Author: Michael Seidel

Science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer. Singer (sorry, no shows) & nudist (in my home). Beer, cat, cheese, coffee, pie and wine friend. Left IBM and Silicon Valley for the southern Oregon life but I miss the ocean. We're too far inland. Gotta move.

Coming Things

I was watching “Future Man” on Hulu last night. An eHarmony commercial came on. The featured woman said, “I don’t want to waste time with men who aren’t right for me.”

I thought, soon such apps and approaches will expand. What person should I have as a friend? What books should I read, what television shows should I watch, or what movies should I go to?

Apps will tell you which you’re most likely to enjoy, enabling you to avoid wasting time with other people or activities that aren’t right for you.

Sad. You can learn a lot from wasting time with things that aren’t right for you.

You can even have a good time.

Instead, let’s narrow our minds and reduce our bubbles just a little bit more.

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Floofsive

Floofsive (floofinition) – a state or expression where a housepet appears engaged in, involving, or reflecting deep or serious thought.

In use: “He said, as he does every morning, “Who’s hungry? Who wants something to eat?” In response, the cats and dogs sat down and regarded him with floofsive gazes, as if they didn’t know who he was.”

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A Little Interruption

I received an email from my wife that her computer had been hacked. It made her a little nervous.

She’d sent the email two hours before. (As an aside, she sent it on one of our other computers. How many do we have? Yes, too many.) I’d been busy writing and didn’t have my email open, so I didn’t see the email. When I saw it, I wrote, “Okay, I’m coming home.” I was almost done with writing like crazy for the day, although I’d wanted to walk to think more about the concept and plot.

Her computer is an Apple Mac. She hadn’t been hacked but was being scammed by a Mad Defender variant, a little surprising. It’s pretend ransom-ware. The Mac Defender scam is about blocking the user from changing tabs and pages in Safari while a warning that spyware has been detected is shown. It then tells you to call a number for Apple support.

From there, several things can happen. One, they can urge the gullible to share computer access. Two, they can be conned into buying a security program that’s not a security program but gives them access to your computer and its files and information. Or, most enticing for them, they get your credit card info and go to town.

It took me about seventy minutes to research her particulars and find and delete the malware app, along with the offending processes. As Mac Defender and the other names it goes by has been around since 2011, they’d changed details to make it more difficult to find and remove. I was surprised that they were using the MS Azurewebsites for this, as MS has been burned by this in the past. That was a big, immediate clue when I opened her computer and saw the message.

Anyone, it was a disruption to writing and posting blog thingies, along with walking and a few other things, but all’s well, and that’s the bottom line in all of this.

Back to our normal programming.

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Friday’s Theme Music

You’d think that today’s theme music originated with feeding the cats or something, but, no, this one started with a dream.

The dream had to do with a man that I’d met and the movies. Throughout the dream, he was either trying to get me to go to the movies with him, be in a movie with him, or make a movie with him. A cheery, energetic guy, I never quite understood him or what was going on. But I recalled him saying, “Just how deeply do you believe?”

After thinking about the dream and feeding the cats, that phrase started Nine Inch Nails, “That Hand that Feeds” (2005), streaming through me. “Just how deep do you believe? Will you bite the hand that feeds? Will you chew until it bleeds?”

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My Valenfloof

“I know you,” he said with a lick to my hand.

“Perhaps not from here, but from another time and land.”

“Yes, I know you, too,” I said to the little whiskered face.

“I’m glad we found each other once after coming to this place.”

So we’re privileged to witness, once more,

the transcendent love between a paw person,

and the human they adore.

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Enflooflope

Enflooflope (floofinition) – the accepted limits for what housepets are permitted to do; being constrained or trapped by housepets.

In use: “Jade was a smart and willful tabby who enjoyed pushing the enflooflope, jumping up counters and table tops, taking food from plates as though it was her serving, arguing back with sharp meows and a swishing tail when remonstrated.”

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