I love my Amazon Kindle. I’ve been a bit annoyed with the cost of the e-books and the lack of a proper PDF reader, but overall it’s a wonderful toy.

Last week, however, Kindle users felt the long, strong arm of Amazon’s DRM system. It seems that Amazon mistakenly sold a version of Orwell’s 1984 that it should not have. The morning after they discovered this, purchasers of the book awoke to find that The Ministry of Trust (aka Amazon Customer Service) had remotely deleted the books from their Kindle.

Since Amazon never mentioned that they had the ability to reach into our library and take our books, Kindle users were shocked. Amazon spokesheads said it was all a misunderstanding, the matter was handled poorly, and that all affected parties would have their money refunded.

They also reluctantly admitted that they did see some irony in the fact that this happened with 1984 of all books.

There was no accident here, of course. The fact that Amazon had the confidence to pull such a move means that this “feature” was designed into the kindle, tested and documented.

It seems spam is getting a bit aggressive recently. My friend found charming bit of spam in his inbox.

Why? You stupid fat fuck. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? What a joke. Your lucky I am even writing this because I can’t stand you most of the time. Why do you not get serious about looking better? With all the bullshit out there right now and dam results I’ve seen in the people I know, your an idiot not trying something. My fuckin sister lost 52 lbs not even exercising using this crap http://xxxxxxx.com

It’s about time you stopped being a lazy piece of shit and do something about yourself.

-You know who I am probably

Some guys really need to just turn off their computer and talk to a girl, but they never will. The scrappy young entrepreneurs over at Whorecraft (yes, really!) think they have found a magic marketing elixir - crossing RPGs and porn. The first installment is “Rouges Do It From Behind.”

Yeah, I know it’s all harmless, but there is something about this that makes me almost embarrassed to be male.

A survey commissioned by Oxygen Media found that 77% of women surveyed would rather receive a new plasma TV than a diamond solitaire necklace and that 86% of them would rather receive a new digital video camera than a pair of designer shoes.

Riiiiiight.

I smell a fix. I’m sure there are some women (somewhere) who would prefer a Cannon FinePix to a pair of Jimmy Choos, but any man who relies on this survey for gift-giving advice does so at extreme peril.

This is so cool, and I don’t know why!

Nike is putting sensors in their shoes that transmit data on time, distance, calories used to your iPod Nano, which provides both a screen display and soothing female voice who reads the information to you.

Yeah, yeah. I know it’s worthless technology. Even though it only costs $30, it performs the same function as a $2 pedometer.  Still, there is something undeniably cool about this gadget.

I sent out the latest edition of Tangled Webs today. It’s been far too long since I wrote the last one.

The reason most computer programs are confusing and hard to use is because they are written by programmers. Generally speaking, programmers are not some of nature’s better adapted creatures. In fact, you can tell a lot about the neuroses of a particular programmer just by using the UI they create.

A few minutes ago I was entering info on a web site. Apparently, I made a mistake on one of the fields because after I submitted the form I was was presented with the following error message

Number format invalid!!!!

That’s right, four exclamation points. It then cleared my info and made me start again. Clearly this guy has some major anger-management issues he needs to work through.

Equally bad are the programmers with decision anxiety. You know the ones. You tell the program to delete an entry and a message pops up asking

This entry will be deleted. Do you want to proceed?

Yes. Click.

Are you sure?

Am I sure?! Yes, damnit! Seriously, what are the odds of me having changed my mind in the last fraction of a second? Delete the damn record.

I’ve had to turn the comments off for this Blog. I was getting about 50 comment-spams a day, and while my content filter was preventing about 98% of them from being posted, deleting them all has become to much of a pain.

I think the punishment for spammers should be simple and appropriate. They should be required to receive 10,000 paper-cuts for each offence. After all, one little cut doesn’t hurt much.

Rikkyo Elementary school has began using RFID chips to track the movements of the students. Whenever a student enters or leaves the school, the fact is logged into the school’s computer and email is automatically sent to the parents.

In any society, prisoners and children are two groups assumed to have very few fundamental rights, and particularly not the right to privacy, so this is not really an invasion of privacy issue. Administrators and parents both love the new system and feel that it will keep their children safer.

This is, however, yet another example of addressing a problem by doing something very visible and newsworthy, but which will have no effect on the problem itself. The RFID system was introduced after a number of high-profile child-murders. When asked how the system could protect students from such crimes the principal said quite frankly. “This won’t prevent crimes against children.”

Of course, actually making children safer is a secondary goal. The primary goal of such systems is making people feel safer.

OK, I admit it. I’m not linked in, plugged in, wired in, or even clued in.

Joining one of these social networking sites is like going for a free personality test at your local Scientology office. It all seems like harmless fun at the time, but it can have unforeseen consequences.

At first LinkedIn was fun. I caught up with a lot of people I had not seen in years, and I had no problems forwarding on requests of one friend asking for an introduction to another.

The problem is when a friend of a friend asks me to forward contact information to a friend of some other friend. There is a good reason these four-places-removed introductions do not occur in real life. If I have no clue who two people are, it is hard to care deeply whether or not they ever get together.

You can’t ignore the request since the system will hound you incessantly. You can’t decline the request because not only would that be rude, but the system requires an explanation of your rudeness which is then archived forever. You can’t even pass on the request without adding some inane comment of your own.

Please, I don’t want to be one of the cool kids anymore. How can I make it stop?