Facebook users, beware!

I'm not sure this is new, but it's dangerous!

Email scam targets Facebook users: Web security firm - Yahoo! Canada News

Essentially, you get an email that looks like it's from Facebook. It tells you your password has been reset and you need to click on an attached file to retrieve it.

We all know NEVER to click on an attached file unless we know what it is, right? (And by "know what it is", I mean we know who sent it AND we were expecting to receive something from that person. If the other person's computer has a virus, they might send you a file accidentally.)

I figure we all know. But this also seems like a good time to remind you. :)

Go Small or Go Home - GONE!

To be precise, it's gone to Smashwords.com and is now available!

As part of this year's "Read an e-Book Week" I have just released Go Small or Go Home at SmashWords.com.

What's "Go Small or Go Home" about?

When massage therapist and aspiring miniatures artist Tess begins treating stressed but attractive hockey star Forrest, her art career soars due to his gallery-owning mother, but her creativity plummets under the weight of rules and deadlines. Soon, she's lost the freedom and joy she'd always found in art. Is having her dream career worth losing doing her art her way, or can she somehow have both at once?

From March 7-13th, you can get my book, and a great selection of others, for free or at a discount from SmashWords.com and their "Read an e-Book Week" catalogue. There are other great books available at the "Read an e-Book Week" site.

I am happy to be making a second book available, and I hope you'll check it out. In time, it will be available at amazon.com and other online retailers; when that happens I'll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, pick up the book this week for free at SmashWords!

Are you backing up your computer?

You know you should be! If you're not, go check out my newest article for Computing Unplugged at http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200906/00002389001.html for eight easy-to-follow steps to make sure you back up everything you'll ever need.

So important, especially for anyone who uses their computer to invent/write/create things. Lesson plans, knit or crochet patterns, books... do you really want to re-invent them after a crash? I doubt it. :)

Heather

Why I love ebooks

On non-running days, I use the elliptical trainer in my building's gym. I find it dull. Deeply dull. There is a television in the gym now, but the only thing more dull than the elliptical, in my opinion, is what's on TV at around 3pm, which is when I often go.

I take the Palm, set up one of my ereader programs to autoscroll my book, and I can work out and read at the same time without ever having to turn a page (which, at my reading speed, happens a lot).

I don't think I'll ever want a dedicated ebook reader, since I love having my entire life in my Palm, but I also don't think I'll ever be without an ebook reader of some kind. I've hardly read any paper books this year, and I expect that will continue.

Now, if only ebooks were cheaper than paper, as I still feel they should be... :)

George: status update

So last week, I posted about my laptop, George, eating my novel's file. I was at first so mad at the computer that I couldn't even look in its direction for fear I'd lunge at it and break it into tiny pieces. Over the course of the weekend, Mr. W worked with it, testing out various things, and figured out that the crash might have been a combo of Microsoft Word and the antivirus software.

My antivirus software does "real-time scanning". I always assumed this meant "I will check any file you download as you download it" but it turns out it means "I will check any file you change every time you change it".

Combine that with a slow hard drive and a paranoid writer who saves at least once a minute (seriously) and you're bound to hit trouble sooner or later.

Mr. W's automated testing (if you were shortsighted enough not to marry/date a software developer, I suggest you remedy that at once: they're HANDY to have around) was able to recreate my crash within an hour or so with the antivirus on, and with it off it wouldn't happen again all weekend long.

Therefore, I am back to using George. I really like him, and trying to use my old laptop feels weird and uncomfortable now that I'm used to George's smaller size.

But if he eats another file, he and I are going on a trip to the tallest skyscraper I can find, and only I will be taking the elevator back to the ground floor. :)

George, how COULD you?

George is my recently acquired Acer Aspire One laptop. (Hell, yes, I'm naming names. :)

George and I, I THOUGHT, were friends. We've been hanging out together nearly every day, working on Raoul and Aardvark and some days both, and we check the occasional email and do the occasional "we should be working but we don't wanna" random Internet search.

Today was Raoul re-reading day. I finished the editing on Tuesday, let it rest yesterday, and today I started reviewing it top to bottom to make sure I hadn't done anything weird. (like the "smile of pure belief" I wrote instead of the intended "disbelief" which does make for a rather different sentence)

I worked for two hours this morning and I did GOOD stuff. I found a bunch of little things here and there that needed to be changed, and I changed them. George and I were on fire.

Perhaps George was literally on fire, because at 2:00pm I pressed "Save" (I never quite trust Microsoft Word so I save CONSTANTLY to make sure nothing goes missing) and George said, "I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your suggestion." (Actually, he said something about the drive being missing, but a good Pirates of the Caribbean quote is never a mistake.)

I said, "!!!" and Word shut down.

Okay, fine, I'll just re-open the file and...

OH. The file is not there. The file has in fact been erased from the drive.

Then I said a few other things that cannot be posted here.

Then I stomped around.

Then I phoned Mr. W (who, lucky for him, was in a meeting) and told him I planned to do myself and the computer some serious damage and he might want to call back before it happened.

(He still hasn't called. :)

To make a long and infuriating story short, I eventually got Word to admit that a) it had a temp file and b) the stuff was there, and I lost maybe two or three minutes of work.

Unfortunately, my fury at the computer for just dying for no apparent reason did not exactly leave me in a calm and rational state of mind that would be conducive for editing. I even ate two squares of chocolate (if it's good enough to help Harry Potter recover from disaster, it's good enough for me - and I DID track its calories) but no good.

So I thought, how to calm myself? Where can I pour out all this annoyance and blinding rage?

:)

Now, feeling a little calmer, I shall return to work. Not on George, though. When a man jerks you around that bad, he don't deserve no second chances.

Read an E-Book Week!

This week (Mar 8-14) has been designated Read an E-Book Week. The official website has lots of books available for free or cheap download (including, of course, mine) and also information on new and upcoming devices for electronic reading.

Interesting idea and I hope they have much success in encouraging people to read electronically!

Keeping track of blog comments

I keep meaning to post about this, so now I am!

When I started really focusing on the blog this month, I also wanted to keep track of comments: both the ones I write elsewhere and the ones people write here. Yes, you can bookmark each blog and keep track that way, but I found that I kept checking pages that had no new comments, which is an enormous waste of time.

I tried several sites that were supposed to help with this, but they were all made of fail. Then I found co.mments.com. THIS has worked for me. It's a simple registration form, and then you can tell the web site (either through a bookmarklet on your browser's toolbar or by going to the co.mments site) to watch a particular blog post.

At first it kept asking me to log in again, but I changed my privacy settings to allow the site to store cookies and since then it's been fabulous. I've had no trouble with it keeping track of blogger, livejournal, or wordpress blogs (as long as each blog is set up to show each post on its own page) and I can see all old and new comments when I visit the site's page. (You can also see it as an RSS feed, but I find I prefer the site.)

I have absolutely no affiliation with the site: I just thought it might be helpful! :)

Heather

May 29, 2008: New Look!

I've spent the afternoon playing with Blogger and getting the blog to look as much like my web site as I can. I'm pretty happy with the results. Those of you who read this via FaceBook, feel free to visit http://heatherwardell.blogspot.com to check it out!

I'd actually planned to spend three hours updating the web site and the blog and getting everything nice and shiny for any agents who might be visiting. Having planned that time meant I could test things, try it out over and over, and not feel bad that I was "wasting time". I actually spent four hours because the blog was uncooperative, but I'm pleased with the results.

Writing Project: EDITS course, web site/blog redo
Time Planned: 2 hours for EDITS, 3 hours for web site/blog
Time Spent: 2 hours and 4 hours
Favourite Part: Returning to "the good old days" when I worked for the bank, trying to teach myself HTML and web design by changing one detail at a time and seeing what happened

Exercise: 30 minutes elliptical
One Fun Thing I Did Today: Re-decorated the blog - I've been wanting to do it for a long time!