Category Archives: Life

There’s nothing like having the phone ring early in the morning, unless it’s looking at the caller-id and seeing it’s your credit card company. Needless to say, the person on the other end introduced herself as being from the Fraud Protection department.

I probably should have been properly paranoid and called them back, but she had enough information to convince me that she was legitimate (either that or a very good scammer). After we’d established mutual bona fides, she asked me the big question:

“Did you use your card to pay 399 South Korean Won for a website named ‘First Date’?”

Nope. And neither had my son or my wife.

And actually, neither had the thief – they’d tried, but “Verified by Visa” kicked in and they were unable to answer the question it asked, so the charge was declined and activated the fraud prevention system, leading to this morning’s call.

Naturally, this was the card I use for all my automatic payments (so I’m careful not to use it at gas stations or other places where skimmers are likely to live); fortunately, I have downloaded copies of my last few statements handy and can update all my accounts when the new cards arrive. It’ll make a great excuse not to do something more productive.

On a brighter note, the first thing I saw when I logged onto Facebook today was a congratulatory post to Luba Cherbakov (one of my peers in my last group at IBM) on her appointment to IBM Fellow; when I looked at the press release, I found that Ron Fagin, a fellow member of Shir Hadash, had also been appointed as an IBM Fellow. Well-deserved congratulations to both of them! (I wonder if the food at the ceremony was Kosher for Passover.)

For the last few weeks, I’ve been turning off my iPhone on Shabbat from the time Torah Study starts (about 9:30am) until services end (around noon). Today, I took it a step further, and kept the phone off through lunch, a play at San Jose Rep (God of Carnage, recommended), and even through dinner with Diane at Il Fornaio.

It was amazingly restful.

The phone is back on (I needed the GPS for our evening walk), but I intend to be more mindful in how I use it during the coming week. And it’s worth remembering that airplane mode works on the ground, too.

I was curious about the poster outside Amy’s lab in tonight’s episode of The Big Bang Theory. Thanks to the magic of HDTV and TiVo, I was able to read the title: “Quantized, spontaneous persisten activity in the entorhinal cortex in vivo”, the name of the lead author: James McFarland, and his institutional affiliation: Departments of Physics and Neuroscience, Brown University. From there, it was a short Google to his dissertation, and then to his page at the University of Maryland, where he is currently a postdoc.

I wonder how his poster got to the show.

I’ve just moved my last domain away from GoDaddy. I’d planned to do it last year after the elephant-shooting controversy, but I’d only gotten as far as setting up the appropriate DNS entries at NameCheap.

Yesterday’s GoDaddy Super Bowl ad reminded me to finish the job, and now all of my domains are at NameCheap.

There were a few ads I liked yesterday; Chrysler’s “Halftime in America” ad caught and held my attention, as did Chevy’s “Twinkies” spot, and I enjoyed Audi’s “Vampires”. Other than that…let’s just say that I’m glad the game was close.

It’s 8:55am on Saturday, and the phone rings. Caller-ID shows it to be “800 Service”, but I decide to answer anyway.

The caller introduces herself as a paid caller on behalf of the American Lung Association. I ask her to remove me from their call list, which she agrees to do.

Then I mention that it’s before 9am on a Saturday, which is too early to call someone. Her reply: “we start at 8am”.

Dear American Lung Association: pissing off potential donors is a bad idea. Having your solicitors take a holier-than-thou attitude about the time they call is a terrific way of pissing off those donors. Be assured that your mail will go directly to my recycle bin from now on.

It’s been a strange week for Silicon Valley companies – I hope it’s not something in the water.

Facebook

There was a time when I felt compelled to keep up with my friends’ postings on Facebook. If I was too busy to check the site during the day, I’d make a point of scrolling back as far as it would let me so I’d miss as little as possible.

I remember feeling that way as clearly as I remember yesterday.

But yesterday seems far away; today, Facebook gifted me with their latest design change, and suddenly, I have no desire to catch up. In fact, I have very little desire to go to Facebook at all – the new design is complicated, what with a scrolling ticker in the upper right, an arbitrary division in the main text area between the “Top News” and the “Recent Updates”, and, in general, a lot of visual sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Google+ looks more attractive every day; I just wish they’d let me use it from my primary email address (hosted on Google Apps for Your Domain) instead of forcing me to use my depreciated GMail address.

Netflix

Perhaps Facebook’s new complication was inspired by the Sunday night Netflix announcement. If so, they have more work to do – after all, you can still interact with everything that Facebook offers on one website, while Netflix is going to force their remaining users to deal with Netflix and Quickster.

I didn’t mind the price increase much, but doubling my workload because Reed Hastings has a vision of the future…what do they think they are, an airline?

On Sunday, I asked for help in identifying a story I’d read many years ago. I pointed to the posting from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

This morning, a friend from shul (who happens to be a Googler) answered my Google+ post, asking if this review might be of the story I was looking for. It was, and a quick search found the first few pages on Google Books.

I wanted to read the whole story, and I thought I’d probably be able to find Matheson’s book in a local library, but I was still curious where I’d originally read the story. I was pretty sure that I’d read it in an anthology, not a single-author collection, so I went to the Contento Index and looked for “The Creeping Terror”. I discovered two interesting things there:

• The story was also called “A Touch of Grapefruit”
• It had been anthologized under that name in Star Science Fiction 5

Both of those facts seemed awfully familiar. I got up from the computer, went to the bookshelves, and found my copy of Star Science Fiction 5. And “A Touch of Grapefruit” was right there on page 35.

Yes. I’d been searching for years for a story which was sitting on my own bookshelves.

At least I got to read the end of the story today!

A few years ago, I decided to set up my own domain. I was (and am) a happy Gmail user, but I didn’t want my email to necessarily have to go through Google, and I’d realized that sending my personal email to my ibm.com address wasn’t viable in the long run. So I picked a nice short domain and started using it for everything.

I was worried about spam – not the random spam that we all have to put up with, but spam created by companies sharing email addresses. So I took advantage of having my own domain and started giving out unique email addresses every time I created a new account. Everything funneled into one mailbox anyway, but I had control.

Over time, I realized that there really wasn’t a lot of leakage due to email sharing. In fact, I found that I got more spam sent to “random_address@my_domain” than from any other source. So I stopped making up new addresses but I didn’t do anything about the hundred-or-so addresses I’d created.

In the last year, I’ve gotten quite a bit of misdirected legitimate mail – some of which I really didn’t want to have anywhere near my computer (other people’s financial data). But I couldn’t easily block it, because I had to leave my catchall forwarding in effect to handle all of the accounts I’d created years ago.

Today, I decided to fix the problem once and for all. First, I had to find out what addresses were getting mail. I fired up Mail.app and downloaded all of my current mail; then I crawled through the mail folders, pulled out the “Delivered-To” lines, and built the list of addresses in use (not all of which were ones I wanted to maintain).

After that, it was a straightforward, if slow, process:

1. Look at the next address in the list
2. Search for the mail referring to that address (on Gmail, search for “address in:anywhere”)
3. Figure out what company or companies was using that address
4. Log onto their website and change the address (or unsubscribe, if it was someone I no longer cared about)
5. While I was there, I usually changed the username to something I could remember and made the password stronger (1Password is my friend!)
6. Lather, rinse, repeat

It took all day (with frequent Facebook, Google+, and newsreader breaks, of course).

And I’m not finished – I still have quite a few weak passwords to strengthen. But not tonight.

Memo to self: sometimes, simple is just fine.

Many years ago, I read a short story whose premise was that Los Angeles was physically infecting additional territories, as though it were a virus. Heroic measures were taken to contain it, but in the last paragraph, a couple in the Midwest (possibly Iowa) succumb and start wearing sunglasses.

I have been searching for the story for many years, but with no success. I’m sure it was published well before 1970 (probably in the ’50s), and I think I read it in an anthology.

If you know this story, I’d be grateful for the details. Thanks!