Review: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

November 23, 2005 · Posted in Reviews · Comment 

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is Cory Doctorow's third novel, and like the first two it is freely available online.

I enjoyed this one much more than the first two, because of its crazy, yet internally consistent fantasy element and the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the story (which, in the vein of the preceding novels, follows the efforts of a group of tech enthusiasts as they try to persuade a community to adopt a shiny new technological concept).

The protagonist's father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing machine. He and other strange creatures walk among us and pass for human, but never quite fit into our world.

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A new standard for idiocy

November 18, 2005 · Posted in General · 2 Comments 

I've had work colleagues forward me inane email hoaxes which to me could not be more obviously hoaxes if they were labelled as such. I've heard countless anecdotes about hapless employees giving away their passwords to company servers to random strangers on the telephone, having been persuaded through elementary social engineering to disregard the security instructions which they had been given. We can explain (although perhaps not excuse) incidents like this with a lack of computer literacy or an ignorance of internet culture, and charitably assume that these people are as sensible as we are in areas which are more familiar territory to them.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how you can explain the astonishing, jaw-dropping gullibility of these managers of about seventy fast-food restaurants in the United States, who strip-searched young employees and subjected them to other humiliating treatment and abuse on the instructions of a caller pretending to be a police officer.

I don't normally post random crap I find on the web here, but I really felt this warranted a special mention. It's a momentous occasion. I think a new standard for idiocy has been set.

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In memoriam: Tosca the cat

November 8, 2005 · Posted in General · 2 Comments 

My parents' cat died this morning. I had kind of been expecting it for a while – she was sixteen years old – but I'm still sad.

We got her shortly after arriving in South Africa, when I was seven, and she faithfully followed us through a long series of rented flats. Her name was Tosca (my parents are classical musicians), but nobody ever called her that; we opted instead for a variety of nicknames in Polish. At some point she gained a surname – Delonghi, after the brand of our heater, which she liked to sleep next to.

She was technically my mother's cat, and was purchased through a classified ad for the princely sum of ten rand. My father always said that she was the oldest cat he had ever owned (our cats in Poland were half-feral and kept disappearing or being shot by a neighbour who kept pigeons).

She was a tortoishell-and-white cat. I have a photo of her sleeping curled up inside a bright red circular plastic tub.

She used to have conversations with my mother. She always knew when she was being spoken to.

It hurts to get attached to an animal with a lifespan so much shorter than one's own, but I still think it's worth it.

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