Update: Slate.com has an article: Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free. Commonsense stuff, but the kind of thing newbies don’t know about.

It also links to Spybot Search & Destroy, which is a piece of freeware cooked up by hacker-activists. Yay hacker-activists!

I spent a bunch of time today on the phone, helping a friend deal with some malware on her employer’s PC. She followed a reasonable, non-porn link on a web page and ended up at a porn site that put a bunch of programs on her computer.

The most useful site we found for dealing with this stuff was DoxDesk’s parasite page, which can scan your computer for malware and walk you through its removal.

It’s insane stuff. These programs install themselves, change your computer’s settings, open pop-up windows willy-nilly… I hadn’t realized how completely bad it is. If you’re running Windows, go to that link up there and find out what programs you’ve got running that maybe you don’t want.

And when you think about it, it’s creepy that the linked page can do that in the first place.

Did I, or did I not tell you to go give the luv to picoscope?

I’ve been curious about digital panoramic images for quite a while, but not curious enough to go to the trouble of buying a tripod and making a pano head for it. So it’s tremendously inspiring for me to read about this guy who stitched together 196 images of Bryce Canyon into a single, gigapixel image. The rest of his site is interesting, too, if you’re into it.

More photog linkage: Luminous Landscape, which has all kinds of good info for dilletantes such as myself.

A wiki about Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle/Cryptonomicon universe. It’s pretty amazingly detailed. It also has annotation by page number.

Browsing through it is interesting, because it’s kind of a shorthand way of re-reading the books.

Walking down The Ave and I stop at an intersection. A guy with a clipboard locks eyes with me. Immediately, he says, “Want to help us stop George W. Bush?”

I have this image in my head of this guy and some friends of his like a defensive line, tackling Bush as he gets off of Air Force One. Ooh, happy, happy thoughtcrime.

So I ask him: “That depends. Who are you?”

He goes into a schpiel about the DNC, yadda yadda yadda. He ends with begging for a contribution.

And it was then that I realized exactly what I had to say. The all-purpose catchphrase for the new millenium: “I gave on the web.”

Go give picoscope the luv.

Go download the US Constitution for your iPod.

I’m thinking about the metaphor of the onion, which you peel back layer by layer. This is a popular metaphor in both psychology and spiritual development; the idea is that you remove the outermost layers to get to what is deep and central. To get to the core.

Except onions don’t have cores, and neither do we. Peeling away the layers yields only either another layer, or no more layers. You’re left with either another challenge or… nothing.

This is true of us as people. No one wants to admit that they’re all layers and no core. We diverge from the metaphor by constructing more and more layers until we die, assuming we go to the trouble of peeling the layers back in the first place.

I look around me and I see people putting makeup on themselves. Or maybe costuming is a better metaphor… They play dress-up with their soul. Today I wake up and put on a pirate outfit and say ARRRR! a lot. Tomorrow I wear a monk’s vestments. The next day I’m in jeans and a t-shirt. Each costume is a new way of relating to other people, to the world, to the universe. There’s no layered onion here, unless you wear the costume of a layered onion, and dutifully play your fancy ball role of running around counting how many layers you’ve removed.

And I’m much happier with the fancy ball metaphor than with the layered onion one. I’d rather the evil of the world merely be someone playing their silly little role.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Two thumbs way up!

Honestly, it’s the smartest movie I’ve seen in quite a while. Just thinky and archetypal enough for adults and older kids, with enough flashy stuff for smaller ones. Lots of intense scary stuff, though, and I’m pretty sure the 7-year-old who was sitting a couple seats down is going to have nightmares.

It’s a moody, dark, children’s movie, with insane murderers, werewolves, and the death of innocents. Well written, with beautiful cinematography. And Gary Oldman and Alan Rickman on the screen at the same time; too bad that’s wasted on one of the weakest scenes in the movie.

Forget that it’s for kids. Go see it.

The mind is like a wild horse, resisting the bridle. I had something in mind to write about here, but the free associations continued, and what seemed big and meaningful shrank into the distance, a speck on the horizon. That doesn’t make it any less meaningful, just farther away and less relevant.

Whenever I see the Budweiser Clydesdales in their harnesses, pulling the big cart piled high with kegs, I can’t help but imagine they’re talking amongst themselves, saying: “Yeah, but we’re fucking GIANT HORSES, man! We could crush this puny cart just by thinking about it!” “Clydesdales of the world, unite!”

The mind is like a wild horse, pulling no draught (and pulling no draught).

Yesterday, I bought McSweeney’s #13, which is a lovely and beautiful thing to behold. It’s a work of art just sitting there, but o so worthwhile once you open its (dust)covers and look inside.

It doesn’t have wild horses or Clydesdales in it, as far as I can tell.

I finally got the most recent David Sylvian album, ‘Blemish.’ He formed his own label to put out records, and it doesn’t have very wide distribution.

‘Blemish’ is sparse, strange, minimal. It’s the marriage of the ambient Sylvian with the songs-with-hooks Sylvian. The song lyrics are about dark subject matter, like abuse and loneliness, which are topics Sylvian doesn’t usually delve into: “Like blemishes upon the skin/Truth sets in”

The music itself is all about running resonating guitar strings through effects pedals. It’s only barely musical, but manages to be beautiful. Sylvian’s in total control here, even though it sounds like he’s just being experimental. He’s been doing this kind of stuff for a long time, and has refined these techniques to an impressive degree. His voice is also stronger and more certain than I can remember it being before, even though the lyrics come from places of powerlessness.

I think that this is an album for one specific moment. It’s a very specific aesthetic, and the subject matter doesn’t give a lot of joy. Anyone can listen to it and appreciate it, but very few people will like it. If you’re familiar with Sylvian’s work, then it makes perfect sense, and you’ll nod your head, even as you go find your ‘Secrets of the Beehive’ CD to play it instead. But for the uninitiated, it’ll be a stretch.