Safe room

I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 — the latest and greatest desktop/laptop OS from Microsoft. All security updates are in place, and I use Microsoft Security Essentials. Yesterday I was reading a Google blog and, as I sometimes do for fun, I was giving the “Next Blog” link a few spins. And what happened? I landed on a page that made McAfee Site Advisor go crazy with warnings. Firefox was obviously being redirected to a bad place and then, before I could do anything, Security Essentials chimed in with warnings. I killed Firefox, then immediately rolled the system back to the last restore point. After restarting Windows I ran a scan and it came up clean.

This is where I get off the train. I’m giving up on Windows ever being secure, and I have no confidence that sticking with legitimate sites offers any assurance of safety (yes, I know Google can’t police every blog it hosts). So I’m typing this using Firefox, on Ubuntu Linux 10.10, that’s running inside of a VMware Player virtual machine. If anything bad happens in my comfort zone here, I’ll blow away the virtual machine and create new one from the Ubuntu ISO file.

By the way, I registered my little site with McAfee, and to the extent that WordPress and the plugins I use are safe, and if Bluehost isn’t harboring anything bad, the site is clean, and you won’t find any ads here either, of course.

Follow-up: And now I’m running Jolicloud, a custom version of Linux 2.6 in another virtual machine. Cool beans, to borrow an expression used by a friend of mine.

The tittering chinchilla

Samjay says that yesterday I missed the funniest thing he’s ever seen in all his years of watching Jeopardy!

[media id=234 width=512 height=404]

By the way, I saw the second and third days of Jeopardy!’s Watson computer challenge. When IBM announced the contest I asked Larissa Kelly about it, and she said that she was looking forward to watching it herself. Considering the drubbing that Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter suffered, I guess I’m glad Larissa wasn’t a contestant!

Marion Harris and the birth of popular music

As usual, I have a bunch of posts I’ve been ticky-tacking away at for a while, but haven’t finished, then something grabs me so I write about that instead. Ya gotta love Louis Prima. Man, that cat could swing! Listen to this bit from his fantastic 1956 mash-up of “I’m Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” — later covered by none other than David Lee Roth.

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Mar/LouisPrima.mp3|titles=Louis Prima: I Ain’t Got Nobody (excerpt)]

But get this. Marion Harris recorded “I Ain’t Got Nobody” before WWI!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24dfSxU1S64

Here’s a song that’s familiar to people of a certain age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjHJ_snG3RI

Marion Harris did that one first, too, the year it was written, 1923.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w0bzYKdXwk

Here’s a favorite by Harris. Listen to her phrasing in “After You’ve Gone,” and you’ll hear Marion’s influence on generations of singers to come.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA6ulKFXiTA

Schulzian doings

Right now, Monte Schulz is at Warwicks, a bookstore in La Jolla, CA. Monte’s new book, The Last Rose of Summer is out, and I have my copy, although I’m 3,000 miles from La Jolla, so I won’t be able to get Monte’s autograph on it. I’ll be reading it as soon as I am through a couple of non-fiction books. I prefer to read novels without having any other books in progress. Monte owns the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference, which this year is being held June 18-23 in, you guessed it, Santa Barbara.

On the Peanuts side of the Schulz family, which is run by Monte’s brother Craig, there is a new DVD coming out, and a graphic novel, the first Peanuts publication from the Kaboom! arm of BOOM! Studios.

You may recall that Charles Schulz never had an assistant helping him with the comic strip, but that did not hold for the Peanuts comic books from DELL (before there was a computer company by the same name), and later Gold Key. Jim Sasseville, then Dale Hale, worked with Schulz on those comics. D.F. Rogers has a great idea, that Nat Gertler should put together the complete collection of Peanuts comic books. High quality color scans from the original comics would be great.

I haven’t checked eBay lately, but I assume there are still sketches being offered that sellers claim are by Charles M. Schulz, but are obvious fakes. Here’s a sketch that looks like it might be genuine. The owner asked a newspaper columnist for an estimate of what it’s worth, and assuming it was done by Schulz I think he’s wrong about the personalized autograph holding down the value of the piece.