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Terry, an innocent bystander until he read one of my columns and emailed me, sent me a pretty good take on the prequel to the Y2K Bug, which, of course, is the Y1K Bug. It took me awhile to find the original author (remember, taking more than a minute to find anything on the Internet is way too long), but I finally did.
Augustine J. Fredrich begins the story with a dateline March 15, 999, in Canterbury, England. He writes:
Spam is annoying, and like the old saying goes, if you can't beat them, join them.
Seriously, I doubt that's why the University of Calgary is offering a course in how to create email spam and spyware. A lot of people will think that, but there are valid reasons to have a class like this.
I don't know how many of you are at your computer 328 hours a day like I am. But being at the computer for that long can really make power go to your head.
I'm not saying I've actually tried to plug my iPod into my ear, hoping to recharge it. The power that comes with a computer is the fact that you have a gargantuan amount of information at your fingertips. It's just a matter of pressing the right buttons to access it.
Unbeknownst to me, robots are starting to pop up all over the place. Not that I am the head robot counter or anything, but I thought I would have a better handle on what is being built. Apparently, though, EVERYTHING is currently in the process of being built.
The advice section of these articles has taken an unexpected turn. I initially set out to help people with Internet-related issues, but the questions turned into something that resembled voting for your favorite color. So, I've restructured the idea in hopes of gaining actual advice that will be relevant to most people out there.
I remember reading or hearing something a few years ago that said only 10 percent of all books published ever sell 1,000 copies or more. I cannot seem to find exact numbers anywhere, however, I found a boatload of other statistics on the Para Publishing website. The self-publishing numbers are pretty low ... only 3.4 percent of Xlibris copies have sold more than 500 copies, for example.
This article is the first in a new series, called IM tellin'. The articles contain nothing more than instant-message banter between myself and any one of my friends or random people. Think of it as water-cooler talk, only a bit more sophisticated than talking about the weather.
For decades, the U.S. government has had the ability to encrypt and decrypt email messages. But now, a man claims he has rewritten the book on cryptography and can make messages perfectly undecipherable. At what lengths will the United States government go to keep the lid on him?
If you're looking for directions to some place specific, you can usually find that information at various Internet mapping services. Or, if you want to find out more information about some place in town, or maybe a place you're going on vacation, that place usually has a website.
But what if you want to find out BOTH of these things at the same time, possibly while standing on your head and singing random early '90s music?
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.