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Before moving to Baltimore, I had had little experience riding most types of mass transportation. Back at home in Louisville, I occasionally took the bus places, but most of my other experiences were infrequent. I can count on one hand the number of cities (Chicago, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco) where I had ridden some form of public transit.
During the weekend, I had a chance to finally attend the Baltimore Writers' Conference. There had been times in the past when I was thinking about going to one, but I could never fit it into my schedule. Luckily, I think I picked a pretty decent one to attend. First, it happened to be at Towson University, where I attend grad school. Second, there was a pretty good crowd of people there, all of whom seemed like qualified members of the writing profession.
The day after the election, I had a chance to check out all of the front pages from around the world. It was remarkable how many international newspapers had Obama as the top story, and as expected, a number of U.S. papers devoted their entire front pages to election coverage. I created an Obama collage of the papers as a tribute to our next president. Feel free to use as a screensaver or desktop image!
You may have noticed that I recently changed the name of my new book to "Corporate Ties." I haven't had a chance to change all of my marketing material yet because, well, there's only so much time in the day, right? After thinking about it and discussing with others, "Polos to Ties" worked great for the local audience, but from a book sales standpoint, a random person might not notice the fashion connection.
According to the Detroit Free Press, there are giant sunflowers scattered all over the Ford Motor Company grounds. A panoramic view of the sunflowers is available on the Free Press website. This is the coolest thing I've seen in awhile!
One thing I've become accustomed to while working with computers is that they rarely show emotion. I almost said they never show emotion, but my computer got mad and wouldn't let me type that. Overall, however, computers are nice in that they don't attempt to influence you by giving you puppy-dog eyes. The computer usually lets you do what you want to do, or it closes the program and shuts down. But rarely does it laugh, at least in a way that you can see it.
If you're like me, you could use a big bowl of ice cream about now, and you are tired of hearing dot-com this and dot-com that. Soon, you won'tn be hearing this crap anymore. Instead, it might be dot-crap.
The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to expand the current list of top-level domains -- http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16268,00.html?nl=int
I will be participating in the 2007 BookExpo America, which will be held May 31-June 3 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. This will be my first book expo, which is billed as "the premier event serving the U.S. book publishing industry."
Host: Ben Woods
Location: Ben Woods' House
(contact me for details)
When: Friday, July 28, 5:00pm
Objectives (What's the point?):
- Kick off five-state book signing tour
- Preview next book (Spoiler: It's about the place I worked last summer, until everyone relocated to Cincinnati without me.)
- PARTY PARTY PARTY
Goods (What we'll have):
- FOOD and DRINKS
- GAMES (Adults AND Kids)
- DOOR PRIZES
Schedule (What's going on):
5-Dusk: Outside activities, games, raffles
DUSK-?: PARTY TIME
I finally discovered something I could not easily find on the Internet: tickets for the newest Star Wars movie.
Sure, it is still a few days before "Attack of the Clones" opens in the United States, but I should already have tickets in my hand. I'm not claiming to be the biggest Star Wars fan in history. I've never dressed up as Darth Vader in public or dated a girl named Yoda. True, she was from Dagobah. But I do have a lot of Star Wars memorabilia hanging on my walls at home, and all of my action figures are stashed away in places I can get to easily.