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Your local (or not-so-local) scientist is currently busy trying to figure out many things, including cures to terminal illnesses, ways to make the environment safer and the reason why reality TV is so popular. But on top of that, there are numerous other things that have researchers scratching their heads, wondering basically why the universe doesn't collapse on itself and why aliens keep playing peekaboo.
Surely by now, you've started to realize that many of those ads you see on the Internet for free stuff might just be bogus.
Of course, there might be some truth to the "free" part, but that could involve talking to a sales rep for 53 hours, wrestling an alligator or taking part in a survey about going to the bathroom in foreign countries.
If only college basketball could take precedence over other things, like work, sleep, eating, etc., it would be possible to consume all of the necessary information to select a perfect bracket this year. Most of us, though, do need to continue our regular life, and due to unforeseen upsets, all of the information available still might not help us win our office pools.
But it doesn't hurt to try. Here are a couple of sites you should be familiar with, so you'll be ready when the brackets are finally announced:
Maybe you've heard of Sequoia Capital, Craig Newmark and Deep Blue, but do you know what they have in common? They are part of Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web.
It's hard to believe that Yahoo has been around for 10 years already. I remember the first version of Yahoo, amazingly enough. Things have changed a lot.
If you haven't noticed, there's a lot of stuff on the World Wide Web. For some people, that might be a good thing, but for the rest of us, who seemingly waste numerous hours a day, looking for those things we missed (like the Lip Balm Anonymous site), it's somewhat nerve-racking to explore it all.
We live in a world where we expect things to improve and evolve, like finding cures for fatal diseases, building structures to withstand the fiercest storms and attempting to select a new singer for the band INXS. Yet, despite all of these advances (OK, INXS' original singer wasn't bad), the majority of people on the highway still have no freakin' clue how to drive.
Those of you who have mastered the art of building a Web site have probably encountered the most important tool known to designers: the protractor.
Coming in second would have to be tables, the backbone to many pages you have visited in your lifetime, or at least within the last three weeks. Tables are the most primitive of the HTML tags because people like to have things in nice readable fashion, excluding tabloid magazines. Most people prefer tabloids that look similar to newspapers more than 40 years ago, which contained at least 343 headlines on each page.
You'll notice that I haven't been writing much, for a few good reasons. At work, we've been pretty busy, and we just moved into a different office. In my spare time, I've been devoting most of my time sending out book queries and proposals and also working on my girlfriend's school's website.
But let's face it: The important thing happening right now is men's college basketball. Who will win their conference tournaments? Which teams will make it to the Big Dance? What team will win it all?
There are two important links you need at this stage:
Humans have tried for years to figure out this World War II encrypted cipher:
"NCZW VUSX PNYM INHZ XMQX SFWX WLKJ AHSH NMCO CCAK UQPM KCSM HKSE INJU SBLK IOSX CKUB HMLL XCSJ USRR DVKO HULX WCCB GVLI YXEO AHXR HKKF VDRE WEZL XOBA FGYU JQUK GRTV UKAM EURB VEKS UHHV OYHA BCJW MAKL FKLM YFVN RIZR VVRT KOFD ANJM OLBG FFLE OPRG TFLV RHOW OPBE KVWM UQFM PWPA RMFH AGKX IIBG"
I decided to take a break from talking about Web sites and Internet applications for at least one column. Amazingly enough, there are other programs on your computer or close by that can be beneficial. The one I plan to discuss today is more useful than a paperweight, although it may not be as helpful as a stapler or rubber band or the largest watergun museum on the Internet.