Interesting how the Nigerian email scam has become a template for other scams: Greetings from Dubai, This letter must come to you as a big surprise, but I believe it is only a day that people meet and become great friends and business partners. I am Mr. Majid Al-Hussein, currently Chief Security Officer with a reputable security and finance company here in U. A. E. I write you this proposal in good faith, believing that I can trust you with the information I am about to reveal to you. I have an urgent and very confidential business proposition for you. …
Month: September 2006
Argh!
I wrote a nice long review of the Korean movie 괴물 (The Host), and another (shorter) review of the book Hand to Mouth by Paul Auster. However, Firefox locked up and they were lost to the ether. I’m not going to reconstruct them today, but maybe later. Argh. Time to do a bit of writing, and then reading, and then sleep.
Nekropolis, by Maureen McHugh
I picked up Maureen McHugh’s Nekropolis in Seattle while I was there, and read it when I got back to Korea, finishing it during my recent flight to Australia (where my copy became a friend’s copy). When I met Maureen, I told her what a treat it was for me, since her China Mountain Zhang was one of my formative SF reads… I’d read a bunch of Greg Egan and Bruce Sterling and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker and John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and David Brin’s Earth, gobbled all of that down in the few years before I stumbled onto …
Rocnknroll
One of my students from last semester asked, after I’d failed to mention it, whether I’d be running a class website like I had last semester. She seemed to be relieved that I’d be leaving it up, including the list of useful links in the sidebar. I’d say that in itself is a sign that the site was a useful resource for students. Now I just need to go in there and retool it so updating is less of a hassle. Should be easy, if I can work in a few template thingies and so on. Maybe this weekend… Another …
Back, back, back
I’m back. The wedding was lovely, low-key but a lot of drinking in the afterward bit, with which I couldn’t realy keep up. But happily I turned that sow’s ear into a cheap silken purse, by taking many pictures that shall (dis)grace Flickr soon. It was very good to meet my old friend Charlie and my slightly-less-old friend Claire. Melbourne the next day was okay, but I was a bit constrained in terms of time and foolishly missed the Picasso exhibition — damn fool me, I didn’t go straight there when I got downtown, but hunted around for cheap winter …