The end of the month is here already? Wow. Turn away for a moment, and the year’s already a sixth over.

Interesting fact I learned this week in a Wired magazine article about the file-sharing software Kazaa: It’s a company decentralized and scattered around the globe: software code is housed in Estonia, the servers are in Denmark, the domain is registered in Australia, and the corporation— or pseudo-corporation, as it were— is located in the tiny South Pacific island of Vanuatu.

The part I especially found interesting was Vanuatu itself, which is billed as a tax haven with a strict code of secrecy. Several years ago (okay, along the lines of 10 years ago!), I had a story idea that would involve this obscure little nation I found in an almanac that nobody had every really heard of before, but of course I never really did anything with it, other than file a bit of knowledge about the country away into some dark corner of my brain.

So now, it seems a bit prescient (only to me, of course, since I never mentioned this story idea to anyone) to find this new stuff out about Vanuatu. It gets the idea gears turning again, and I’m thinking I should blow the dust off this story notion and see how well it dovetails with these new insights.

Also this week we had a close encounter with the W32.Opaserv.Worm virus on my wife’s computer. Damn thing had been infected with three variants (in the C:Windows directory were three separate .EXE files of the virus: “brasil.exe”, “alevir.exe” and “scrsvr.exe”), and since this machine is running Windows ME (I hate Millenium Edition!!), you had to jump through four times as many hoops to kill the virus as you would for any other system. Watch out for this little bugger. It’s a pain in the ass.

And how come nobody has registered the sweet domain mybandersnatch.com? 15 bucks on directNIC, people! (Ten points to you if you actually know what a “bandersnatch” is.)