You can't be careful enough

Today was a day of two scams, one for me and one for Timo. Timo's was the more egregious, but mine was likely the more bothersome.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to join a relatively new social network called Quechup by someone I trust and who is also pretty deeply involved with social networks. So I did the free sign up, looked around the site a bit, connected to my gmail directory, didn't find much of interest, and dropped things there. Today, I started receiving bunches (does email come in bunches?) of automated replies from people who were on vacation. This confused me as I didn't think I had sent any of them email.

Then long-lost acquaintances started writing. It was nice to hear from some of them, but others were mysterious. Then it became clear that these were all responses to invitations sent from Quechup to join my network. Had I hit some send button inadvertently last week that caused a slurry of messages to gush out to everyone in my address book? I started sending apologies. Then a friend wrote to say that Quechup was well-known for "aggressive spamming of mail directories." Not only was everyone I knew being spammed: family, friends, acquaintances, professional contacts, doctor's offices, schools, mailing lists…, but I had been spammed 1000-times over!

Superficially, it appears that this is a non-destructive spam, but how many people will be annoyed to receive email that has appeared to come from me and never wish to hear from me again? And now I'm getting invitations from all sorts of Quechup members who I suspect are being spammed just as I was. I better get online and start deleting my entire profile.

Then there is Timo's eBay spam-of-the-day. He sold his iPod for a price that seemed too-good-to-be true. Then he noticed that the account with the highest bid hadn't been used since 2004. He received a PayPal notification with his name on it, but it wasn't from a PayPal address. The shipping instructions were for a store location in Nigeria, even though the account was American. Finally, he received a message from eBay saying that the winning account had been hijacked and the sale nullified.

eBay has relisted the item, but you'd think they could have made the sale to the runner-up bid. And the sad part is, there's really nothing he could have done to change this outcome. eBay is a dangerous place, and sadly, the entire Web is full of pitfalls. We're still browsing in the 21st century equivalent of the wild west. Browser beware!

Book Review: "Kitchen Confidential," by Anthony Bordain

This is really yesterday's post, but I don't see a way to back date it from when I'm writing it, which is today.

I finished listening to Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bordain's autobiography in the restaurant business. It is profane in the extreme, descriptions are grossly exaggerated to the point of unbelievability, and it doesn't hang together with any sort of theme (does it need to?), but I liked it nonetheless. Partially, I just liked how true-to-character the whole book was, and having Bordain read it in his somewhat lower-class-sounding New Jersey accent, made it seem all the more genuine, despite the exaggerations.

The fact is, Bordain isn't as lower-class as he sounds. He's rather well-educated and well-read and this is evident from his vocabulary, powers of description, and knowledge of his craft. I liken him to the cooking equivalent of Bruce Springsteen—seemingly working class New Jersey on the surface, but completely savvy and talented in reality. Bourdain is proud of his accomplishments, but writes with vivid savageness about his past excesses as a drug addict and general live-for-the-moment type of guy. And while he doesn't seem to regret anything he has done, he speaks kindly of others who came up the ranks with their passion for food as primary motivator and not the love of rank and money as he did.

But if Bourdain had been refined, his book wouldn't be so entertaining. In the end, he really does love food and cooking and he's totally devoted to his faithful staff, which is clearly a big deal in the New York restaurant scene. Most surprisingly, after many descriptions of debauchery in and out of the kitchen, we learn that he's been married to the same woman throughout the book! So I even ended up liking Bordain. I wouldn't mind reading his other books, including a couple of kitchen novels.

New iPods! Are we still excited?

Up in the sky! It's an iPod! It's an iPhone! It's iPod Touch. Huh? Even Apple has their moments of branding clumsiness, but perhaps it's just hard to get excited about a new form-factor iPod that's really just an iPhone with no phone. But like the name, this is either a great moment of marketing savvy, or a fill-in-the-gap product that means more for what it isn't than for what it is. What do I mean by this bit of confusion?

My first impression of the phoneless iPhone had to do with my eldest son, Timothy, whose music library expands to fill any available disk space. Great, I thought, a "cool" new interface for his next iPod. But then one notices that the iPod Touch is only available with 8gb or 16gb, one tenth the capacity of the updated iPod Classic. There are modestly updated Nanos and Shuffles, as well, which is nice, but not really the big news here.

So who is the iPod Touch for? Answer: all the people writing to Apple to say they'd really like an iPhone, but don't like or can't use the AT&T Wireless network that iPhones are wedded to. If I'm right, then this is not a key, long-term market, merely a stepping stone in a mysterious strategy for ubiquitous electronic media branded by Apple.

I choose not to join into this guessing game, but Apple TV, which is not exactly a revolutionary hot potato, and the iPod Touch, want to lead somewhere. The question in my mind is if, like two parallel rails vanishing in the distance, they will come together at some point? I'm in no particular hurry to find out, but I like to think that Apple knows what it's doing and that these pointers, place markers, interim solutions, whatever you want to call them, will all make sense in retrospect.

At the same time, Apple gets to collect huge amounts of genuine market research on everything it sells, and make money at the same time. It doesn't matter that the iPod Touch looks disappointing to me or that it feels like just another new flavor of cereal in the marketplace, it's almost as if Apple can't lose these days. So I'm see today's "big news" as further indication that Apple is staying ahead of all who would copy their success and at the same time plotting moves well ahead of any possible response from its would-be opponents. 

Software Review: Why Scrybe?

Despite my generally skeptical nature, I like Scrybe, or at least I like what I've been able to glean from the iscrybe website and video overview. Like any new product with as-yet-to-be-determined potential (it's intended to help keep life in the Internet age somewhat more cleanly organized) Scrybe feels over-hyped.

Scrybe is a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today's lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way.

It would not be hard to rewrite this sentence to mean something, but you'd need to know what it was meant to mean before you could do it. But somehow I have let me hype-defenses down and wish that I could be a part of the beta ("temporarily closed"). I watched the video overview and liked what I saw, at least partially because I was ready to like what I saw. I am the market for this product. They know what I struggle with every day and their solution appears to work the way I work—at least this is my impression.

This isn't really a full-featured organizer, at least not yet. It includes a calender, todo lists, and "thoughtstreams," but no integration with address book or email functions. Thoughtstreams don't interest me, though it might be that if I knew what they were, I might find them useful. But even though my hype-defenses are down, I've still got buzz-word defenses in tact.

What really appeals to me is the simple ability to integrate todo lists with calendar events in a way that maintains context. In other words, lists have an awareness of the calendar state. So as you look through by month, week, or day, the lists reflect your view. At the same time, the user interface has an elegance I haven't seen before, though I can't really be certain of this perceived quality until I can actually try Scrybe out.

Scrybe also has another big plus in its favor. Adobe has made a major investment in the company. Scrybe is written in Flash and one can only assume that they'll be able to add much more functionality by adopting Adobe's rich Internet Application tools, Flex and AIR, and they'll likely have a lot of help doing this. One futher hopes that the next somewhat more public release will be even more elegant, functional, and innovative, and that there will be a version running in Mac OS X Tiger.

I blog because I am

It is necessary for me to blog. I have resisted the urge long enough. I have no pressing subject on which to blog, but blog I must. In fact, I write this for myself in the hopes that the act of writing will reveal the reason for writing. 

Today's blog is about family and falls on Labor Day, a good time to begin. Katharine and I are home with Hoover (Corgi) and no children. The three boys are away at school, and though this is not the first time we have been home without children in nearly 22 years, it will be our longest stretch without their daily distractions so far. This "opportunity" to look inward, to reflect on one's own lack of productivity, is as much my reason for starting this blog as any. 

Perhaps it is the need for discipline, a vague hope that writing regularly about anything will lead to more purposeful writing. And then assuming that I enjoy writing, that writing brings some sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction (in a good way), I hope that some writing will lead to more and better reasons to write. Somehow, this will all be magically revealed to me as I wander from reflection to reflection.

Here's to hope!