What I know about music honestly (as George once said here) would not fill the thimble of a small-fingered seamstress.  But this is an astonishingly cool visualization, which makes clear something about the relationship of music and math that I’ve always known was there, but never really got.  And which makes me wish I knew more.  (Hat tip: Ezster.)

I just did something that was either absolute genius or pretty much evil.  Or maybe just borderline stupid.

There’s someone out there, someone young and female, who is convinced that my mac.com email address is hers.  How do I know this?  She has repeatedly signed up for Xanga accounts, on which she posts her violent responses to the million tribulations of adolescence, her cutting, her anorexia, her general abjection.

And she does so using my mac.com email address, so I get daily updates on her and her commenters.  The first couple of times this happened, I emailed the abuse folks at Xanga, asked them to deal with it.  The third time, I got proactive, so to speak, and used that contested email address (and the password I’m so easily able to obtain through it) to log in and change the email address on her account.

This kinda got stepped up this morning.  About a week ago, in a fit of fury over the now six-month-long total breakdown in calendar-and-contacts syncing functionality in .Mac, I began looking for alternate syncing mechanisms, and came upon Plaxo.  I signed up for a trial account and began poking around, only to decide that, in fact, I didn’t want to use the service.  (I don’t remember why.  Some scruple about not wanting to run information that personal through a social software system.) So when I started getting the messages from Plaxo to confirm my email address, I just ignored and trashed them.

Except they kept coming.  And so today I got frustrated, and logged in, and deleted my account.

Except.  You see this coming, right?  It wasn’t my account.  It was hers.  Which I fully realized in the split second before I hit delete.  And then went on and hit delete anyhow.

I thought something was weird when I tried to log in and my usual baseline “I’m not terribly worried about security here” password didn’t work, so I reset it.  And when I logged in, there were two email addresses assigned to the account: mine, and one with some variant on “cutiexox” as the username.  And in the upper left corner of the window, Plaxo welcomed to the site someone with a first name that starts with K but is not mine.

I feel somewhat bad for having done this.  Probably I should just have deleted my email address, and not killed the account altogether.  But I’m beginning to think that her continuing email confusion is on some level intentional.  Who gets their own email address wrong, repeatedly, over such a protracted period of time?

Part of me, too, keeps having these moments of regret about foiling my own opportunities for watching this girl’s story unfold, for being, in a deeply voyeuristic way, well beyond that of the regular reader of any online diary, somehow party to the tale.

And then I think of the spam that this kid could no doubt generate for me, not to mention the general obnoxiousness of lurking in her various accounts, and figure that we’re all better off this way.

Somebody else has noted this recently—I’m sorry I can’t remember who—but spambots are getting weirdly smarter.  Another blog that I have editorial privileges on gets a fair bit of trackback spam, and yesterday I got an email message telling me that there was a trackback awaiting my approval.  The source claimed to be the University of Virginia library, and the excerpted text seemed at first glance to be related to the material on the blog (including the term “EText”), so I followed the link to the MT edit trackbacks page, half-expecting to approve the ping.  Instead, I found that the linked domain was avoidcollections dot info, with “university of virginia library” its subdirectory.  And the text on that linked page is a computer generated hash of text from UVa library pages, interspersed with Yahoo ads.  Yesterday, most of the ads were for credit card companies.  Today, looking at the page again, the ads are for commercial resources related to attending college in Virginia.  There’s something extremely disheartening in this.

One sure way to measure your network dependency is to live in a building in which broadband is included with your rent, and see how you respond when the Internet suddenly, completely, and inexplicably breaks.  And there is nothing you can do about it—no router you can reset, or DSL modem you can futz with, no customer service hotlines on which to hold.  There is only your apartment’s leasing and maintenance office, where you’ll be told, “uh, yeah—it’s broke.”

How many times do you turn to the computer to look something up, only to realize you can’t, before the aggravation really starts to kick in?

How long does it take before you pack up the laptop and head down to the coffee shop, the one with the open wi-fi?

How long before you start picking fights with roommates or family members?

How long before paralysis sets in, in which you feel it impossible to accomplish anything?

Just curious.

[UPDATE, 5.17.06, 11.00 am:  Yes, I changed the title of this post.  I’m so deranged by my lack of networked communication that I totally fumbled the support group reference.  And left the ball lying on the field for a full day.  What a maroon.]

From the bottom of my heart, for that most misguided first-round pick, which allowed me to snark at you in a way that the gods of March clearly heard.

I’m not sure why, but I’m a bit obsessed with a piece of spam I got earlier today, one of the bajillions of “update your PayPal account” messages I get each week.  Perhaps it’s because most of these get sucked up by Postini, and so I never really see them, instead zapping them in large batches.  But this one slipped through the cracks, and so I got a close look at it.

What I’m fascinated by is a combination of things:  the message uses the kind of identity-theft prevention rhetoric that financial institutions actually use, but it does so in combination with seriously fractured grammar.  For instance:

Due to upcoming year 2006, and recent changes in PayPal’s Service Agreement you need to submit additional details on your PayPal account. Starting from 2006 all PayPal accounts will come with complete detailed information! Identity protection matters. And PayPal works day and night to help keep your identity safe.

Due to 2006?  All accounts will come with complete detailed information?  Wha…?

It gets better, though; scroll down and the message provides some of the details of the apparent identity protection services I’m being provided with:

New spoof tutorial
Learn how to spot and avoid fraudulent “spoof” emails and websites with PayPal’s handy 5-step spoof tutorial.

Protect yourself with tools
Guard yourself against “spoof” emails with the SafetyBar, and against fraudulent websites with the eBay Toolbar.

Checklist if you are a victim…
When you suspect a problem with your identity, you have to act fast. Use PayPal’s checklist for what you should do.

I do at times suspect a problem with my identity, but it has never occurred to me to protect myself with tools.  Where is that ball peen hammer, anyhow?

All kidding aside, unless you’re reading closely—not just spotting the weird grammatical issues but recognizing, for instance, that none of headings of the services the message describes are actually linked, and that the only link in the message goes not to paypal.com, but to paypal.com.us-securely-run.com—unless you catch that, it would be relatively easy to mistake this for an actual message about fraud-protection.  There’s nonetheless a kind of inadvertent poetry in it.  I want to be furious, and yet the phrases from this message keep running through my head…

Gee, spend one little day traveling and the blogosphere goes a wee bit bonkers over some article in the New York Times about how some professors seem to think that student use of email is hastening the end times.  And my pal meg winds up with an inbox full of vitriol, not to mention having to spend a day convincing our fellow academic bloggers that she’s not a power-mad despot in technophile’s clothing.

People, please!  Repeat after me:

First, the small point:  the much maligned “mainstream media” got maligned for a reason.  Have any of you, EVER, been quoted accurately in the newspaper? Really accurately?

Second, the bigger one:  no one heavily invested in an older media institution can analyze the workings of a newer media form objectively.  The anxiety of obsolescence that all media change breeds makes it impossible for such analysis to be carried out innocently, without an agenda driven by the desire to promote the virtues of the older form at the expense of the newer.  Any argument in print about the ways that electronic communication is leading us all down the primrose path really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

So the forthcoming book now has a page at B&N.com and Amazon.  Which seems to suggest it’s actually going to come into physical being in the world at some point between now and May 30.  Which is awesome.

But:  I’m still waiting on the page proofs.  Which means that said book still has no index.

And:  I’m quite amused by B&N’s “more on this subject” classifications for the book.  “American fiction -> History and criticism,” yes.  “Popular culture -> United States,” of course.  “Literacy -> United States,” by all means.  But “Archaeology -> Guatemala”?  Mighty curious what produced that link.

So, sure, I read the press releases, and I even wrote about it somewhere that I’m too lazy to go seek out a link for right now, at 2.38 in the bloody morning, so I knew it was coming, but I still want to say that I’m completely over the top freaked OUT by the new Macromedia home page, which gives me a bad case of what Buffy used to call the wiggins.

I think.  If someone could explain the wiggins to me, as distinct from the willies, I’d be much appreciative.

What does it say about me that my first thought was ”suicide pact”?

Nothing good, I’m sure.