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Follow baseball online, then hit the road

Spring begins many things, including my first love -- baseball.

There really isn't much that beats a spring or summer day, sitting in a favorite ballpark, watching baseball, eating nachos and just relaxing with a friend or two or 36,910. I would someday like to travel to every major league ballpark, but I'm going pretty slowly right now. I've visited just seven. Plus, I can't seem to stop going to my favorite place -- Wrigley Field in Chicago -- so maybe at least I'll see all the teams play there.

Sitcom stars appearing at the top of the tree

What do Theo Huxtable, Adolf Hitler and Magnum P.I. have in common?


1. They are names of my plants.
2. They have all recently purchased an iMac.
3. The computer knew I was trying to be each of them during an Internet game.


Are you serious? How many plants do you think I have?

Windowless? Let Web sites control the weather

It's a good thing there are Internet weather sites. Yes, it's beneficial for travelers to know if it's going to be nice at their destination. It's great to know if a large snowfall is coming, so everyone but bartenders can be off work. You can even check out the weather where all your friends live.

Since you're getting junk mail, try to get free stuff too

I'm not usually one to steal ideas for a column, but this one was too good to pass up. Macworld had a story in its April edition about free stuff on the Internet. I wouldn't consider myself one of those people who go to different fairs with the sole intention of seeing how many magnets and pencils I can collect in a plastic Go Army bag, but if something's cool and free, I'll give it a try.

A British cow won't drive you half as mad as a computer problem

Do you frequently need help with your computer? Does your monitor and/or hard drive occasionally stop working? Are you currently pulling a blanket over your head as you sit in the closet? Then you have come to the right place.

If you've never had any technical difficulties with your computer, you fall into one of two categories:

1. You have never used a computer.

2. You used a computer once and realized it wasn't cooking a grilled cheese sandwich properly.

From the Archive

First book draft finished

For those interested, I completed the rough draft of my book last night. Thankfully, the ending makes sense, although there is plenty of editing left to do. Once I get through that first round, I plan to post some samples on this site, as well as asking a few people to read through the manuscript.

Also, I'm in the process of finding a literary agent, who will then help me select the correct book publisher. There are a lot of options, so hopefully my research will pay off. I'll furnish more information from time to time as I figure out exactly what to do with the book.

Now's the time to become a pirate

There are a plenty of new careers and opportunities these days, yet you rarely see anyone entering the piracy field. Some people have invented their own versions of a shipwrecked pirate - stealing stereos, hacking into computer files, playing baseball in Pittsburgh - but few take their chances on the high seas.

On the other hand, the Assocated Press said pirates killed more people in 1998 than the year before. The International Maritime Bureau reported Malaysian pirates, who killed 67 crewmen last year, are "getting increasingly violent."

Pirates? Violent?

Updated Performance Against Seed Expectations

Some of you are probably familiar with the Performance Against Seed Expectations (PASE) metric used with the men's tournament brackets. In short, the metric takes into account how many games a seed is expected to win based on past performances since 1985 (the first year of the 64-team tournament). I use this metric to determine expected offensive statistical totals for the college basketball fantasy league that I run each March.

Let's discuss Trump - don't be the enemy

For my Republican friends, you know, of course, that we don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of political perspectives. I'm inclined to believe that I'm right, but I also believe that many disagreements could be talked through enough to compromise. I don't believe I know everything on the political spectrum, so I'm willing to listen and maybe my mind can be changed. I know that despite our differences, you want what's best for the country, as do I.

One Web. One World. One Wish.

How has the web changed your life? That's the question that users around the world are answering today to celebrate OneWebDay.

First off, who would have thought to combine capitalized words, minus the spaces, for the name of something anyway? Yes, it was used before the Internet for various things, including the names of racehorses. OneWebDay, even the word form itself, has become something due to this rapidly advancing form of technology.

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