You made it! Thanks for visiting.
So the news out recently is that PayPal is going to block "unsafe browsers." I'm not talking about people here, but actually web browsers. How will PayPal know if something is unsafe? Good question, but one way they will tell, according to this article, is by determining the version of the actual browser.
My first tour stop in 2008 will be the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, where I'll be a part of the fifth-annual CityLit Project. The event is free to both the public and exhibitors, which is not typical for most book-related events. It's pretty annoying to go to some events where either you have to give up a large percentage of your sales or you have to pay an upfront fee.
For Christmas, I received one of those Page-A-Day calendars to keep on your office desk. Normally, when I have one of those, I pull off about two months' worth at the same time because I completely forget about it. And I still do that for the newest one I own, but this one is a little different. This calendar is full of odd and wacky websites, which of course, is great research for my columns. I'll highlight some of my favorites here, and try to give a little bit of info when necessary.
As a huge fan of baseball, I enjoy reliving the past seasons, teams and players that I may have seen, read or heard at some point in time. Rob Neyer cleverly combines the best and worst of every Major League Baseball team in his "Big Book of Baseball Lineups".
It helps tremendously to have the chance to work with an actual editor with any writing project ... especially a full-length novel. Patrick Coyle provided a lot of great feedback with "Polos to Ties," which is probably one of the main reasons I've received decent feedback so far from literary agencies. I'm still looking for a reasonable deal, though, as finding the right agent isn't always the easiest thing to do.
In the near future, I plan to post the first five chapters of the book, but I'm also waiting a response from a second editor as well.
I wouldn't imagine a non-baseball fan would actually pick up a baseball book and read it from cover to cover. If there was a book I would recommend to a person who was interested in history but not a huge baseball buff, it's "Crazy '08" by Cait Murphy. And for a baseball fan, this is one book you wouldn't want to be without.
Maybe starting a new feature with an acronym of GAC isn't the best idea, but that's all I have for now.
The Good Advice Committee will come to you on a regular basis, possibly weekly. A lot of it depends on whether or not the committee members are up to it, and it also assumes we have questions each week as well. The purpose of the GAC is to examine and determine sensible advice, which could be about technology, relationships, etc.
It's apparent how much of a stronghold social networking has on U.S. society when a story about Facebook changing its terms of service appears as the main story on baltimoresun.com. That would be equivalent to seeing a story about a credit card company changing the fine print in its terms and conditions, or your favorite cereal changing the order of ingredients on its new packaging.
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.
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.