Daily Thoughts 8/25/2010 (Bring On the Books For Everybody, the Facebook Era)

English: Interesting Story, 1898, Laura Muntz Lyall (1860-1930)

Daily Thoughts 8/25/2010

I have been reading more of Bring On The Books For Everybody.  I like Jim Collins description of many of the newer womens novels being "romantic consumerism".  It fits nearly perfectly with books like The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger.  He also uses another term postliterary novel for books like The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Jay Fowler which has a nice ring to it.  He is showing how books and films are tied in knots together.  I can see how shows like Sex and The City are a natural extension of modern "chick lit". 



On the subway home, I finished reading Bring On The Books For Everybody. Jim Collins excerpts a paragraph from The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon in the final chapter of the book.  It is about the "cemetery of forgotten books" one of my favorite places in literature.  The author is challenging the idea of Fahrenheit 451 in the final chapter, offering us a vision of popular culture which combines literature with visual mediums like film and television.  It is much closer to my own view of the future of books.








Today was another quiet day.  We discussed vendors today.  I am going to take a look at Ingram.  Ingram has slightly better discounts than the other vendors for hardcover and paperback books.  We also discussed how we are going to keep track of missing books.  I spent quite a bit of time on the floor helping patrons with reference. 


Last night was kind of interesting.  I had to work on cleaning up a trojan on my machine.  There were a lot of attacks on computers focused on companies spoofing other peoples machines and asking them to buy their antivirus software.  The warning comes as a popup, then says your machine is not properly protected.  I went through Computer Associates, Microsoft, and another company to get my machine back up.  It took many hours to clean up.  Microsoft had me use a company called Esoft to finally clean up my machine.



I also had a chance to read a bit of the Facebook Era.  There is a concept which is introduced called the "online social graph" which is a map of all the people on the internet and how they are connected.  Clara Shih reminds us that the internet is about people.  In her view social and consumer networks are beginning to merge and old fashioned advertising is no longer working.

Daily Thoughts

This is a short interview of Kevin Mitnick who was immortalized in the book by Bruce Sterling called The Hacker Crackdown.

Daily Thoughts

Right now, I am scanning my computer for viruses with Computer Associates anti-virus as well as using Spy Bot Search and Destroy to scan for trojans and malware. I have previously had denial of service attacks on this blog because people don't like what I am saying. I have also had a few attempts to hijack this blog. It was not a fun experience. Right now, I am having problems logging into a few sites.

Sometimes people claim my blog is spam because they do not like the content and I have to contact the place where people claim it was spam to get it back up. This has happened a couple of times. Remember, if you state anything objectionable, it can be considered spam. Be careful where and how you post.

I have learned to leave spam alone unless it has specific offensive content. Some people are not even aware they are spamming. Most of it is innocuous; come visit my site, I like your site; join my directory, I think you will like it. There is a very fine line between spam and regular advertising. Some people are a little too thin skinned about their political or social views and have a hard time accepting there are other viewpoints. A good argument can be fun.

I have located a few files which puzzled me and deleted them, they are Java Shinwow.BH, a nice little piece of work. All of my caches on my machine are cleaned out. I am still having problem with one site, but I now can log into Blogcatalog. My Java is now updated, I still have not updated Microsoft...

My machine is now thoroughly cleaned.

Independent Retailers Outperform Chains This Holiday Season, National Survey Finds
http://news.bookweb.org/6539.html . For me this is encouraging. I believe a move back towards more independent small businesses and more locally produced products will make the United States stronger.

I put a new book on hold, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death: A Novel (Hardcover)by Charlie Huston (Author). It is reviewed on Amazon by Stephen King which is a bit surprising. I rather like Charlie Huston's Jo Pitt vampire detective novels. This looks like it may surpass them in bloodiness. It is about a company that cleans up after dead bodies.