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Listen and/or watch past presidential campaigns

We're down to the home stretch in the 2008 American presidential nomination. As usual, the television ads are full of interesting tidbits, many not even true, about the candidates. It hasn't always been this way. In fact, in the recent past, nominees actually created ads for reasons other than seducing the United States into a trance to vote for them.

Haha, just kidding. I mean, would this great country all a politician to just speak the truth and lay out the facts?

Preview 'The Developers' via Google Books

Google just recently announced the release of its Google Books Preview program. Publishers and developers can easily create a preview window and slap it on whatever website they want. I've added this to my website to give readers a chance to check out "The Developers" in a fairly easy manner. Actually, you can read the entire thing with the Google Book Previewer, which I suppose could be a good or bad thing.

Just ask iGod about life's mysteries ... I did

 

Tonight, I had a little chat with God. Well, I should say it was iGod. Here's the transcript:

Big Baltimore book events at the end of September

I have two more book appearances this month, both during the last full weekend in September. I'll be at both the Baltimore Book Festival and Baltimore Comic-Con.

Book review: "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller

Writing a review for Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is sort of Catch-22. If I don't tell you enough about it, you probably won't be interested in the book. But if I tell you too much, you won't have to read it because you'll already know what it's about.

But I suppose I should try.

From the Archive

Web vacation won't jeopardize the real thing

Riding in a car during a long trip is a lot like sitting in front of a computer for a day. You know, staring aimlessly at whatever is in front of you thinking of a million different places you'd rather be and yelling to no one in particular because you've just encountered the Leave-on-Your-Left-Turn-Signal entourage.

Dress codes for avatars

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?

Tell Congress: Don't censor the Web

Let's join Google, Wikipedia and others in telling Congress not to censor the web! Fighting online piracy is important. The most effective way to shut down pirate websites is through targeted legislation that cuts off their funding. There's no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines censor the Internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs.

Prince may be able to finally get a domain name

Sometimes we take for granted our ability to type in domain names in our native language. It's true that the most of civilization accepts English as the way of the Internet, but researchers agree that it doesn't necessarily have to stay like that.

Of course, this means that in the near future, you might be able to type accented letters, Chinese characters and even cave paintings into your web browser.

Grandparents column revisited

My grandmother (mom's mom) recently passed away at age 90, so I wanted to display this article I wrote about my grandparents six years ago. At this point, I still have my dad's parents to spend time with, which actually, I hope to do tomorrow.

(This column was originally published in the Crawfordsville Journal Review on March 19, 1999)

There are at least 56,828 things to do during spring break. If you have a credit card, or know how to use a stolen one, the number grows exponentially. But there is one activity that rarely gets a lot of hype this time of year.

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