Back in action

With a new baby and two crashed computers, I've been limping along on the Internet lately. One of my machines (my older, slower one) is back up and running now, so I should be posting more again.

For those of you who may have missed the earlier post, In Cold Blog is in full swing now. That blog is a joint effort by 30 true-crime authors, police officers, prosecutors, crime victims, and editors. It is the brain child of Corey Mitchell, author of Strangler, Evil Eyes, Hollywood Death Scenes and others. I've kept up with my once-a-month duties on that blog. You can find my latest post updating the case I wrote about in Precious Blood at that site.

MySpace not my bag

I was proud of myself. I had never signed up for MySpace. I had never visited it. I wanted nothing to do with it.

But then magazines and authors started putting up MySpace pages and I felt I was
obliged to visit and see how other writers were using it. Then I learned that you have to sign up for MySpace to view the content. I signed up, and I immediately regretted it. It is everything I imagined it would be, only worse. Crappy color schemes, virtual "friends" that show up unbidden, and faux popup ads.

Aren't the real popups bad enough?

I now have an empty MySpace profile, an empty MySpace page, and I'm sure I'll soon have a full email inbox -- full of spam messages because I had to give an address to MySpace.

When a phone was a phone; not an iPhone

What I really want in a cellphone is to be able to call someone. That's all. I want to pick it up, dial a number and talk to someone. I don't want to listen to music on it, I don't want to surf the Internet, and I don't want to check my e-mail.

I've got a great little phone. It's about three years old -- prehistoric by cellphone standards -- but it makes calls. It has a few other features that I have used -- for instance I occasionally put something on the calendar if I don't have a piece of paper to write it down on -- but its main purpose is to call someone.

So now Apple Inc. is getting all this buzz over the iPhone. It calls, it surfs, it downloads, it messages, it dances, it sings, it gets sued. All for the Apple egotist. So egotistical, in fact, that Apple has used a trademarked name owned by another company to name its new $600 toy. Apple, of course, says Cisco Systems' resulting lawsuit is "silly."

Well Apple could have avoided this silliness if it hadn't been silly enough to use a name someone else owned for its silly new product. Yes, I said silly.

Why would anyone want a touch screen on a phone you carry in your pocket? It's supposed to have a "proximity sensor" to keep it from dialing, but what about scratches? How long will it be before you have drop another half a grand for a new iPhone because you can't read the screen anymore?

I carry my little phone in the same pocket as my change, my ink pens, and my pocket knife. I go hunting with it, camping with it, running with it. I've dropped it on everything from concrete to gravel to a hardwood gym floor. It still works, reliably, every time. Let's see the toy formerly known as iPhone do that.

Jeepers creepers, Harry's got a brand-new name

J.K. Rowling has gone to great lengths to keep young readers on her web site, with a puzzle required to find the title of her newest (and last) Harry Potter book. No doubt my son will go crazy with it until he finds the title -- unless he looks here. The title is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.