Talk about paying it forward. Within days, Amir Massoud Tofangsazan has become famous on the Internet. The story goes that he sold his laptop computer to someone under false pretenses. First of all, the laptop didn’t have the features that were advertised. It took almost two months after payment before Amir shipped it. More importantly, it was broken. Apparently he pissed off the wrong guy. The seller created this blog, which contains the story of the transaction, plus lots of interesting content that the seller was able to retrieve from the laptop’s hard drive. The stuff pulled from Amir’s laptop included all kinds of gay and fetish porn photos, embarassing pics of Amir himself, and clips from Amir’s CV bragging about how punctual and honest he is. The seller says he’ll take down the blog when Amir refunds the £375 that he paid for the laptop. The story was picked up by traditional media outlets in England, and also spread around the Internet like wildfire. Someone had to start a second blog to handle the comments coming in, discussing Amir’s alleged actions.

I don’t know if it’s all true or not. I guess it’s too early to say for sure. The story is now being investigated by the police. But Amir isn’t helping himself out too much. Apparently he’s been posting comments under various fake names attacking the seller and the creator of the comments blog. Amir’s problem is that his threatening, abusive tone and distinctively poor use of the English language make it a dead giveaway that he’s the one writing all of these comments. Anyway, I’ve heard of “buyer beware,” but this story proves that “seller beware” is equally good advice.

I heard a related joke this morning on the radio. A guy dies suddenly, and finds himself at St. Peter’s Gate in heaven. He begs and begs to have his life back, just for five minutes. St. Peter, thinking that the guy just wants to spend some more time with his wife or something, asks what the guy could possibly do in five minutes. The guy said, “Erase my hard drive.”

Yeah.

Well, I haven’t felt much like writing lately. No real explanation for it. Just kinda feel unmotivated, you know? I don’t have the feeling it’s negative, or positive, or anything. It’s just the way it is right now.

I dragged myself here to provide a bit of an update though. On the topic of Big in Japan’s trip to NYC, we’ve started discussing the details amongst ourselves. There are nine of us on the team who will be making the trip, plus a few other people like friends, significant others, family members, etc. All of us have different budgets and schedules, so we worked a bit on figuring out the best options to make the trip as much fun and as inexpensive as possible. First of all, we’re going to stay in a hostel. We chose one that’s not too far away, and that also has 10-bed dorm rooms. Since it’s an improv marathon, we won’t be sleeping much anyway. If we rent the whole room, we can lock it up and our stuff will be safe inside while we hang out at the theatre or explore the city. I’m going to book the room on Tuesday when the manager returns after Memorial Day.

We also decided we’ll probably fly down from Buffalo instead of driving or bussing. It’s only about $130 to fly from Buffalo if we get the flights early enough, and that’s cheaper than a bus from Toronto. Driving down takes about 10 hours each way, and isn’t much cheaper than flying if we’re renting a car.

We’re going to hold a couple of fundraising events to help defray the costs of our trip. I think there will be a variety night of some kind, with comedy, music, a DJ, etc. We can also hold a BBQ. We have less than two months to go, but we’re getting to work on it ASAP.

In other news, I’ve been offered an opportunity to shoot someone’s wedding in Playa del Carmen, Mexico next February. I had thought about going back to Asia around that time, but I’ll make some money shooting this wedding, so the worst it can do is delay my travel plans for Asia. Usually I won’t shoot weddings, but I can make an exception in this case!

My brilliant sister Jadine is graduating with a Masters of Science from the University of British Columbia’s School of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene tomorrow morning. She’ll be an Occupational Hygienist. Congratulations, Jadine! I will have to refrain from asking her to clean my teeth. That’s a different kind of hygienist.

Big in Japan got accepted into the annual Del Close Improv Marathon in New York City. It’s a non-stop weekend festival of improv, spanning several stages. Our time slot is 12 noon on July 30, at the UCB Mainstage. I had half expected us to get a crappy 6AM time slot on an obscure stage, if we got in at all. But noon on Sunday on the main stage is pretty good. We were hyped about the news.

Last night’s show was a lot of fun. We were down to four people, because several of us couldn’t make it. Summer is a busy time for everyone, and I think we’re going to be shorthanded for a lot of shows. Last night, we basically threw away the Harold form and jammed out some quick-paced scenes based on our suggestion of “toad.” It was great playing with a small group. Not only did it boost our confidence and energy, but we got a chance to play multiple characters again. Sometimes with a larger group playing a set format like Harold, we don’t get to play more than one character. Anyway, we’re riding high now.

A lot of the world’s advances in personal information management would never have happened if men were allowed to carry purses. We have developed all kinds of complicated belt-clipped and pocket-sized devices, like smart phones and PDAs, to replace the perfectly functional, but bulky paper agenda.

“Notebook” software is a somewhat recent addition to the mix of purse-less agenda replacements. I’m talking about software that keeps track of a collection of text, picture and multimedia clips. Although most agenda software has a simple notepad of some kind built in, it’s often nice to have a tool specifically made for keeping notes. A couple of years ago, I started keeping a plain text document (still called “New Text Document.txt”) that I would edit with notepad.exe for little things I needed to jot down. That document is automatically synchronized with my PocketPC so I can take it everywhere with me.

Microsoft OneNote took the “notebook software” idea to the next level by adding a whole raft of new features. It was designed as a companion for the Tablet Edition of Windows XP. I’ve been using OneNote for several months now, and I’ve yet to use some of the advanced features, like the spell checker, audio recording or drawing tools. Sometimes it’s because I don’t feel the need to use them. In other cases, as with the Outlook “integration,” it’s so complicated or poorly implemented that it’s not worth the effort. For instance, OneNote would be much more useful if it could synchronize in real-time with your notes in Outlook so you could take them with you on your Windows Mobile or PocketPC device. But I digress.

Google Notebook is a new project from Google Labs, and it is similar in many ways to MS OneNote. It takes a slightly different approach though. While OneNote keeps all your files on your local PC, Google Notebook stores your data on Google’s servers. Depending on how you feel about the security and privacy of your data, you may or may not like this, but it has some advantages. The biggest advantage is that you can retrieve your notebook information from anywhere you can access the Internet.

Google Notebook is also a lot simpler than OneNote, which isn’t entirely a bad thing. Like I said before, I don’t use most of the advanced features of OneNote, so having a leaner program with less clutter can be an advantage. Google Notebook has all of the basic features of a notebook program though. You can create different sub-notebooks to organize your things. You can manually create new notes, or you can copy and paste them from websites. One very cool feature is that you can set any of your sub-notebooks as “public” so you can share them with the world. It’s a bit similar to del.icio.us, but feels slightly different because it is geared more towards notes rather than bookmarks.

Google Notebook runs within your browser. It’s written in AJAX, so although it’s a web application, it acts like a desktop application. In the screen shot above, you can see that I’ve grabbed a note and I’m dragging it to a different section of the notebook.

There’s an optional, but highly recommended browser extension for Firefox that makes Google Notebook much easier to use. After you install the extension, you can select any text or pictures from a web page, right click and “Send to Google Notebook.”

After you’ve added the new note to your notebook, you can move it to a different section, edit it, or delete it. You can also manually create new notes and just type them in.

As good as Google Notebook is, there are some limitations. For instance, for obvious copyright reasons, it doesn’t copy pictures into your notebook. It just displays them from the originating server, so if that web page is removed, or if the server is set up to block external linking to images, you’re out of luck. At least with OneNote you can copy and paste the actual image into the notebook.
Also, I wish there was a way to send a note directly to a certain section of your notebook. Right now, it just sends the note to the last section that was opened. You have to either open your notebook and manually switch to the right section before copying the note, or you have to drag the note into the correct section after copying it. It’s a bit cumbersome, and could be solved by expanding the “Send to Google Notebook” menu item to show the existing sub-notebooks within. To be fair, this is a limitation shared by OneNote too.

There’s also no way to synchronize Google Notebook with my PocketPC. Since OneNote doesn’t do this effectively either, I am still left with my original New Text Document.txt for keeping notes that I want to take with me when I go out.

So, it seems that each of my methods of note-keeping has managed to stay useful to me in some way. I’m now concurrently keeping notes in my New Text Document.txt, MS OneNote, and Google Notebook. Google Notebook is still in beta stages (like nearly everything with “Google” in front of it), so there’s still hope for the future. But, life would be a lot simpler if I could just carry a purse!

• You can get Google Notebook here.
• You can get information about Microsoft OneNote here
• To create a New Text Document.txt, just right-click on your desktop and choose “New > Text Document”

Subject matter may be cliché, but style should never be.