Fun with Amazon

There's a 'Dodge Hover' in Mona Lisa Overdrive. This could be it. All it needs is a row of old, beat up, chrome-plated skulls where the front bumper should be.

I ordered a copy of Mona Lisa Overdrive from Amazon yesterday ($4 for a used hardcover, a penny for the book and $3.99 for shipping) and this button pops up on the screen offering to let me start reading it now. Cool, I've already read the first six pages or so in the preview, I could keep reading it on the screen, so I point and click, and presto! There's the book! Wait a minute, I can't read this, what is this? What is it? It's in Portuguese.
    I figure there's a glitch in the system, so I send 'em an email. I got a reply this morning telling me that I can buy the online version of the book. Nothing about the free version. They do want to know if they solved my problem. Well, no you didn't, so I get redirected to their evaluation form:

I don't know who makes up these forms. They strike me as worse than useless. There is nothing about how they failed to understand the problem in the first place. If you can't get to square one, none of this other s*** matters.

Seems this problem is a little too subtle to communicate by email, so I call. (Calling is their preferred method of contact which was a surprise.) Takes about 30 seconds to get connected to an actual person. (Click the button on the web page, immediately my phone rings, then there's the requisite robo-call announcement telling me that the NSA's minions are listening in, and then poof, a real person comes on the line.) I tell her what happened and she tells me that to read the online version, you need to buy the online version. Okay, looks like there's a glitch in the system. She tells me she's going to make a note of it, which is more than I expected.

P.S. The nice thing about reading the online version is that when you come across an unknown term, you can point and click and get everything the internet knows about it, which is how I got onto the Hattori Clock Tower. On the other hand, I have to sit at my desk and I don't get to sit in my cushy recliner. What I need is a desktop to fit over my recliner. Then I would never have to get up. Oh, wait, I wouldn't be able to get up, I'd be trapped. Help! Let me out!

Rooftop Refuge

Professor Zhang Lin's mountain villa built on top of a Beijing apartment block.

I'm reading Mona Lisa Overdrive and I come across this scene where Mona is looking out a window of a high-rise in the Sprawl (New York City) and she sees this wild landscape built on top of the building across the way. There are rocks and hills and trees and even a mountain goat climbing around and nibbling on the shrubbery, and I think I've seen that before, but where? Or maybe I didn't see it, I just constructed an image in my mind the last time I read this book. What a minute, have I read this book before? I could have, it was written over 25 years ago, but I don't think so.
     But I do remember seeing this and I think it was a real place in China. A little Google and here we are. The doc who built it got an order to tear it down a couple of years ago, so it's probably gone by now, but it was very cool while it lasted.

Smart Phone Zombies

    A key element of the story in the book revolves around people operating virtual lives in cyber space. The New York Times just passed out a bunch of free cardboard widgets that turn your smart phone into a virtual reality viewer (essentially 3-D stereo). I'm pretty sure looking at smart phone that is a couple of inches from your eyes for very long is going to mess with your vision. Might be so bad that the smart phone zombies will start wearing a camera as well so they can where they are going when they need to walk around.

Count Zero

Count Zero by William Gibson

Part 2 of the Sprawl Trilogy, set between Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive. We've got three main characters, Turner a ruthless 'operator', Bobby, a wannabe hacker, and Marly, some kind of art dealer. Turner is very unpleasant, but then he lives in a very unpleasant world. Bobby is young and foolish, and perhaps lucky, which might be why he is here. Marly is the only character I had any sympathy for. unbreakable body! has a decent review.

Not the best book in the world, but every now and then you get a bit that makes it all worthwhile, like this one:

"The man's life, from Turner's vantage, seemed marked out by a certain inevitability; he was brilliant, a brilliance that had been detected early on, highly motivated, gifted at the kind of blandly ruthless in-company manipulations required by someone who aspired to become a top research scientist."

I wasn't even aware that "ruthless in-company manipulations" existed, much less were necessary for a top level job. That might help explain my abysmal career trajectory.

The book is from 1986 and it's amazingly prophetic. We still don't have computer-aided memory, or direct neural access to computers, but our interface has improved dramatically, witness the VR goggles that are becoming popular.

Bobby's forays into cyberspace are described in the vaguest of terms. How you would interact with anything is likewise glossed over. Reminds me a bit of the movie Tron.

Hattori Clock Tower

The K. Hattori Building in 1932

I started reading William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive this evening. A couple of pages in he mentions "the shadow of the Hattori clock". Must be a pretty big clock, so I look it up. Turns out to be a rather famous landmark in Ginza. Kintarō Hattori started his watch and clock business (otherwise known as Seiko) in Ginza in 1881. Ginza is a district in Tokyo, Japan. In 1932 he built the K. Hattori building.

Tokyo PX in the K. Hattori Building

Much of Tokyo was devastated by American bomber raids during WW2, but the Hattori Clock Tower survived. After the war it became the PX (Post Exchange) for American G.I.'s.  In 1947 the building went back to being a department store.

The Wako Building Today

At some point people started calling this the Wako building, which is the name of the department store that occupies it.