"The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde

I apologize for only getting this posted now. I forgot about it on the 27th and PM'd Wench the next day asking for permissions to post it. I apparently missed her reply and am only posting now.

"The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde tells us the tale of SpecOps LiteraTec agent Thursday Next and her misadventures with her adversary, mastermind Acheron Hades. Hades is a criminal who can project his outward image as anything he likes, he's nearly impervious to bullets (as Next finds out) and he can exert his will through weak-minded people.

The book is set in an almost 1984ish Britain, ironically in the year 1985. The story begins with some background information. Shortly after, the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens is stolen. The theft puzzles the authorities on the scene. The surveillance tapes show no disturbances, and the glass case the manuscript was housed in only shows slight ripples on one side. Thursday Next knows who is responsible: Acheron Hades.

So begins her renewed pursuit of the number-three most wanted criminal in all of Britain. Later, a stakeout goes wrong when one of the persons involved accidentally whispers Hades' name -- alerting him to their presence with another of his superhuman powers. All the agents involved in the stakeout are killed, except for Next due to the care of a stranger. She later determines that it was none other than Edward Rochester, the eventual husband of Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Hades kidnaps Thursday's aunt and uncle, Mycroft and Polly. He also steals Mycroft's latest invention, the Prose Portal, which allows people to travel into literary works. Hades has one of his men go into Martin Chuzzlewit and kidnap an unnamed drunkard mentioned in one scene. The man then kills the character, only later to be discovered by Next. Dickens fans across England are perplexed at the disappearance of the drunkard, who was erased from the book upon his death.

When Jack Schitt and Next track Hades, his lackeys, and Mycroft and Polly to an abandoned hotel in Wales, Hades jumps into Jane Eyre. Thursday follows him. After what seems like months in the book, but is really not that long in the real world, Hades disguises himself and infiltrates Thornfield Hall to kill Jane. Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason, chases Hades around with a pair of scissors. Hades seems genuinely wary of this crazy Creole. He sets fire to the house in an attempt to kill Next, Rochester, and Mason. After a shootout on the roof where Rochester gets his hand shot off, Next finally accepts that her ammunition will have no affect on Hades. She realizes that the Creole's scissors were made of silver, and that was why Hades was so insistent on getting away. She remembers a silver bullet given to her by a vampire hunter earlier in the book. She loads the bullet and scores a direct hit on Hades, killing him. On the escape from the house, the servant stairway collapses. Rochester loses his eyesight but manages to get himself and Next out of the burning building.

Eventually Next's story parallels Jane Eyre in that Rochester advises her to let go of the grudge she has with Landon Park-Laine, who was her dead brother's best friend. He told a military tribunal that Next's brother was responsible for the destruction of an entire light armor brigade during the Crimean War, which Thursday served in. Next finally lets it go, realizing that Landon was not to be blamed for his testimony against her brother. She, with the help of some folks she met along her adventure, shows proof of Park-Laine's fiancée’s husband, to whom she's still wed. Next and Parke-Laine marry, providing us with that warm fuzzy feeling that everything's all right.

It was amusing that Brontë fans liked the ending that Next inadvertently created more than the ending that Charlotte Brontë herself wrote since Rochester and Eyre get married, where in the previous version they did not. The edited "Jane Eyre" ending in "The Eyre Affair" is the actual ending of the book.

What are your thoughts on Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair?

-Ze Baron

YAHOO! OpenID

A friend just pointed Yahoo! OpenID out to me.

Here's the first paragraph:

OpenID makes it easy for you to deliver a simplified login experience for your users. Rather than having to create a unique user name and password for your website, users can now use an existing user name and password that they have created elsewhere. Of course, this is true only if "elsewhere" is a participating supplier of OpenIDs.

At Yahoo!, we acknowledge that simplifying the user login experience across the Internet benefits everyone. That's why we are a huge supporter of OpenID. By enabling our 248 million registered users as OpenID accounts, we hope that gives you a lot of reasons to support OpenID too.

Hmm. Just the other day a friend of mine said that she was reluctant to vote for Multiply at Blogger's Choice because it was another ID and another password. I have all my stuff noted down so I don't have to remember it, but I sort of agree with her.

Then I look at a program like this and wince.

The potential for this... imagine getting your YouTube, Multiply, Gmail, MySpace, and Facebook IDs hacked at once. That would be like online identity theft. Now, I imagine that Google and Yahoo! would have different programs and all that other corporate crap...

I hope that they are doing this right. I still don't think I'll sign up.

(For discussion -- could this be the future of 360?)

Ze Baron

MULTIPLY STAFF BLOG

Keep up to tabs with the latest posts at the Multiply Staff Blog.


-Ze Baron

JUST JOINING MULTIPLY?

This is a tutorial for all the bloggers who have just landed at Multiply. Multiply veterans, feel free to refer newcomers to this post, rather than to our homepage. This post is open to everyone on Multiply, not just group members like all other content. Newcomers, I suggest you join this group so you will be able to see the content outlined in this post.

You've decided to open an account at Multiply. Now what?

Things are much more different here than they are at sites like Blogger, WordPress, MySpace, Facebook, or even... 360 *insert dramatic music*. That's why we're here. Even if you didn't come from 360, I am confident that this group will provide you with the best help available. In fact, if there is something that, after searching all the tutorials and stuff, you don't know how to do, I will personally explain it to you or write a tutorial for the group about it. But first, I want to cover some of the stuff that we've already got going on. I suggest doing these things in the order I've outlined.

Import Your Posts From 360 (or another service)

This post outlines the first thing that you'll want to do once you get to Multiply. Having blogged for a few years at 360, I was disappointed at having to start over again once I got to Multiply. After more and more people started flowing in, though, the Multiply Staff (great people!) designed a tool to import the blogs. Whoo-hoo! Be sure to follow the steps in the post there to get it done right the first time.

Manage Your Privacy Settings During Blog Import

This is the second thing to be sure of. Multiply added this to the import tool so that your security settings will be maintained as they travel across the great Internet expanse. It was quite thoughtful of them, eh? Just be sure to read this post and be aware of how your privacy settings reflect who sees what you post.

Shut Off or Edit Your Email Alerts

When you registered, you put in your email. Multiply will send you an email when there is a post in a group you join or on a contact's page. This is handy when selectively applied. I don't suggest leaving your email alerts all on because groups like User Support, Customized Themes, and Y!360 Refugees have a lot of posts that will rapidly fill up your inbox. This post will guide you through the process.

Customize Your Page With 360-like Tools

Here's a post that explains how to customize your page. The tools outlined in this tutorial are almost the same as at 360. There are more advanced ways of customizing your page, like with CSS, but understand that your page can be customized without the use of CSS. If you're interested, that tutorial is more advanced and is found in the group once you get the basics hammered out.

Removing Posts From Your Inbox

Many users complain of having an information overload in their inboxes. This post outlines a way to remove whatever content you choose. While this feature might not be helpful to you now, once you add contactsand join more groups remember that post and refer to it. You will find it very helpful.

Helpful Groups and Links

Here is a list of helpful links and groups I've compiled. Check it out, join the groups that you find most interesting, and bookmark the post for further reference. Be sure to at least glace at the ToS, and join MUDS and User Support.

*M* Tutorials

For even more in-depth help on setting up and getting used to Multiply, check out *M* tutorials. Between this group and *M* tutorials you should find all the help that you need.

Y!360 Refugee Group Badge

I hope that you've joined the group by now. If you want to show your membership on your page, use a YRefs Group Badge. It's designed in three different sizes to suit any page. And, when you click on it, the badge will take you to our group.

Ask A Question, or Introduce Yourself!

One last thing. If you have any questions about this tutorial, about Multiply, or about most anything related, post a note to the group. Looking for your friends? Post a note and tell them you've arrived!

-Ze Baron

Privacy Option: Signed-In

I am interested in a privacy option that's a little more lenient than "Network" and more protected than "Everyone." After pondering this almost every time I post a blog, I came up with the perfect security option. If, besides Everyone, Network, Contacts, Individuals, and Advanced, we could have a new option, which I call "Signed-In"

That's an admittedly dumb name, but it expresses the premise I'm trying to get across. Network is limited to your contact's-contact's-contact's, I believe. Everyone is, naturally, everyone with internet access.

What bothers me (and a lot of other users, I'd bet) is that the Google Spider and the Yahoo! Slurp, which are their respective owners' web crawlers, index our pages that are set to everyone. I hate seeing many, many pages of stuff from my site show up when I search my page out.

I also hate it when I block someone and all they have to do is sign out to view my page set to "Everyone." Aside from stopping them from commenting, that defeats the purpose.

The Signed-In setting would make the content set to this setting available only to those people who are signed in to an ID. That would, first and foremost, defer the crawlers and secondly stop people who aren't absolutely bent on attacking a specific person. It would even prevent people from signing out so that they don't show up on Multiply's page history bar at the bottom of most pages.

This is a feature I would set all my posts and modules and everything to... my entire page, if it were possible.

-Ze Baron

Blog Privacy Settings

I love it how we can set our individual blogs to be accessible by certain levels of people, or by individuals, but there's a problem I have with it. Say I have all my blogs on their respective security settings... then one day, someone wants to harass or spam me. They probably don't have a life, so they'll go through posting lots of vulgar comments on all the blogs that they can see, which is most of them since I almost always post to "Everyone."

As great as Customer Service is, they don't handle all reports instantly 24/7 (but that's another feature I'd like to recommmend.) That's why I think we should be able to click "Customize My Site," then click "Edit" on the blog module, then set an access level to get into the module where the blogs are listed at, much like can be done with the contacts module (among others) now.

Ideally, this would not change the individual settings on each blog.

Hypothetically, let's say I had a blog about how I hate my job set to all my contacts but business associates, a blog set just to family about a family reunion, a blog about my trip to the beach set to contacts, and a post about Multiply's recent nomination for best blogging host set to network, plus a bunch of inconsequential stuff for everyone.

Then someone comes along who keeps creating accounts and attacking. Lock down to "Contacts," then only they can see my blog registry.

Another reason I find this would be good was for vacations, or periods when someone wants to change all their blogs. The best reason for this, though, is when someone is blocked and just signs out to read things set to "Everyone." Temporarly changing the settings to "Network" until that person bores would be a profound help.

-Ze Baron

MULTIPLY NOMINATED FOR BEST BLOGGING HOST

Multiply's been nominated at Blogger's Choice!

We can actually win this thing. The winning nomination has 225 right now, and Multiply has 29. This group has over 1,800 members! Create an account there then vote for Multiply.



Spread the word! Multiply can win this thing. Everyone, please, vote!

-Ze Baron