If you're part of the reading and writing and Internet community, you've heard about the Amazon.com problem.  If you haven't, short version is that Amazon removed the Sales Rank feature from almost all books that contain Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender content.  At first they claimed it was because of the "adult content" of such books (except they also excluded HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES, a children's picture book), and then they claimed it was a glitch (terrbily specific glitch, if you ask me), and now they're claiming they're working on fixing it, whatever "it" is.  The trouble with this is that the books became excluded from Amazon's search function, making it almost impossible to find (and buy) them.

Various people are howling conspiracy, prejudice, and homphobia.

Me, I think they seriously fucked up.  I think it was meant to be a bit of code that filtered out erotic or other adult content so people could search for books on, say, vampires without getting erotic vampire stories (of which there are a large number).  I think whoever programmed the filter made an enormous error, released the new filter into Amazon's little search engine last February (when some people started noticing their books were excluded), and the filter grew more and more aggressive, excluding more and more books until it finally Got Noticed.

I watched the whole thing explode on Twitter.  It was like watching a few snowflakes turn into a blizzard.

See, I can't imagine Amazon doing this on purpose.  They exist to sell books.  Why would they deliberately exclude an entire section of their catalog just now, especially since they've sold such books for years and years and years?  And especially when they would have to know it would create a PR fiasco?

And since it came to a head over Easter, when no one in real authority was on duty over at Amazon, it was handled stupidly and poorly by people who didn't know what was going on once customers, writers, and activists started to complain.

Was Amazon at fault?  Yes.  Was Amazon stupid?  Yes.  Do they deserve the bad Internet press?  Absolutely.  The situation should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, and the dumb-asses have earned every shred of approbation. 

Do they deserve the chance to fix it?  Yes.  And they better move fast.

At least my books haven't been affected.  Yet.

As I recall, Amazon loaded up the first Kindle with a bunch of free books and newspapers and magazines.  They don't do that with the second one.  It came empty, and there were no offers of free books.

I played with it for a while.  It took a bit to figure out how the bookmarks work, but it have it now.  I haven't gone into playing with the text (making notes, selecting text, etc.).  That'll come later, I'm sure.

I downloaded two books.  One thing I like about the Kindle is that it lies flat.  I can use it while I'm eating.  Paperback books (and a great number of hardbacks) don't lie flat and are hard to use at the table, but the Kindle doesn't have that problem.

I'm liking it so far.

Okay, I'm on Twitter now: http://twitter.com/StevenPiziks . If you've over there, let me know so I can follow you!

Okay, here's how it happened.

I bought my iPhone yesterday.  I felt I was ready to step into the world of hand-held Internet, and my old phone was eligible for upgrading.

Buying it meant first signing a contract (which I hate, but we're not planning on switching cell carriers anytime soon anyway) and then getting the phone switched on for me.  The very nice clerk transferred many files and much information, shook my hand, and said, "Welcome to the world of time wasting."

I got it home and did what you have to do in order to learn a new techno-gadget--I played with it.  I did have to struggle a bit to get it to connect to our WiFi (finally figured out I was giving it the wrong password, of which there are three to choose from) and download my e-mail (the iPhone automatically generated POP server information that was incorrect and I had to correct it manually), but once that was all straighted out, we were off to the world of tapping.

The screen is way fast and responsive.  It springs instantly to life and does what you tell it to without hesitation.  When you push a button or flick to the next menu, there is no load time.  I like that a lot.  And the special effects are cool.  Aran loves the way you page through photos by tossing them around with your thumbs.

I'm in love with the GPS and Google Map function.  No more getting lost, no more paper directions.

I also downloaded several apps to it--NPR, Pandora, Tic Tac Toe (Mackie's favorite restaurant game), New York Times, Facebook.

I'm getting better and better at using a touchpad typewriter.  Give me a couple of days and I'll be able to write stories on it.  :)

Me have iPhone 3G now.  Me spend entire day playing wif it.  Me have no brain.  Me thumbs wore down to nubs.

The Wherever School e-mail server was flooded with virus spam yesterday.  Spam, spam, spam!  It came in the form of an e-greeting card supposedly from Hallmark.  I didn't even open it; I marked it Spam and blocked the incoming address.

Incidentally, if you've ever sent me an electronic greeting card, I never got it--I always delete them unread because so many of them are spam, viruses, or both.

And then another one showed up.  And another, and another, and another.  I spam-marked them all and deleted them unopened, more than a little annoyed.

We all later got a warning e-mail from IT that said, "Don't open the attachment!  It's a virus."

A couple of people in the building did open them and discovered to their horror that the thing hijacked their web browser and turned it into popup city.  Bleah!

This site is kind of fun:

http://www.r2d2translator.com/

You can type things into the translator and it'll translate it into R2-D2 sounds.  You can download them as MP3s as well.  I created a couple for download.  Now when a message arrives, R2 says, "You have mail."  And when my phone rings, R2 chirps, "Answer the damn phone!"

Snurched from tcastleb : http://wordle.net/ .  You can create word clouds there.  It's kind of cool, but snagging a picture from them is really complicated.  I finally managed it and can use it for some of my LJ entries.  Neat!

I finally broke down today and reinstalled Windows XP on the boys' computer.  They've downloaded so many things indiscriminantly and sucked up so many  viruses that the poor thing just doesn't operate well.  The viruses even managed to destroy McAfee.  So I started over again.  It didn't take as long as I had feared, at least.

I reinstalled Firefox, removed IE from the desktop, installed Firefox's script-blocker and ad-blocker, and I'll have to give the boys yet another  lecture on Internet safety.

Sasha's currently reloading his World of Warcraft software.

I spent most of yesterday evening tweaking the laptop with limited success.  I was hoping to find a way to transfer some larger files directly from my main computer to the laptop instead of via a flash drive, but the two computers won't talk to each other, so that was a bust.  I spent a fair amount of time surfing web sites about Ireland and leafing through some travel guides I bought and trying to decide exactly how best to spend my time there.

In Dublin, I "need" to visit:

--the Book of Kells at Trinity College
--a pub or three that plays music
--some music shops
--the National Museum
--the Dublin Writers Museum
--Dublin Castle
--Christ Church Cathedral
--O'Connell Street (site of the Easter Uprising)
--Temple Bar (which isn't actually a bar, but a district)

We'll see if I can squeeze all that in over two weekends, though I can drive back from the cottage to explore some more if I want.

Since I'm currently writing a book about Morrigan and want to write a book set in Ireland at the time of the Easter Uprising, this'll all be good stuff.  :)

The new laptop found the wireless modem just fine.  But the datastream was too narrow for it to establish an IP number and connect effectively to the Internet.  Annoying.  Part of the point of the laptop was to be able to rove in the house and (later) yard.

Today I called Comcast to see if it was a software problem or a hardware problem.  Got bounced from one person to a second one.  The second person checked a couple things.  We needed to change a channel and generate a new WEP key.  Both were fairly easily done and the connection was made good.  Ta da!  Now I'm coming to you wireless.

--Steven

This week is turning out horrifyingly busy, and it's only Wednesday.

MONDAY: Mackie arrived home with no good behavior stickers and he was on red on the traffic light, meaning he misbehaved badly all day.  He lost video games in addition to TV and I pointed out that if he didn't come home with an excellent behavior score tomorrow, he'd lose his bicycle.  Sasha and Aran behaved fine.  The "one kid" trend continues.  No restaurant for the boys this week.

Meanwhile, the new laptop arrived.  I've observed before that getting a new computer is liking moving to a new house.  Getting a new laptop is like buying a cottage.  I spent the afternoon setting it up, loading software, and transferring files.  I was using a flash drive for this, and when I was copying music files over (using the media player program), the computer informed me that it wouldn't actually copy the files into the laptop, it would only play them from the flash drive.  Spent some time unsnarling that and getting the stupid computer to download licenses to play some of the content.  Microsoft, of course, won't talk to its website to download said music licenses via Firefox--you have to use Internet Explorer.  I'd already set up Firefox as my default browser, however, and didn't feel like going through the whole thing of resetting and/or figuring out how to tell Media Player to use IE instead of Firefox, so I can't play all my music, but I can play most of it.

There was a break in there to go to karate class, too.  Since Aran and I are second-degree orange belts, we started learning the form for second-degree orange belts.  It's one of the harder ones.  The moves are tricky and many of them are brand new.

One move involves "the evil ducky."  Really.  It's hard to explain in writing.

I couldn't get the computer to connect to the wireless hookup properly.  It connects, but the datastream is too narrow for netsurfing, and I can't figure out why.  It may be a problem with the modem.  I'll have to call the cable company next week.

Got to bed way too late and totally failed to fall asleep.