Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Much going on here, and I may not be publishing Contra quite as often as in previous months. A lot centers on preparing materials for Lulu, which I'm going to be testing in a number of ways. I'm also testing a new scanner designed specifically for scanning books and magazines, and will report here once I've gotten a good feel for it.
• I got a Skype spam the other day, and (worse) it was a 419 scam from South Africa. The instant the message arrived, the sender was offline, clearly to avoid being traced. Although Skype can block senders, it's pretty obvious that that message would not arrive from that same sender again. Conventional spam is also up, and nearly all of the additional spam is pump-and-dump stock scams, which may well be the perfect crime.
• I'm increasingly convinced that Flash is hugely superior to AJAX as a Web 2.0 platform. Check out calendar/organizer app Scrybe, a Flash app that (admittedly) is not yet generally available-but play the video. Egad. I don't know about you, but I find that extremely impressive, especially since Scrybe works when you're offline, and will seamlessly sync with your server-side data as soon as you connect.
• There is a transit of Mercury this coming Wednesday. While not as vanishingly rare as a transit of Venus, it's still uncommon, and worth watching if you have the usual solar eclipse paraphernalia. The transit will be seen in its entirety only from the westernmost quarter of the US; east of there, the sun will set before the Mercury completes its run across the solar disk. Here in Colorado, we'll get most of it, though the transit will end shortly after sunset, and the presence of mountains on our western horizon makes things a little complex. I'm heading about five miles east to our church's parking lot to get away from Cheyenne Mountain, and will have my 8" scope projecting an image on foamcore for anyone who wants a look.