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I'm sitting in my cube right now, wearing shorts, a T-shirt and tennis shoes. On the other side of the sensibility coin, analyst firm Gartner is predicting that avatars will have business dress codes by 2013. How do people come up with this stuff?
The Library of Congress is up to its old tricks again. Chronicling America has a number of scanned newspapers from 1880 to 1922 from various American states. The site, which is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, allows users to search based on topics and zoom in to read papers from the more than 100 years ago.
A co-worker recently sent me a link to Life's list of 30 Dumb Inventions. I'd say there are probably more than 30, but this list is pretty good. I will admit, though, that I'm a big fan of the flying platform. I could use one of these as a substitute for city driving!
I plan to attend the 2009 edition of the Baltimore Book Festival ... as a customer, though, not as a vendor. But I still feel as if I should be more a part of the action. So, for the rest of September, I decided to give away a few copies of my workplace humor novel, "The Developers," in conjunction with raising money for Southwest Baltimore Charter School.
As a knockoff of my literary agent list, I have decided to supply you with the short list of publishers I have contacted for my latest book venture. After querying agencies for a few months, I started contacting more mid-range publishers with the hopes of avoiding agencies altogether. This is not to say that bypassing an agent is beneficial to everyone; I think it's worthwhile in my case for a few reasons:
A few weeks ago, while doing research (if you can call it that) for a column, I came across a site devoted to myths and legends. I thought I had visited just about every genre of Web sites, but boy did I miss a big one.
Paranormal Web sites seem to be fairly normal these days. Not that I'm completely surprised by this, but I was shocked to see the latest reports of phenomena. I really must be out of the loop because now there are theories on Mothman, Owlman and Goatman out there. I swear I did not pull these names from an episode of "Power Rangers."
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you are bad in any way if you aren't a college basketball fan. But being from this area, you'd better know a little something about it because if not, your co-workers are sure to avoid you like a 72-year-old cheese log during the next few days.
March Madness is like a vacation; you wait forever for it to get here, then it's over before you know it. But rarely can you go on vacation and have a chance to win prizes and cash. There's a much better chance of just blowing it all.
Hopefully this is old news for you, but Microsoft on Oct. 12 announced 10 security advisories, which corrects 22 new flaws within its operating system and products. If you haven't updated your computer yet, click here to read the details.
Many people are familiar with the movie "Catch Me If You Can," which describes the early life of Frank Abagnale and his ability to change identities at a moment's notice. Some know this was based on a true story, and even fewer people know that Abagnale worked with the FBI for 32 years to thwart identity theft.
I haven't seen any exact data on this, because I'm not even sure it's available, but I'm guessing perhaps one in eight websites have background music playing on them. While some sites use the music to promote a musician's new release, others apparently prefer to remind you of standing in an elevator for an infinite amount of time.