You made it! Thanks for visiting.
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.
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.
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.
Google has created a lot of neat stuff lately. OK, the company has created a lot of neat stuff for the past few years, including, most recently, a new web browser. But please, download Chrome on your own time, because I want to talk about Google's bread and butter: the search.
You can learn a lot about people by finding out what types of books they like. In the past, that meant grilling them on what they had read, what they own, etc. Maybe they remember every book they have ever seen, but most likely, unless you come up with a title and/or author, they'll have no clue if you spout off about a book they love.
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.
It turns out that the first paragraph of my book is a fraud! You would probably think this is a bad thing, but it seems to keep the media running toward Dan Brown and Kaavya Viswanathan, so maybe I should try to publicize this as well. The only problem is that I didn't lift passages from my favorite author or pretend to invent a biblical conspiracy. I just made up something that never happened on "Andy Griffith."
The ever-popular Meetup.com website will begin charging its groups a monthly fee beginning May 1, 2005, and while the price is still fairly cheap, it's more than free.
The site announced changes recently, obviously in an effort to earn some dough from users. Then again, it's probably going to be a tough sell considering the users never anticipated paying anything from the start.
Scotland will be a hot place to be this week, as the The Group of Eight (G-8) leaders of the world's most industrialized countries will meet to discuss important international items, including global warming. So far, the U.S. is the country not currently backing the proposed ideas, which is somewhat similar to the Kyoto Protocol, which was ratified by 141 countries as of February, but not the United States.