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I had a little segment all prepared and my phone rang. It was the house phone, which I don't usually answer – just for the reason that follows.

A fellow, yes, I admit it, from India and with a very thick accent who identified himself as Jacob, told me that I was getting this phone call because the company that he worked for – a Microsoft company – was getting messages from my computer that I was spreading a malware. He told me to go to "Run" and enter "eventvwr," which is simply the event log. It keeps track of, well, events, like when a process runs, when there's a disk error, if there's a system crash, etc. There are thousands of them, potentially, in a given day.

He asked me to tell me what I saw more of, yellow triangles or red circles. I said triangles. That wasn't the answer he was hoping for, but he played along. “Oh, he said, that is very bad. Very bad.”

“Ma'am,” he went on, “Do you have any idea where these could be coming from?”

Well, I said, probably because I was editing video and having a lot of trouble with the program crashing. I can see that by the date and time.

Another bad answer.

Did I see many red circles, he persisted.

Yep. I said.

Oh, that is very, very bad. Ma'am, those are very, very malicious programs which are being downloaded by your computer without you knowing.

Oh, it's ok, I said, I have malware protection, virus protection and a hardware firewall. I'm all set.

Well no ma'am, these are very malicious...

Click.

It may be entertaining to play along, but seriously, these guys are aiming to get control of your computer (with your permission), make sure there are problems, and get you to sign up for a roughly $300 protection plan.

Don't get taken in. Jacob isn't his real name.

I made a discovery today. Actually, a couple of discoveries. I started out with the notion that I was going to get all my various computers and devices organized and shared on my home network, so that no matter where I was, or what I was doing, I would be able to access files and information. If you saw my house, you'd understand!

I had a problem not long ago with one of my Mac computers fighting with my Epson wireless printer for an IP address - the Mac won, and my Epson was disabled. I didn't realize what the problem was at first, all I knew was I couldn't print, and nothing I did would wake the Epson up.

Finally, I recalled reading somewhere in passing that there could be a conflict with a Mac and a wireless printer, so I made sure all my Macs were shut down. I didn't think to shut down my phone and iPad, but luckily they weren't the culprits, anyway.

Sure enough, when I rebooted my printer, all was well. I still have to learn how to give my Macbook Air a different IP address so there's no conflict. But in searching for this information, I found an app that can get me started - it's called "Fing," and it’s free for your iPhone, iPad, or Android.

What the app does, very simply and quickly, is scan your network and find all the IP address (they will show up in the form 192.xxx.x.xxx, where each x is a unique number assigned to that device on that network. These numbers typically start with 192. Now you know what IP address is assigned to each device, and can undertake the assigning of a new device to a unique number. Each number for each device on my network showed up in order, so that the last three numbers were .1, .101, .102, etc.
So check out the application Fing if you're having network issues, or if you simply want to know how your network is laid out.

Next, I wanted to authorize my SONY Vaio on iTunes so that it could download applications and share in my purchases from iTunes. I followed the instructions I found carefully, but was unable to find the dropdown to authorize my computer. Instead what I found was something called iTunes U. Wow! I've written on the subject of Coursera before, and told you what an amazing offering it is - I've taken two courses now and find them to be, in general, excellent.

iTunes U is along the same lines, but in bite size, or podcast size segments. It's all free, and it ranges from learning languages to the Bodelian Library, health and nutrition, and right now I'm downloading a bunch of lectures on the Age of Mythology. I'm not sure how I missed this one before, but it's a promise, I make that mistake twice!

I'll save the rest of my networking issues for another column!

What is it with the Internet and cats??

For years we've been entertained by lolcats - the image of a cat combined with text that is supposed to be what the cat is thinking. As we all know, cats are devious and tricky, and lolcats reveal, in lolspeak, or kitty pidgin, the innermost workings of their devilish brains. If you haven't seen one, and wonder what I'm talking about, imagine the picture of a, er, large kitty, the caption reading, "I can has cheezeburger?" and you'll get the idea.

These images are all over the place, but one of the most famous websites for sharing is icanhas.cheezburger.com.

In fact, as is typically the case, lolcats weren't invented on the Internet. The idea is an old one, but just caught fire because of the ease of sharing online. In fact, the earliest recorded silly kitty photos were a series of postcards created by British portrait photographer Harry Pinter. In the 1870s he posed kitties in silly situation, and then added text to further frustrate the felines.

Other photographers picked up on the idea, and while it wasn't exactly a craze, it certainly predated the 2006 first known appearance of a lolcat online.

Now welcome Sushi Cats, captioned as "a cute collection of magical felines resting on sushi rice" by Japanese company Tange & Nakimushi Peanuts. In this case, the poor cats - and they do look both patient and annoyed - are dressed in eccentric but edible oddities, then seated on a bed of rice and secure there with a strip of what looks like seaweed. Their official name is Neko-Sushi.

Again, according to the official history, "Neko-Sushi is an extremely unusual life-form consisting of a cat on top of a portion of sushi rice. Although several references have come down to us through history from various researchers and witnesses, their existence is still shrouded in mystery and actual sightings remain rare. There are several academics who have devoted their lives to the study of these creatures. According to a number of these, Neko-Sushi make use of gaps in space to come to us from an alternate dimension. Beyond these “gaps” lies the world of the Neko-Sushi in which, it is recently understood, lies the true identity of the cats that dwell with us here in the human dimension."

Well, given that I'm not a sushi fan, I'm in no danger of mistaking one of these for smoked eel sushi and chowing down. But you sushi eaters, beware the revenge of Neko-Sushi if you do try to eat one. You know how kitties can behave!

A mystery: a post on Facebook announced via something called "Vine," "I got my first Birchbox." What?

Yeah, I'm behind the curve here.

Vine is a mobile app that was recently purchased by Twitter, and is the video equivalent of the 140-character post that comprises a Twitter comment.

Vine's maximum length is 6 seconds (6 seconds??), and can be shared via other social media apps, like Twitter and Facebook.

What's distressing, and possibly fatal, for Vine is that advertising agencies weren't nearly so slow on the uptake as yours truly.

According to Wikipedia, "In a couple of months, (after the 2012 purchase of Vine by Twitter) Vine quickly became the most used video-sharing application in the market, even with low adoption of the app. Other video-sharing services began to see declining use. On April 9, 2013, Vine became the number one most downloaded free app within The App Store (iOS)."

Vine allows the user to take short videos using the Vine-associated camera, but only while the screen is being tapped. Well, technically, tap and hold, tap and hold, tap and hold. Vine will then assemble the various cliplets into a sort of animation that tells a 6-second story.

Now, for the second part of that post: Birchbox.

Nothing is new under the sun.

Many years ago, there was a beauty service that offered subscribers a gift box a month for a nominal fee. It was an assortment of the company's beauty products - sample sizes - geared toward your style, preferences, and coloring. I have to admit, it was fun to get the sample box each month, and I actually did become a fan of some of the products.

Birchbox is more... ecumenical. It offers products for both women and men, but other than that, it's pretty much the same idea. For $10 a month, you get a surprise box with sample "beauty and lifestyle" products, and full size items that earn you points for further product purchases. You can also buy gift boxes and promotions.

I opened a Hotmail account today. And I said it out loud.

Not too long ago, someone published a list of the hierarchy of email addresses, from the best (your own domain) to the worst (probably Hotmail). Though I have to admit that when Hotmail first came out, it being one of the early online services, everybody had a Hotmail account, me included. It very quickly went the way of all only-cool-for-an-instant items, and was the sort of address only your mom or your weird Uncle George the Luddite would admit to having.

The big news of the year, though, was the Microsoft was going to revamp Hotmail, and turn it into an online version of Outlook - and about time, I'd say. The consensus is that Microsoft did a really good job.

What occurs to me both in looking at my own setup, and in reading reviews, is that Microsoft took the best of its hard working email client, Outlook, and the best of online email program extraordinaire (Gmail) and pulled the best features from each, combining them into a solid, savvy, service that offers flair as well as function - and can serve as your one-stop portal for email, social connection, contacts, and best of all, organization.

If you made me choose Gmail's one failure for my money, and failure is too strong a word, really, it would be that Gmail makes it difficult to organize your stuff in a way that's compatible with working versus searching. Gmail opted to organize email into topics, or tag, before it finally succumbed to the idea of folders, and even when it finally realized that when in work mode, most people do want to organize by folders rather than search by topic - even if tagging a thread makes it accessible by many different topics. It's that very feature, for better or worse, that is daunting: What did I tag that again? When I'm thinking in terms of folders, I am very precise: I organize by client, by job, by year - I build a system and think that way. When I'm tagging, it is more mood dependent, or perhaps I organize by the nature of the specific email.

Outlook - or Hotmail - has that new, bright, boxy look of Microsoft's Windows 8. But it's pulled with it a lot of what we know and love about Outlook email - the easy to parse left to right organization, the folders, the reading pane, and the customizable views.

Quick views allows you to access the power of Gmail’s tagged searches, letting you choose only emails with attachments, or smart categories (I want to see Amazon shipping information only), and it brings up front a capacity Outlook always had, which is to search your inbox by keyword.

Like Gmail, Hotmail now offers contact photos, instant access to Facebook or Skype (the Google Chat alternative) video calling, Contacts, a calendar, and something called "SkyDrive," the equivalent of Google's Drive - a home in the clouds for your photos, documents, and shared items.

For now, I'll use this email platform for business, to finally find a way to segregate my friends and info emails from my home business emails. It all looks pretty promising. Give me a month or so and I'll give you a final verdict.

Maybe you've heard about the new Facebook Home - the not app, not OS, could-be-dangerous, definitely quirkily marketed new, er, "thing" from Facebook.

Here's how Mashable describes Home: "...Facebook Home isn't a new OS and it isn't a fork of Android, instead it is a new home screen and app launcher interface for Android that gives your Facebook notifications, news feed posts and messages more integration with the overall phone experience."

Ok, so from that we know that Facebook Home, let's call it FH for now, is for Android, and it ties Facebook more closely into your use of your Android phone in all its many capacities.

What does it do?

First, it will run covers as soon as you turn your phone on, or activate it. The "cover feed" is just your news feed, including photos, status updates, and links. Whatever your friends are sharing, it's there in your cover feed.

Then, it will push notifications, like updates on Facebook and other apps.

Then, there is the oddly-named "chat heads." These are avatar based messages, including your text messages and Facebook messenger, that will pop up on your screen when you're contacted - and you don't have to leave whatever else it was that you were doing to answer it. (I have to ask: are we running out of cutesy names for apps, or was Facebook just being really silly?)

Now, here's some downside, according to at least some reviewers of the product:

• It can be difficult to shut down


• By knowing what apps you're using when (as it becomes your app launcher, though you *can* bypass this feature, Facebook now knows more than ever before about you, your preferences, and aggregate data about all of us


• By knowing which apps get used the most, Facebook knows where to expend its own development efforts in creating clone apps


• Your phone's GPS can send constant information *to Facebook* about where you are, what you're doing, who you're talking to, where you go most frequently, essentially, whatever you do by phone now via a variety of apps will now be done through one single powerful portal, Facebook, and Facebook has never been shy before about mining that data.

So, as with most things, there is an upside and a down. I'll wait to hear from Android-using friends about how well they like the new face of Facebook mobile.

It's possible that I'm wrong about this, and if so, I'll eat the paper I wrote it on.

But I just don't get the new buzz-app, Vizify (that's Viz with a Z, kids).

It's all about you. But as far as I can see - and see it's what it seems to be about - it's so all about you, only you could possibly be interested.

Where Facebook is about sharing your days and doings, Twitter doesn't quite make my grade because its 140 characters force twitterers to try too hard to be cool. Facebook lets you just talk, or show a photo, video, or like something, no comment. Twitter forces an economy of scale that screams "use cool shorthand and hashtags and find a way to say what you have to say non-turgidly."

So where Pinterest is about sharing images of what interests you, from books to music to animals to scenery, Vizify's whole reason for being is to reduce YOU to a series of images. Not like Pinterest's images of other things, but what's known as infographics - thus, the number of times you've looked in the mirror today, or the hours of each day you spend doodling - or perhaps it's data that the app itself has scraped from your other online social media and cobbled into a graphic display. Perhaps you love to tweet about your favorite musical group, and you also slavishly mention this group in your blogs and as Facebook posts. Vizify will take all those mentions and create a clever graphic representation of your obsession.

Users can simply apply the information to a profile on their Vizify site, or they can use the little Vizcards (the infographics) to whatever other social media they prefer.

The truth is, I must not have been cool enough to make the cut, because, like many apps before it (Gmail, for example) it was by invite only while it was in Beta, and not only did I not get an invite, but I hadn't even heard of it until I stumbled across it quite accidentally while reading media news the other day. As of Friday, owners expect the 250,000 by invitation-only users to swell in ranks as the app opens its doors to the wretched rest of us. I still don't know anybody who's using it.

For my money, I think there are so many social sites out there, that display our tastes, interests, passing fancies and goodnights in so many varied ways that it's impossible to keep up with all of them as it is - and this one, like Twitter, practically begs us to play at it, rather than mean it. I must be profound, or I am a loser. I must find a way to make myself look interesting, graphically, or I will officially be boring. See? It says so right there - on Vizify. So it must be true.

Where is this all headed? As I noted with no small amount of irony on this blog not too long ago, there's a lot of us out there talking...I'm just not sure who's also listening.

Just when you thought Google couldn't come up with another way to set itself apart, along comes its animated site, "How Search Works." This site basically asks the age old question, what starts with 30 trillion individual pages, is constantly growing, and can give you the one answer you were looking for - in seconds?

The answer, of course, is search, specifically Google search, and with its new animated site at www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory, you can find out everything you ever wanted to know about how Google actually goes about finding what you're looking for.

You're going to want to see this for yourself, but here's a quick synopsis:

It all starts with crawling. Google sends out spiders, who literally crawl the web, looking for search terms and strings, and sorting their relevance by a number of different factors. Then all this data is indexed. That index only takes up about 100 million gigabytes. I don't even want to think of something that big, much less looking for my data in it!

Then the story moves on to algorithms. This is the deep magic of Google, and why it has stood out among search engines almost from its inception. It just has a better way of figuring out which pages are most likely to give you the information you're looking for. The algorithms include things like synonyms, spelling, query understanding, and methodology.

Then, using over 200 factors, including freshness of content, site pages and quality, safety, and user context, Google will determine which pages to give you back, and in what order.

Google Labs - and I want to know who those guys are and what planet they're from! - is constantly refining, tweaking, and rethinking its methodology. And you're even invited to tour the lab as you hunt around the animation.

As I said, this is an ultra-simplified, boiled-down description of the animation, and you can browse through any number of more detailed insights as you explore the site.

So if you've ever been curious about how it all works at Google - stop over and find out for yourself!

It's something called a "penny auction." If I've got it straight, here's how it works.

You buy a bunch of bids for $.60 a bid. They come in "packs" of 100 or more.

An item goes up for bids. Each bid increments the price $.01, but COSTS the bidder $.60. The bidding lasts a certain amount of time, and there is a "no jumper" clause, which simply means that nobody can join an auction after the price has reached $5.00. The last bid in when the clock runs out wins the item, and pays the amount of that item. The other people who bid but lost LOSE their bids (at $.60 a pop), unless they are willing to pay the full retail for the item (from DealDash, of course), in which case, their bids are refunded.

So here's my thinking: If you're going to buy the item anyway (exactly the one they have for sale) and feel that the price they're offering it at is reasonable, by all means, go ahead. Or if you have a ton of time on your hands and enjoy auctions, then you very well may pick up some amazing deals, especially on arcane little oddities that aren't really popular (that is to say, I'd avoid auctions for things like the new iPad with retinal display). Otherwise, shopping around is still a better deal.

Just when you thought search was pretty much covered by all the various engines and algorithms out there, Facebook introduces a new type of search - one based on your friends. And friends of friends.

And every other permutation you can think up.

They're calling it Graph Search, and the idea is to find events, people, activities, places, all based on what you and your friends have declared interest in. Right now the application is in Beta form, and you can sign up to be given an invite to test it out.

We've talked about advertising in this regard in this column before. Advertisers have a real advantage when they're talking to people who have expressed interest in their product or service. So Facebook is banking on the notion that searchers will find results even more beneficial when they search for things based on mutual interests among friends.

An example provided by Facebook is to search on "restaurants in New York City my friends have liked." That could be useful, especially if you have lots of friends who frequent New York City.

Another way to use the Graph Search, and probably the genesis of the slightly odd name is searching by photos. So, "photos of beaches," or "photos of favorite beaches," or "photos of beaches in Georgia," and so on. Then you'll see all the photos posted by friends of beaches that meet your search criteria.

There was some speculation that this new Facebook feature would pose a threat of some kind to Google. That seems a little out there to me, given that it is limited in scope to friends, and friends of friends. However, it could replace Google as your search engine of choice when you want a recommendation for a particular brand, place, event, or activity - and that could pose a threat to Google's advertising pre-eminence, though it's more likely to simply move Facebook advertising up a notch than to dethrone Google. That isn't just because Facebook would get the search traffic for recommendations, but also because individuals would be, in the marketing parlance, "raising their hands" in favor of a brand, place, event or activity - and there's nothing marketers love more than that.

As of this writing, I'm awaiting my invitation. If I get one, I'll let you know how I like the adventure.