Articles

As I attempt to find an agency to pitch my new book, I thought it might be a good idea to list some of the agents I have contacted. At this stage, I've run into issues where companies have listed communication methods, but they don't seem to follow through. I hope that my list will save the time of others who are attempting to find representation.

August 21 is National Spumoni Day. Did you know that? I seriously doubt it. But who cares? It's an entire day to celebrate Spumoni! If you don't know what Spumoni is, check out the Wikipedia page. Better yet, let me explain why you should care about Spumoni in the first place.

I know I've said this before, but I am getting closer to publishing my new book, "Corporate Ties." There was a bit of foundation work that I needed to construct, edit, tear apart, rebuild, pulverize, stack up, decimate and recompile. Well, the good news is that I'm getting closer to the end. How do I know this? There seems to be a light at the end of each paragraph now.

Google recently made a mildly surprising announcement (at least, to me) that the company is shutting down its online collaboration tool, Wave. Google does a lot of cool, neat and worthy stuff obviously, and I think Wave fits into this category. It's just that the actual marketing of it was rather peculiar.

The definition of "friend" has been watered down a bit with the advent of online social networking. It seems that now, your friend might be someone with whom you've never met, even someone with whom you've never communicated, with the exception of a simple button click on a website. This can be a good way to meet people, but it's a bit weird to call a person a friend when it's quite possible the individual on the other side could be an enemy, a fish or a hat.

By now, I'm sure that everyone and his or her dog (assuming said dog is on DogBook) has heard the hubbub relating to new Facebook privacy policies. I have to be honest: I haven't read every single story about it, primarily because I don't intentionally publish stuff online that should be private. In general, people rarely read terms and conditions before signing up for something online, but hopefully now, people will check out Facebook's privacy terms and decide whether or not they want to keep their account.

As you have probably noticed, I haven't been writing as much on here lately. There is a reason for that: There are a few exciting things in the works over here, but I cannot divulge all of the information yet. Let's just say that besides a new book coming out, there's an entire foundation behind it, meaning a real publishing company (with books from people other than me!). We're still working out all of details, so I'll keep you posted!

While the United States Post Office seems to be losing money each month, at least one Baltimore branch has decided to take matters in its own hands - by charging extra postage at random intervals.

The Waverly branch of the Baltimore United States Post Office charges an additional 17-44 cents for an article of mail that can be sent from the USPS Hampden branch for just 44 cents. It's pretty shocking that one would receive a different rate from various post office branches. Before compiling this story, I had to check with my own eyes to make certain this was accurate.

The governor of Kentucky has decided to take on the online gambling industry himself. He has decided to sue the owners of the Full Tilt Poker website to recover losses incurred by Kentuckians.

Twitter may have seemed like a new idea when it was launched a couple of years ago, but it wasn't. Check out this Robot Messenger that was used in 1935 at public places in London. For a fee, users could write a message on the "notificator," which would be visible for at least two hours. At least with Twitter now, your friends aren't lost after two hours!