At the end of page 47 in The Long Tail (hardcover edition, thanks again Randy) I read

…Then Barnes & Noble and Borders took it one step further by introducing massive superstores. Sometimes built in converted movie theaters or bowling alleys, these megastores carried as many as

and just before turning the French-vanilla colored leaf, I said out loud “100,000″. Then I turned the page to find that is exactly what came next.

The number 100,000 hit me with such certainty that it felt like a premonition. That’s why I said it out loud, so I couldn’t convince myself afterwards that I only thought I knew in retrospect that it was coming. So what happened?

Maybe I could subliminally read the number 100,000 through the page. The paper in this book is fairly thick, and when holding the page up to the light I still can’t read 100,000 through it because words are printed across it on the obverse. But you never can tell — what our eyes and brain take in and process exceeds that which reaches our consciousness.

Perhaps I heard this figure somewhere before. I don’t remember ever hearing the number of books in these stores discussed, but it’s certainly possible that I did and forgot about it. Again, the brain is a strange machine.

A lucky guess? An informed estimate, that just happened to be spot on? Maybe, but where did my feeling of certainty come from?

Maybe it was a premonition. Our perception of time is even more limited than our perception of color or sound, where other species outperform us. To us, ultraviolet light is invisible — but birds can see it. What if, on occasion, we can perceive events in time just beyond the usual event horizon of our normal cognition?

Maybe my mind was so in tune with the changes of the moment that what followed became natural and necessary not only in the order of things, but also in my own consciousness.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit inspired me with Divine Knowledge.

Or Satan attempted to deceive me into sorcery and witchcraft by giving me one of the answers. The first one’s free, buddy.

Maybe this is a symptom of the inherent falsehood of the concepts of time, space, cause and effect. Not that we can live without them.

Scariest of all, perhaps I reshaped the whole event in my memory. Perhaps I only remember saying the number out loud. Nobody else was there to hear it. What if my mind experienced a false impression of premonition, followed by a false recollection? It could happen — and it has.

Perhaps some other explanation not thought of before. Seasoned programmers will recognize this category of explanation — when things can’t be explained, things are not what they seem. Maybe there’s more to the story than we know about yet.

My postmodern mind is almost equally intrigued by each of these hypotheses.

Maybe it’s a combination of more than one of the above. Or, depending on the world you’re inhabiting, all of them.

The first thing that tipped me off (besides the spelling and grammatical errors) was the recipient e-mail address. I only use askchip@chipstips.com for questions from Chip’s Tips, so I would not expect to receive a greeting on that account.

Rule number one regarding e-mail hyperlinks: always check the link. If the format of the message is not Plain Text (in Outlook, you check that by opening the item in its own window and then pulling down the “Format” menu to see which format is checked), then view the source to see where the hyperlink really goes (in Outlook, right-click within the body of the message and select “View Source”). Search the source for “href=”, then look at the domain name or IP address in each link. In this case, even though the link appears in the text to be on www.all-yours.net, it actually links to a .exe file at IP address 67.15.40.5, which is located on a server at Empire Host, Inc. in St. Laurent, Quebec (looked up via DNSstuff).

What’s more, if I take the pickup code in the message and go directly to www.all-yours.net and enter it, I get:

No such e-card, so the scam is exposed. I have no idea what would happen if I followed the link, nor do I intend to find out. Most likely it would install some type of spyware or zombie. To Outlook 2003′s credit, Outlook blocked the links in the message (see the header just below the sender address in the first image above).

Final step, report this bad boy. Sent the entire e-mail item as an attachment (so all headers are included) to spam@postini.com. Happy Deathday, malware!

• vapourtrails.ca » Keywords 2.0 Beta
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• WordPress at Alister Cameron’s Synaptic Jungle
  Using my OPML blogroll widget prominently in the sidebar — Thanks!
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Only recently have I been introduced (via apotheon) to the writings of Paul Graham.

I found myself agreeing intensely with every paragraph of this essay, although many of the memories it conjured were painful and I almost didn’t want to keep reading. I imagine most of us nerds prefer to forget a lot of what happened in secondary school.

Graham also explains why the key to my salvation from teenage sociopathy came when my father put me to work: it gave me something useful to do, exposure to a different part of life, and a sense of acceptance from adults.

Teenagers do have it rough in our society. We humans make a peculiar species: right at the moment coincidental with the onset of sexual maturity and the development of some independent thought, we herd adolescents all together into a confined space and tell them not to mate and how to think. It’s no wonder they form tribes of their own in resistance.

Kent Newsome posted about some persistent problems he’s been experiencing with Windows Update.

My experience with Windows Update (now Microsoft Update) has been generally positive except for the reboots — until Thursday.

After installing the latest C-5A cargo hold full of patches on all of my systems and enduring the required reboot (even on the server — argh!), they all came back up just fine except for one:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

ntoskrnl? That doesn’t sound very important, can’t it just boot up without it? Seriously, though — this was a soft reboot, how did this file get corrupted? I’ve got all of my systems on SmartUPS 1000′s, and the disk drive checks out OK. What happened?

Oh well, I have been meaning to install Linux on this baby anyway, because XP has been running like a dog with three broken legs. It’s an older system (300 Mhz AMD K-6, 192MB) that I used to use for testing various Windows setups with Ghost. Recently I’ve been using Microsoft Virtual PC for that instead, so this puppy has just become a superfluous little lap dog of a workstation. I expect Linux will make more cheerful use of the limited hardware, so maybe I can get some useful work out of Fido again.

• Independent Sources » Blog Archive » The top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs
  “Does what it says on the tin” — thanks, Armchair Anarchist
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• New Scientist SPACE – Top 10: Weirdest cosmology theories – Information
  Yeah, now we feel REAL safe about Japanese researchers trying to create a baby universe…
  Thanks, Armchair Anarchist
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• IBM researchers: Single molecule stores data
  Doing there level best to extend the validity of Moore’s Law
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• The Visual Dictionary – a visual exploration of words in the real world.
  Pictures containing various words – via Lifehacker
  (tags: images words)
• Newsome.Org
  Who Do You Write For – Update
  (tags: linklove blogging)

Thanks, Doc, for transcribing the text of zefrank’s excellent exposition of what a good friend of mine yesterday called “the f**king terrorists (and the collaborative bureaucracy)”.

Security guards are simply dumping confiscated liquids into a large, open container in public (via BoingBoing). Would you do that if you thought that any of those liquids might be volatile? No, they’re just blind cogs spinning in the fear-mongering machine, while Homeland Security tips its hat to Al Qaeda: “thanks for the credibility boost, guys.”

This just knocks me off my feet:

Someone used Google Translate to read my blog in Chinese. I found the URL in my referrer log.

Google Analytics reports that of all unique visitors to my blog over the last week, only 57% were in the United States.

Adding in the 8% from Canada, that still places 35% of readers outside of North America.

And a whopping 12% don’t use English as their primary language. Look at the variety of languages in that “long tail”: German, Italian, Dutch, French, Spanish, Polish, Chinese, and who knows what else. That’s surprising to me, considering the games I like to play with the English language. To them, some of my puns and associations are probably as easy to understand as Steve Gillmor.

Anyway, readers: Danke, Grazie, Dank u, Merci, Gracias, dziekuje, xiè xie, and any other way that you say “Thank you!”

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