All aboard the Obama Express: Oh, goody. Our president, fresh from his successes in Libya and Syria, is moving full speed ahead trying to forge a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement. The fact that the Palestinians keep rejecting anything other than getting everything they want, or extending negotiations? Irrelevant, because Obama can threaten Netanyahu and get it done. Or so he thinks.

This is why I don’t have a webcam, and why I don’t video chat: The NSA, in cooperation with whatever the hell the U.K.’s GHCQ is, captured millions of webcam chats over Yahoo and stored them in a database. So, that little video sex thing you had with your partner? Yeah, it’s in someone’s database. That boring chat with your friend overseas? Ditto. Do I think Edward Snowden is a spy and a traitor? Yes. Do I think his exposure of things like this is a good thing? Yes.

I don’t even have a category for this item. I never thought of “SPYING ON THE WORLD”.

If you can get past the snark and condescension, it’s worth a read: Slate has a short history of Israel’s discovery of natural gas and its possible effects on the country.

1) Open a command prompt.

2) Type in the following: TRACERT -h 100 216.81.59.173

3) Wait for it. After about 10 hops, it’ll start to look very familiar…

I went looking for my old short stories and discovered that I had totally effed up putting them on my last computer from the one before that. So I dug up my old Sony Vaio over the weekend, as well as some 3.5 inch floppy disks that had my writing directories backed up, and brought them to work with me. One of the help desk techs gave me an external floppy drive reader that connects to your computer with a USB drive. I pulled the stories off the floppies while he got the full directories (in case I’d missed anything) as well as anything else I felt I needed from the hard drive. Turned out to be about a gig worth of stuff, and it also turns out that in my WRITE directory is a little file called “editor.exe”, and it’s the XyWrite editor.

So then I went to the head systems genius and asked him to help me see if I could get a DOS emulator somewhere, and he showed me how to use Windows to do it. And lo and behold, XyWrite was booted up, and I remembered that to open a file you type “CA FILENAME” in the header, and that you use the F5 key to alternate between header and file, and SA saves and QUIT, well, quits.

So I’m going to copy/paste all of my old, unfinished stories, see which ones are worth resurrecting, edit where needed, and send them out to various magazines. If they don’t sell to magazines, I’ll be producing them as ebooks, and maybe a chapbook, since I know how to do it.

I am totally geeking out on XyWrite, though. I never got rid of the manuals. And I even have the little keyboard chart you stick over the function keys.

It’s going to be a lot of fun to rediscover my old work.

Georgia resident Andy Morar is in the market for a BMW. So recently he sent a note to a showroom near Atlanta, using a form on the dealer’s website to provide his name and contact information.

His note went to the dealership—but it also went, without his knowledge, to a company that tracks car shoppers online. In a flash, an analysis of the auto websites Mr. Morar had anonymously visited could be paired with his real name and studied by his local car dealer.

Yeah. Over the weekend, I did some research for the second book in The Catmage Chronicles series. I was trying to find an Egyptian cat pendant in a museum or antiquities collection. I had to use advanced search methods and then some in order not to get results that showed cat pendants in museum stores (or not in museum stores–Google was trying desperately to get me to buy a cat pendant, it seemed).

Last night, I ordered a few things on Amazon. And in my “People who bought this would also like” list was–Egyptian cat pendants. The very same links that kept showing up in my search attempts. Clearly, Google and Amazon are trading information.

They see you when you’re sleeping. They know when you’re awake. Online privacy? What’s that?

You probably can’t blame Obama for this.

Oh, hell. Let’s blame Obama for it. It happened under his watch. If it had happened under George W. Bush, rest assured a liberal blogger would be blaming him.

Here’s how to see if you’re infected.

Go to this website: http://www.dns-ok.us/

And/or try http://dnschanger.detect.my/

Go here to find out how to get rid of it.

Conversely, if you can’t access the web on Monday, well… hie thee to a computer store and pay them to clean it, because you’re hosed.

Changed your LinkedIn password: Millions of passwords were stolen. Go online and change yours now, even if you may not be in the stolen accounts. It never hurts to change your password from time to time.

His memory will be a blessing: Ray Bradbury, one of the last of the science fiction greats, died today, and our world is a little bit poorer for that. One of my favorite memories was attending the San Diego Comic Con in the 1980s–back before it grew to be the behemoth that it is and when it was mostly about, you know, comic books–and seeing Ray Bradbury and Dick Giordano among the autograph tables. The children were ignoring these two greats of comics and SF for the younger artists and comic writers. I went up to them, politely asked them to sign my program, calling them “Mr. Giordano” and “Mr. Bradbury.” I told Giordano that I’d been reading his work since I was a child, and he made some sort of joke about how that was what, last year? Then I told him that I was older than I looked, and that I was in my thirties. “In that case,” he said, “you can call me Dick.” They were warm and kind and I still treasure that program book. Fahrenheit 451 is probably his best-known work, but if you’ve never read “I Sing the Body Electric” or his other short story collections, you are missing out.

Even the Dems are pissed at Obama’s national security leaks: Yeah, leaking vital national security information so that you can pump up your ego may not be the best way to impress even your own team. The Valerie Plame affair? A big freaking deal. Screwing double agents and ruining possible intel in the bin Laden assassination and others? Hey, it’s all good, because Obama gets to say he killed bin Laden.

Meanwhile, back in Israel issues: Mahmoud Abbas is still insisting Israel accept the deal he pushes as is, no negotiation, etc., etc., warning that it may not be on the table very much longer. Good, then we can get back to negotiations. Meanwhile, the Islamist running Turkey was running his mouth again:

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told the conference the Palestinian issue remained the “the most important problem threatening peace and stability in the region”, and said there was mounting anger with Israel over its policies.

Really? Bigger than Syria? Bigger than Sudan? Bigger than Libya, Lebanon, Iran? Really? The Palestinian problem takes precedence over all of that? Just as the unions are learning that no, Americans really don’t think that taxpayers should be footing their medical benefits and pensions, the Palestinians are learning that the world really doesn’t give a damn about their issues, because things like not being killed by Bashar al-Assad’s death squads is a far more pressing issue.

The F5 key will refresh your browser page.

Control-y (holding down the control key while pressing the y) is a keyboard shortcut that you can use to repeat tasks that take multiple keystrokes. For example, let’s say you want to delete five rows in an Excel spreadsheet. The first time, you highlight the rows, go to the appropriate menu, choose “Delete rows”, press enter. The second time, you highlight the rows, type “control-y”, and it deletes the five rows. This can be used throughout many programs. I use it in Dreamweaver as well.

Right-click is your friend. Repeat after me: Right-click is your friend. Right-click anywhere, in any program, in different places, and watch what happens.

I could probably make a living teaching people things like this.

I guess, since I’m not a Costumer, I don’t have to worry about the “critical vulnerability”. Ah, yes. Spelling counts. Our teachers were right.

An interesting fact about October 2010:

This OCT. has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays, all in 1 month. It happens once in 823 years. These are considered money bags months. Pass them to 8 good people and money will appear. Based on Chinese fengshui.

Whoever stops this will experience none

I stopped it, bad grammar and all. I will experience none.

I did not pass the chain letter along to 8 good people. Or 8 bad ones. Or even 8 indifferent ones. The only way I ever pass along chain letters is when I respond to someone who has sent them to me. There are generally insults about the sender’s intelligence involved. And maybe a swear or three.

And what do you know: This chain letter has made the rounds before.

This message is just a revamped version of another “interesting fact” that circulated earlier in the year that informed recipients that August 2010 was special because it boasted 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays and 5 Tuesdays. The August version also falsely claimed that the “event” only took place once every 823 years.

In fact, any month that has 31 days will have three consecutive days that occur five times in the month. Such combinations are commonplace and occur each and every year. For example, October 2011 will have 5 Saturdays, 5 Sundays and 5 Mondays.

Huh. Imagine that. A chain email with wrong information. Who’da thunk it?

Oh. Wait. I would.