this to share with me as much as I wanted to have something to share with him. Stranger things have happened.

"Okay, cool." I said.

"But I’m probably not going to finish it as fast as you did," he said.

"I totally understand," I said. "No pressure, and I won’t take it personally if you don’t dig it."

I set it down on the desk next to him while he played Diablo and walked back into my office. The symbolism of this gesture was not intentional, but also was not lost on me.

A little while later, I walked back out into the living room, and found him sitting on the couch, reading. He appeared to be about 50 pages into it.

"What do you think?" I said.

He held up one finger in the universal "wait a minute" gesture, and continued to read.

"What?" he said.

"I asked you what you thought, so far."

"It’s pretty good," he said, noncommittally, before he went back to reading.

"Cool," I said. I couldn’t believe he was already that far into the book, and though his words were carefully chosen, his body language said that it was much more than just "pretty good." Rather than press the issue, I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of iced green tea.

Later that night, I noticed that he was sitting in the chair by our family iMac, but instead of playing games or talking to his friends on iChat, he had his head cocked to one side, Little Brother open in his lap. He’d made some serious progress in the book. I noticed that he had Firefox open to a Google search about [spoiler redacted].

I nudged Anne and pointed to Nolan.

"He’s been reading that pretty much non-stop since you gave it to him," she said quietly.

"That rules," I said.

Over the next two days, I’d see him sitting on the couch, sitting in my favorite reading chair in our den, sitting in the chair by the iMac. He was always in the same pose, head cocked to one side, Little Brother open in his lap. We talked a little bit about the characters and the events in the book, and he asked me lots and lots of questions about the technology and real-life issues Cory presents in the book.

Flashback: Long before Little Brother was published, I had dinner with Cory. He told me that he was working on this book for teens that was supposed to have lots of real-life lessons in it about privacy, security and civil liberties. At the time, he told me how he hoped kids would read it and head to Google after each chapter to learn more. Nolan was doing exactly that.

Yesterday was the third day since I gave Nolan the book. After school, he bounded into the house and flew into my office. I looked up from my work and saw him holding Little Brother in outstretched arms.

"I love this book!" He said. "I seriously can’t put it down!"

"That’s awesome," I said, "but it’s not interfering with your schoolwork, is it?"

"No," he said, "I’m reading between classes, and only in class when I’ve finished my work and made sure the teacher was cool with it."

I loved it that he took it to school with him. He’s been spending more time than I’d like with non-reading, non-motivated kids who are, I fear, really in danger of holding Nolan back from realizing his potential. It’s a small step (and maybe it’s only temporary) but I was nevertheless thrilled that he was reading at school, unafraid of what his current peer group would think. I was hopeful that escape velocity would soon follow.

"That’s great, Nolan," I said. "I’m so happy to hear that you’re enjoying it."

We talked a little bit more about some of the events that had unfolded in the book that day, and he pointed out that he had about 100 pages to go.

"I want to finish it right now!" He said, before pulling the book close into his chest and hugging it. He lowered his voice and dramatically added, "But . . . I must wait. I must . . . savor it."

I laughed with him. "Don’t you love it when you’re into a book that’s so good, you don’t want it to be over?"

"YES!" He said, before he raced back out of my office.

"I haven’t seen him this excited about anything in months," I thought. "This is better than I ever could have hoped for." I made a mental note to send Cory a thank you card.

After dinner last night, I found him in the living room, sitting in the chair in front of the iMac. The room was dim, mostly lit by the glow of the computer’s monitor. It silhouetted Nolan’s now-familiar stance, head cocked to one side, book open in his lap. It was, for me, a "remember this" moment.

He must have sensed me standing there, because he turned around and said, "Eighty pages to go, but I’m really stopping now. I’m going to finish this tomorrow."

I remembered all the times I’ve gotten close to the end of a book and put off finishing it. I remembered the way it felt to sit in the pull between wanting to know what happens and not wanting it to be over. I could see that Nolan was enjoying that feeling himself. I chose not to point it out.

"I’m so glad you’re into this," I said. "I’m really glad we’ve been able to share this book."

"Me too," he said.

Earlier today, while I was writing the first version of this post, Nolan sent me a text message that said, "OMG it’s over!!! So great, so great!!"

I sent back "Ha! I was just writing in my blog about how much you liked it. Yay!"

He replied, "Yeah, pretty amazing."

My heart swelled. I wonder what he’ll read next?

Dear Lazy Web: Video Cameras?

Dear Lazy Web: I’m thinking about getting an inexpensive ~~(<$300)~~ (Let’s go $400-$450. I guess <$300 isn’t realistic for the features I want) small video camera to take with me on all my Geek Tour stops this summer, starting with Mysterious Galaxy and the Stone World Bistro this weekend.

I haven’t had time to do the normal amount of research I’d like to do, but I’m sure at least one of you out there on the interweebs has.

The only thing I know I do not want is something that records onto DVDs. We reviewed lots of those on inDigital, and they all sucked out loud. I think I want something that records to a hard drive or solid state memory instead of tapes. HD isn’t that important to me if it adds too much to the price, and I don’t have a particular brand loyalty or aversion. I assume that whatever I get will play nice with iMovie. Oh, and I need to be able to pick it up by Friday.

If you’ve got a suggestion on something to consider or avoid at all costs, would you leave a comment? Maybe we’ll have the bonus side effect of building a useful list for other people, too.

KTHXBAI.