Okay, now the spammers are just trying to confuse me. “Mike,” writes the nonexistent alancrooks@ns1.ehost2102.com, “Thanks again for lunch it was great! Best regards, Steve”. Um…right. Frankly, I think I liked it better when they were trying to sell me something.

Then again, even Amazon, who I know is trying to sell me something, is starting to sound a lot like spam and can’t even bother to get their details straight. “Your birthday is right around the corner –” they tell me, “March 28, to be exact.” Um, no…it’s on the 26th actually. Has been for years. Says so right on the wishlist you’re asking me to update. Why exaclty you thought I would want to add this, I don’t know. But why don’t you and my good friend Steve discuss it over lunch?

Well now, this is interesting:

Found via harrumph. I’m considering joining up.

And because I think this is interesting, too: “I am Google! I find many good things.” Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford.

I’m taking a short break from reading William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! While it’s a wonderful, poetic book — absolutely Faulkner at his best — that doesn’t exactly translate into an easy read, and I find I’ve been making excuses not to pick it up again. In fact, I haven’t been reading much of anything at all, and that can’t be good for me. So, after reading Emma Straub’s entertaining and insightful interview-essay on the appreciation of genre fiction (found via Neil Gaiman’s online journal) — and after I moped around Barnes and Noble for half an hour last night — I decided The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub was the way to go. So far, no complaints.

When all your past experience tells you that you’re an idiot, it’s probably not a good idea to start playing fast and loose with your HTML. For over an hour I couldn’t get Blogback to work, nor could I figure out why it wasn’t working, and finally, when I somehow got it to work again, my weblog was taken over by error messages telling me that my version of Blogback had expired or was pirated, and at the very least should be deleted. Such is life. I’ve switched temporarily to a commenting system from uigui.net, and although customizable features like re-sizing would be nice, it does seem to be working. Leave a comment, why don’t you? Stop for a minute and say hello.

So my attempts to create a Windows boot disk on my office computer fell through, and whatever it is that I did create failed to work, possibly because all I have to work with is a copy of the Windows 2000 CD left by my predecessor. I should have known something was up when it had trouble copying to the disks I brought with me, but then again if I knew what I was doing I wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with. When things like this happen, when a computer crashes and goes dead to the world, it’s an unwelcome reminder of just how computer-ignorant I am. I know how certain programs work, I recognize some terms, and I can navigate the web pretty easily. But in the greater scheme of things I haven’t got a clue. Hopefully tech support does.