Back of the Envelope

It took two weeks of light blogging, but I finally finished the rough draft of Eyes in the Shadow. It'll take at least a week to revise it into something readable, but I finally know how the story ends! Uh, I guess you will too once I post the last few chapters in the coming weeks.

I'm usually pretty good at spotting the phishing e-mails, but the one I got this morning impersonating Paypal came close to getting me. The From line said Paypal, of course, and it instructed me to go to their site and confirm my information, and provided a link to do so. The text of the link in the e-mail said paypal.com, and it takes me to the the Paypal front page, so I enter my account name and password and it takes me to a page asking for more information... too much information. Name, address, bank account, credit card account... hold on a second, shouldn't Paypal already have this information about me? That's when I finally get suspicious and realize that the URL is all wrong. The link in the e-mail might have said Paypal.com, but it pointed somewhere else entirely.

You may insert your own favorite curse words here. On the bright side, I didn't give the phisher any bank or credit card account information... I caught on before that. And the phisher can't get that information directly from Paypal, as they don't give that information in the profile. On the dark side, I did give them my Paypal account name and password, so I went and changed that immediately, as well as any other site where I use the same or similar account name and password.

Bottom line, of course, is something I already knew... always check the URLs, especially when they come from unsolicited e-mail, even if the e-mail's headers indicate it's from someone you trust.

Recently, I've finally gotten around to unpacking some more of my belongings from my recent move to Boston. Yes, yes, it's been four months, but the last time I moved, I unpacked right away, and most of my belongings just sat on shelves gathering dust. This time I've been unpacking as needed, and buying the necessary furniture as needed. Just recently, I've acquired enough furniture to set up my desktop. I'd been holding off on that until I could fix the video card, which was overheating due to a dead fan. I finally gave up on it and did some reseach into replacing it, as I mentioned earlier. I wanted the GeForce 6600, even though it recommended a better power supply than my system was equipped with. So I browsed through the Dell user forums, and discovered that folks with similar systems had been able to use it despite the power discrepancy, so I went ahead and bought it. So far, so good. It runs Doom 3 at 30-60 fps even with 4x anti-aliasing turned on. And even with the detail cranked up all the way, Jedi Academy runs at 90 fps... I actually have it turned down to 60 fps just to sync it with my monitor's refresh rate. Finally, it came with two games: Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I haven't looked at Splinter Cell yet, but I'm having a lot of fun with Prince of Persia.

Anyway, bottom line, my living room and dining room now look presentable, and all my boxes have been shifted to my bedroom, which is definitely not presentable.

I said on Sunday that I was cutting back on the blogging this week to focus on the writing. So how has it been going? Well... not as well as it should be going. I spent more time than I intended buying and putting together furniture Monday and Tuesday, and researching video cards Tuesday and Wednesday. Aside from the distraction, te bigger problem is that my muse and I had a big fight, and we've parted company. Even without her, I've been able to revise Chapter 14, so that's done earlier than usual and it will be going up on time. I'm most of the way through the chapter after that, but without my muse it's been slow going. It's a tricky chapter, and I want to make sure I get it right, but I keep getting stuck. When I do, I either have to hammer out something and worry about fixing it later, or go away for a bit and come back later. The "hammering out something" sounds good in theory but I never get very good results with it and sometimes I can bang away all I want and not get anything at all.

So when I went to bed on Wednesday I was stuck at most of the way through Chapter 15. If I get a chance, I'll give it another go today and see if I get anywhere.

The other day, I discovered that my credit card wouldn't work when buying some ink cartridges and a TV cart. While not good, I had enough cash in my banking account to cover it with my debit card. When I got home, I discovered a letter from my bank informing me of suspicious activity on my account, which explained why the credit card had been put on hold. When I looked into it, however, I discovered that the suspicious activity was nothing more than the amount of use I had put my credit card to recently.

I tend to go in spurts when it comes to buying things. I had put off a number of purchases while I worked on paying off my credit card, which had approached $9,000 after my second move in four months. It took a while, but now that I finally had it hovering around $1,000, I figured I could buy a few things I'd been putting off, including the new phone I've talked about. Of course, said phone required about $200 worth of accessories, such as the Memory Stick Duo and the USB Bluetooth interface I've talked about. Meanwhile, I've been doing a bit of Spring cleaning, finally getting around to unpacking some boxes I'd left sitting in the living room for months, so I needed some shelves for the unpacked items. And while I was at it, I bought a spring coat, as I keep hearing that things will warm up around here soon, although I haven't seen much evidence. Overall, that's about $1,000 worth of purchases in a week, whereas I've been spending less than half that each month for a while now, so I can see why my bank was concerned, and, believe it or not, I appreciate it.

What has me exasperated is the fact that, two months ago, they weren't concerned over a $1,000 worth of purchases in Indiana, while I was living in Massachusetts. One would think that a purchase at a gas station in Boston and a Walmart in Indianapolis on the same day might just trigger the same suspicion as a quick spurt of spending, all either in Boston or online and mostly at the same set of retailers I usually shop. Someone needs to update their algorithms.

My desktop's video card, a GeForce4 Ti 4600, has pretty much given up the ghost, and I need a replacement. Now the computer's nearing four years of age, which is like 120 in computer years, but I've updated the processor and the memory and I think it can last me a little while longer. However, I'm not going to try to stick a high end video card into it. For one thing, a high end card would probably cost more than the system itself is worth, and for another, it probably wouldn't work in my machine. The problem is that I haven't been keeping up with video cards recently, so while I've done a bit of research, I figure I could use some advice. What I'm looking for is a midrange card, in the $100-$200 price range, with at least marginally better 3D performance than my old GeForce4 (there's no point downgrading), which is compatible with a four year old computer with AGP 2.0 and a 250 W power supply. (I looked into the GeForce 6600 before realizing that it requires at least a 300 W, and preferably a 350 W, power supply. Video cards are real power hogs these days.) Any suggestions?

This mural, tucked away in a dead end hallway at MIT, is absolutely beautiful:

It's possible that this is a hack--MIT's term for a physical practical joke perpetrated by altering the MIT environs in some way. For example, various and sundry items have been placed atop MIT's great dome, including a car, a house, and plastic cattle. MIT being MIT, there is a webpage devoted to chronicling all the hacks.

This particular mural doesn't appear on that page--and if it's a hack, it's the longest running one I've ever seen, as it's been there for over five years. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I first started in 1996, but it appeared shortly afterwards. It was inspired by the fact that MIT decided to build a library in building 7, bringing what was once a throughway to an abrupt end, so you now have stairs leading down to absolutely nothing. The hallway then made absolutely no sense, until someone added Wile E. Coyote.

This, incidentally, was taken by my new camera phone. It's the first time I actually had a camera on me when I went by.

This was a very good weekend for writing. Over four thousand words written, all part of Eyes in the Shadow. And it was remarkably easy to do. Sometimes I struggle with a story, trying to work out the next part, and sometimes it just flows, and this was one of the times it just flowed, where I kept writing more than I expected, not less. In any case, I've got a rough draft of the next chapter, plus part of the one after that, finished. And I'm beginning to see how it will all turn out, although I expect I'll still be surprised by a few things before the end.