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August 21 is National Spumoni Day. Did you know that? I seriously doubt it. But who cares? It's an entire day to celebrate Spumoni! If you don't know what Spumoni is, check out the Wikipedia page. Better yet, let me explain why you should care about Spumoni in the first place.
I know I've said this before, but I am getting closer to publishing my new book, "Corporate Ties." There was a bit of foundation work that I needed to construct, edit, tear apart, rebuild, pulverize, stack up, decimate and recompile. Well, the good news is that I'm getting closer to the end. How do I know this? There seems to be a light at the end of each paragraph now.
Google recently made a mildly surprising announcement (at least, to me) that the company is shutting down its online collaboration tool, Wave. Google does a lot of cool, neat and worthy stuff obviously, and I think Wave fits into this category. It's just that the actual marketing of it was rather peculiar.
The definition of "friend" has been watered down a bit with the advent of online social networking. It seems that now, your friend might be someone with whom you've never met, even someone with whom you've never communicated, with the exception of a simple button click on a website. This can be a good way to meet people, but it's a bit weird to call a person a friend when it's quite possible the individual on the other side could be an enemy, a fish or a hat.
By now, I'm sure that everyone and his or her dog (assuming said dog is on DogBook) has heard the hubbub relating to new Facebook privacy policies. I have to be honest: I haven't read every single story about it, primarily because I don't intentionally publish stuff online that should be private. In general, people rarely read terms and conditions before signing up for something online, but hopefully now, people will check out Facebook's privacy terms and decide whether or not they want to keep their account.
To once again prove you might find anything in this column, with the exception of celery, this week's column is about hairstyles.
Have I devised a way to get your hair cut online? No.
Have I made a searchable database with everyone in the United States with their current hairstyles? Not yet.
Was I having trouble coming up with an idea and took the first one suggested to me by a friend? Well, maybe.
As a writer, I am usually sitting on a few mildly interesting ideas for books, articles, etc. Last year, I wanted to create a children's book about the winter holidays, but I wanted to avoid writing about Christmas or any specific religious holiday.
Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, is finally here. OK, well, as of May 29, 2009, it's not actually here yet. However, people are already raving over the name "Bing." It does have a nice ring to it, and it goes great with Crosby. But, what's in a name?
If you have seen The Developers, maybe you passed over the copyright page, which contains random stuff that every book has. The ISBN is listed, as well as the publisher and a note that explains the book is fiction. Also nestled into this page is a little note that says "To help debug future versions of this book, please send corrections and comments to info@benwoods.com."
Luckily, some people have read this and have sent me minor errors they spotted in the book. I will list them here.
In today's society, there are two groups of people — ones who get paid to cut grass and ones who cut grass only because it's their duty to the country. Actually there's a third, smaller group of people, composed mostly of apartment dwellers, kids and travel agents. But they, too, have either had to cut the grass or will in the future.