Mom uses BlackBerry to write novel – no ‘BlackBerry thumb’ reported

You'd think that writing a book day and night on a BlackBerry smartphone would eventually render your thumbs useless, but a woman from London has done just that, and now her novel is selling on Amazon.

If you were going to write a book, the chances are you’d sit yourself in front of a full-size keyboard connected to a full-size computer screen before you embarked on your full-size project. Not so Brit Georgina Campbell.

She bashed out a 55,600-word book on, of all things, her BlackBerry smartphone. The 41-year-old Londoner said the idea to put thumb to keyboard came about after watching the 2011 sci-fi movie Attack the Block. While daughter Lorra loved it, Georgina thought it was abysmal and so bet Lorra she could write something better. It was then she grabbed her writing tool of choice and started work on her novel.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Georgina said it took four months to complete the gritty tale of a group of girls growing up in inner-city London, writing it entirely on the phone’s native MemoPad app.

“When I started writing the book I would normally do it after a 12-hour shift at work and it would be a breeze – I loved it and wrote through the night,” she told the Mail. “It was almost like a holiday – I’d just sit down and start typing the book out on my BlackBerry using my two thumbs.”

Georgina said the phone was the ideal writing tool simply because it was with her all the time. “I was writing on the train, on breaks at work, waiting for a bus, having a bath, when I was walking around – anywhere. It completely took over my life – all I thought about morning to night was writing the book.” Four months after tapping out the first word, The Kickdown Girls made it  to Amazon.

Possibly the most remarkable part of the story, however, is that despite her round-the-clock commitment, her thumbs are still fully operational instead of finishing up as mere worn-down stumps; she didn’t even develop BlackBerry thumb, the repetitive strain injury linked to excessive use of the physical keyboard so beloved by BlackBerry users.

Whether Georgina’s work is better than the script of Attack the Block is something for readers to decide, though at the time of writing the publication is languishing at 257,164 in Amazon’s book chart and has no reader reviews.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Woman faces felony after posting photo of undercover cop on Facebook

Definitely a terrible way to use Facebook, an attempt to search for the identify of an undercover officer lands one woman in hot water.

Covered by ABC News earlier today, 30-year-old Melissa Walthall of Mesquite, Texas faces a felony retaliation charge after allegedly using her Facebook account to upload a photo of an undercover police officer. According to Mesquite police, Walthall posted the photograph of the narcotics officer on Facebook after he testified against 34-year-old George Pickens during a drug trial that occurred two months prior to the incident. In the caption of the photo, Walthall specifically mentioned that the officer was working undercover and posted “Anyone know this [expletive]?” in the description. It’s likely that Walthall was attempting to use social media to figure out the identity of the officer and subsequently spread that information rapidly online. 

While Walthall’s Facebook profile was set to private, Mesquite police learned of the photo after one of Walthall’s Facebook friends spotted the photograph with the revealing caption within their News feed. The unnamed person immediately notified police and supplied the police department with a copy of the photo. After questioning Walthall, police learned that the photo had been supplied by Pickens. 

After searching online, Pickens had discovered the photo on Facebook without any tag to identify the undercover officer’s personal Facebook account. Opposite from Walthall, his idea for social distribution to reveal the officer’s true identity was far less technologically advanced. With the help of his brother Bobby Stedham, Pickens made photocopies of the photo in the style of a lost cat or garage sale flyer. The duo planned to post the photo around local neighborhoods or pass it out on street corners.

When police searched the home where Pickens was residing, they discovered copies of the handout clearly outing the officer as undercover. They also discovered an unregistered sawed-off shotgun underneath the bed where Pickens slept as well as 28.6 grams of methamphetamine and a variety of equipment for drug distribution. For his role in the creation of the flyers, Stedham also faces a felony retaliation charge. 

Detailed in the Texas Penal Code, retaliation is defined as “A person commits an offense if he intentionally or knowingly harms or threatens to harm another by an unlawful act in retaliation for or on account of the service or status of another as a public servant, witness, prospective witness, or informant.”

However, authorities didn’t indicate if Walthall or Stedham will face significant jail time for their role in attempting to reveal the identify of the undercover officer that testified at Pickens’ trial. 

Regarding the publication of the photo on Walthall’s Facebook profile, Texas Municipal Police Association executive director Kevin Lawrence stated “It’s a very dangerous situation. If you’re trying to infiltrate a cartel, a drug ring, a gang, one of the keys is people have to believe you’re not an officer. Anything that hints at tying you to law enforcement is very dangerous.” Regarding social media accounts among police officers, Lawrence continued “There are too many opportunities for bad things to happen in exchange for very little up side. But the fact the officer shouldn’t have had a Facebook doesn’t excuse her either.“

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

How much?!? Woman in France gets phone bill for $15 quadrillion (yes, it was a mistake)

A woman in France got the shock of her life when she received her cell phone bill recently. Although the $15 quadrillion was obviously wrong, she had a hard time trying to convince workers at the telecoms company of the fact.

Sometimes you get your cell phone bill through and it might seem a little more than what you’d been expecting, but what the heck, you pay it.

However, Solenne San Jose, from the French city of Bordeaux, would’ve been hard pressed to do such a thing as her bill was a lot, lot more than she’d been expecting. In fact, it had so many zeros on it that she didn’t even know how to say it.

San Jose had decided to pull out of her phone contract early and as a result was told by her carrier she’d have to pay a termination fee that would be included in her final bill which would be sent in the mail.

Upon opening the bill and seeing the final fee, San Jose said she “nearly had a heart attack.” Why? Because it was for €11,721,000,000,000,000 (about $15 quadrillion), that’s why.

Receiving a phone bill more than 5,000 times greater than the gross domestic product of the country in which you live is really no way to start the day, so San Jose called the company, Bouygues Telecom, to suggest there’d been some kind of mistake in an effort to get it to cancel the charge made to her bank account.

But this is where things got really absurd. On her first attempt to sort the problem out, she was reportedly told that nothing could be done, and informed that “it’s calculated automatically.”

Another person at the company said someone would be in touch to sort out paying the amount in instalments. Eventually, an employee with some common sense realized a mistake had been made. The real bill? €117 ($151).

The company have reportedly said sorry for the error and told San Jose she won’t have to pay anything at all. With the stress and hassle it must have caused, however, you might think it could’ve offered a more generous apology – a mistakenly written check for a couple of quadrillion dollars would’ve been nice.

[Sud Quest via Technorati] [Top image: JeniFoto / Featured: marcogarrincha / Shutterstock]

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com