House of Jorob

Bookshelf: Shinju

Shinju
Laura Joh Rowland
c 1994

Tokyo. January, 1689

Sano Ichiro, tutor, samauri, now yoriki, a senior police commander, finds himself assigned to investigate a shinju, a double-suicide by two lovers. Except his superior instructs him on exactly how he wants the case closed. "You will dispense with the matter as quickly and quietly as possible." For although the man was a peasant, the woman was daughter to one of the wealthiest, most powerful lords in the region. And as is customary with love suicides, the girl's identity would be kept confidential while the man's disgrace would be cast upon his family.

Except Sano isn't very customary, try as he might. His personal honor gets in the way of so many things: filial responsbility, duty, loyalty, conformity, obedience.....

And so Sano resolves to look further into the matter of the shinju. And his life will never be the same afterwards.

There's a lot of introspective dialog here--we spend a lot of time in Sano's head as he moves about the countryside. For the most part Rowland makes sure to balance this material with a dose of character encounter. But there's one point where the novel hits a soggy patch.
Long around page 260 or so, the novel hits a dead spot. It was the strangest thing: one minute the narrative is flying along, the next minute it bogs down in an internal dialog that had me looking to skip ahead 30 pages or so. And that's rare. I think in all the books I've read over my life, I can count the number of times that has happened on one hand. After I finished the book, I went back to see if I could figure out what happened. Overall, I think it was just one trip too many for the solitary character's internal monolog thing.

Force yourself through the slow patch. There is some seriously good writing here, with a satisfying conclusion. Rowland's attention to detail is evident throughout. Although at times Sano's inability to see what the reader can see is coming from around the corner will make you grit your teeth a bit.

This was the first novel for Rowland, who has since gone on to produce a dozen books featuring Sano. I'll have to watch for the monologs, though. That's when the narrative wheels can get stuck in mud.

Anti-Matter: Billions and Billions.....

They've created billions of anti-matter particles in a lab in Livermore, California.

All we need now is a plentiful source of dilithium crystals and the universe is ours for the taking.

And the brains to put the whole project together.

Chinese Democracy. No. Really. It's Coming.

As a public service to those who weren't born yet when the last album was released, here's a quick bio.

Chinese Democracy finally has a release date of November 23, 2008. Head to your local Best Buy, because that's the only place you're going to be able to get it. Gotta love those excluse release contracts.

This is the first collection of new material from the band since 1991, and the first album since 1993.

The band's press release is here.

A link-filled blog post is here.

I had a different wife, a different address, no cell phone, and a different car when the songs from the Use Your Illusion I and II albums were on the charts.

I gotta tell ya. After all this time, it's hard to get excited about the new album.

Google Flu Trends: Google saves the world

When you can aggregate billions of pieces of search data, you can do some amazing things.

Like figure out where the flu is reaching epidemic proportions ahead of everybody else.

During last year's flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share data with the CDC. According to Google, "Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports."

Two weeks can save lives.

Read more about how Flu Trends works here.

By the way, get a flu shot.
Even the $30 shots at the local CVS or Walgreens are cheap when compared with the amount of money lost when you actually get sick.

Where to report scams and scammers

A while back I posted some notes about a real doozy of a scam.

I owed my readers some additional information: where to report scams when they come across them.

This includes Do Not Call list violations, as far as I'm concerned.

In the US:

Federal Communications Commission

The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable.

• e-mail to fccinfo@fcc.gov
• http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm

Federal Trade Commission

According to the FTC's own descriptions, the FTC is the only federal agency with both consumer protection and competition jurisdiction in broad sectors of the economy. The FTC pursues vigorous and effective law enforcement; advances consumers’ interests by sharing its expertise with federal and state legislatures and U.S. and international government agencies; develops policy and research tools through hearings, workshops, and conferences; and creates practical and plain-language educational programs for consumers and businesses in a global marketplace with constantly changing technologies.

• http://www.ftc.gov
• https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov

Internet Crime Complaint Center IC3):

IC3's mission is to serve as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints
regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime. The IC3 is a partnership between 
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National White Collar Crime Center,
and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).

• http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx

In Canada:

Reporting Economic Crime Online (administered by the National White Collar Crime Centre of Canada):

• www.recol.ca
• https://www.recol.ca/intro.aspx?lang=en

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Call Center (The Royal Canadian Mounted Police)

• http://www.phonebusters.com

Meteor 3: Return of the hard drive

I didn't want to lose the data.
It was all still there, according to my forensics.
I couldn't get at it, but it was there.

And so I've been working on recovering this stupid hard drive one byte at at time, it feels like. Since October 23, no less.
I'm almost done.

Logged on the DDO last night and left a joyous "halloo!" to my gaming buds.
Implicit in that sentence: Windows was back, the firewalls were up, network connection was restored, and the gaming applications were no longer corrupt.

Immediately afterward, I ran another backup of the rebuilt system. Overnight, because it takes a good 7 hours to back the whole thing up, full. (too many repairs to run incrementals during all of this.)

And tonight, I transferred 10 GB of free space from one partition over to the C: so that the WOW patch 3.01 would install.

Which was what started me off on this journey of recovery in the first place.........

It was a long way back--after the breakdowns I wrote of a couple posts back, I invested in a Barracuda SATA drive. 1 TB. No fooling around.

Installed it nice and simple. Bought a copy of Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 to manage my partioning. Immediately copied the old partition wreckage over to the new drive, and set that drive up as having active system partions. That failed, but it did tell me it couldn't find ntloader.

Ntloader?

WTF.

This meant that the original screwup was more than a simple drive letter switch. Portions of the OS got whacked.

OK. Copied the missing files over to the system partition. For kicks, copied them over the the cloned set on the new disk, too. Then hid the new disk's partitions, to force the old one to boot.

Nope.

OK, Un-hid the 2nd system partition, then booted again, using the bios selector to tell it which disk to boot from.

"Windows is corrupt. Bad or missing boot.ini file. Windows will boot from C:\windows."

Wow.

That brought up a badly broken Windows installation, but the drives were all there.

Hallelujah.

Rebooted to the Windows OS disk.

This time it detected the older Windows installation. Would I like to repair it?

Hell yes.

After an hour, rebooted yet again.

Up it came. Got to my system login.

Once in, Windows was kind of there. A crapload of rundll errors all over the screen. Not to mention the video was shot (easily fixed. The video controls were there, just reset to 16 bit)

All the drive letters were messed up again.

What's this? Symantec's Partition Magic is trying to finish the original botched job, according to yet another error message, buried beneath layers of rundll errors.

All the run-time errors made sense now--they were calling from the wrong drive letters. Again. But the Partition Magic thing was annoying.

Ok. Reboot to Acronis. All the partitions are lettered correctly at that level, its WINDOWS that's got it wrong. While I'm here, another backup.

Back to Windows, the next evening. User regedit and regedt32 to reorder the letters in Windows. Reboot.

Hooray--all the rundll errors go away as missing things start loading themselves again.

No. Wait. There's no network connectivity.

Damn.

Control panel--there's no network setup icon. There's the icon shell, but that's all. Looks like a little copy of the unidentified application icon. Trying to use it is fruitless--it just lays there.

Sigh.

Insert the Windows OS disk. It spins up and wants to install.

Well, okay.

Fortunately, running the OS disk while already in Windows is not a death sentence any more. This time, the disk installer located Windows, and decided it could upgrade what I had. Which to me meant repair. Good enough.

Reboot.

Yay! Panda upgrades it's signatures for the first time in three weeks.

We're back where we were three weeks ago. Another backup kicked off, then to bed......

As I said, that was last night.

Tonight, moved 10 G over to the system partition, using Acronis.

Reboot.

WTF.

Where's the network?

The network config icon is there, and it reports IP is up, and receiving. Just no sending.

Everything else in the house is online and talking to the Internet--it ain't the router.

Couple more reboots and some system inspection and I'm guessing the repartition fubarred something in Windows again.

Damn.

Reinstall Windows again, see if it helps.

It does.

And the WOW upgrade starts up.

And that's when I learn there've been two modifications to the patch that was already a Gig in size.

My god.

Lesson learned: Don't screw with the system partition. Take stuff over to other partitions instead of trying to enlarge the thing.

Scam alert: Deposit this check in the shredder

Oh, this is a beauty.

And it must be working, because these guys have been at it since August.

It costs money to run this kind of a scam.

Here's how it works:

Your name gets gleaned from an online survey that you took over the last six months--the kind of surveys that won't let you take them unless you feed in an address, too. The survey you took most likely has nothing to do with the scam: all the survey-site is guilty of is scraping your name and address onto a mailing list and then selling it to whomever shows up with cash.

An envelope arrives in your mailbox. Plain, white number ten envelope. Name and address in caps. No return address. Stamp is Canadian, 96 cents. Postmark is French and English. Mine was sloganned: "Appuyez la sante mentale/Support Mental Health" and carried Canadian codes H4T 1A0 101. Date was October 21, 2008.

The first thing you'll notice is a check. Mine was for $4,780, drawn on California Trust Bank. It looks real: routing and account numbers, watermarking, the works.

Included with the check is a two-page letter. Letterhead is from One-Distribution Research Center.

The letter is an offer to join One-Distribution's "Mystery Shopper" program.

The check is an advance against expenses. Your salary is included in the amount.

The job? Two parts: Evaluation a regional office of Moneygram, and then evaluate one of six major stores: Sears, KMart, Walmart, Home Depot, Gap, or JC Penneys.

The scammers want me to walk into a Moneygram location, and wire $4,225 to a Gary, in Lake Orion, Michigan. I'm to give Gary my own last name when I wire the funds.

Then I fill out my evaluation of the service people at Moneygram, and fax the evaluation to 954-206-0175.

Then I'm to go to one of the six stores, and purchase $100 worth of merchandise. Fill out the second evaluation, and fax it.

After deducting the Moneygram fees, Moneygram wiring amount, and the shopping costs, what's left of my check is $300. My salary.

To sweeten my deal, my salary goes up to $400 after I complete the assignments, which are classified as "Probation Training" right now. So the next one will net me even more money.

Like I said, this scam must be working, because the printing and mailing expenses are not cheap. The check as DocuGard watermarking on the back, and color-guard copy-proofing on the face. Trouble is, I can't for the life of me find any bank named California Bank Trust in Costa Mesa, California.

This is an international scam: The voice telephone number uses a Florida area code. The fax number uses an Quebec area code. The letterhead address is Lake Orion, Michigan. And the check is drawn on a Costa Mesa, California bank.

I can think of two ways this will pull money out of victim's bank accounts:

• For every person who is willing to wait until the check clears, there are those who will not wait. And if you wire the funds before the check clears, when it bounces you are out $4225 plus the Moneygram wire-transfer fees.
• Deposit the check, the check bounces and is returned to the issuer. But your bank data is still on the back of the check, since you endorsed it. And if the fraudsters are doing nothing but collection information, they now have your confirmed name, address, and bank account number.

Here is all the data I've got from the material I received:

One-Distribution Research Center
2241 S. Baldwin Road
Lake Orion, Michigan 48360
514-691-5899
954-206-0175

Address on the check:

One-Distribution Company, LLC
PO Box 1260
Costa Mesa, Ca 92628-1260

California Bank Trust
Costa Mesa Ca 92626

According to Rip Off Report, a version of this scam ran under Genesis Forwarding Services - Consumer Survey Services. The scammers didn't seem to be posting international then--Elk Grove Village, Illinois. In that case, the check appeared to have been drawn on Citibank.

The phone numbers were consistent between versions, I found. The numbers just changed roles. I found a couple of notes where the writer was getting phone calls from the fax number I have on my paperwork.

Step Ball

MLB has a great commercial about playing baseball with anything you can get your hands on for gear: folding chairs, milk crates, phone poles for bases, a stick and a ball for the essentials.

But that has nothing on Step Ball.

For one thing, you need at least six people to play streetball--teams of three: Pitcher, fielder, and someone to catch--or else you'll be chasing that ball a long way every time someone whiffs.

Where I grew up, we had a shortage of little kids our age. By the time I was eight, it was clear we existed in the neighborhood as tweeners, as in, "tween the last crop of kids and the next one." There were a bunch of big kids--16, 17, 19 year olds--and a pile of infants--3 months, 1 year, like that--on our block.

And then there was us.

Me, my brother, and Chuck and Jeff.

Four, maybe five years separated us in total. So it was natural we hung around together a lot, like it or not. Once we were allowed outside.

Summertime on a block of row homes, when you can't cross the street, can be brutal.

It was brutal when you could cross the street, for that matter. We couldn't ride our bikes too far away, and the neighbors really threw a fit when you played football across their lawns.

So some time back in the mists of the early 1970's, we invented Step Ball.

You could play it with just two people. Four worked, too.

All you needed was an open space in front of our front steps, and a cooperative neighbor to not park their car directly across the street from those same steps.

That, and a tennis ball.

An older one, preferably. New ones, fresh out of the can, had too much fuzz on them.

What you did was stand on the sidewalk, in front of the steps.

And threw that ball as hard as you could.

Our steps were perfect for this. Four concrete slabs, eight-inch risers, 12-inch treads. And a rounded corner where the tread met the riser.

We didn't know any of those words, of course.

All we knew was that rounded edge was the sweet spot, and if you hit it, that ball was going to soar clear across the street onto the neighbor's front porch.

That being a home run, naturally.

A single was anywhere across the front half of the street. Doubles, the back half. Triples, up on the opposite sidewalk.

Fielder had free run of the entire area--including the home run area, if he could get up the neighbor's lawnslope  to the front of the porch area before the ball came back down.

Which was never.

Foul balls skipped off the front curb of the sidewalk, where you stood to throw in the first place.

The sweet spot had an evil twin, right next to it. Because if you missed that sweet spot, the ball would carom forward, up the steps and into your own lawns, bushes and--god help you if you did this--the roof of the front porch.

The annual rite of Retrieval of Roofed Tennis Balls occurred in September, when Dad would climb onto the porch roof from out the bedroom window and toss them all down.

I remember one particularly rough season when between three of us we managed to roof seven tennis balls.

Before July 4th.

Dad proved himself to be very cool that year.

Two RoRTB's.

One in July, and one in September.

The September one brought back eight tennis balls.

Just could not find that sweet spot.