You made it! Thanks for visiting.
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.
While I do not consider myself an expert in many things, one thing I feel a bit knowledgeable about is the genre of business-related books. I haven't read all 540,495,317 books in this field, nor do I plan to do so, because most are written by authors who think that because a company made billions of dollars by having its employees wear Hawaiian shirts on Fridays, the CEO of said company is a genius.
If you aren't happy with the selection of holiday sweaters that you have seen this year in the stores, you have a few options. One would be to just wear the same ridiculously tacky one that you wore last year. The other idea would be to make your own at We Hate Sheep. We Love Holiday Sweaters.. Make sure you accessorize as much as you can because the holidays come only once a year! You can also choose to window shop and peruse all of the previously made gorgeous sweaters. I'm wearing mine right now!
Sometimes keeping computer terminology straight is difficult. There are so many definitions, words and acronyms that it is easy to confuse one for the other. For instance, I was talking to my mom the other day about a keyboard, and she thought I meant a music keyboard. Needless to say, she spent hours looking for a delete and escape key on her piano.
I'm not a big fan of sound on websites, but talking heads with sound? OK, now you have my attention. SitePal apparently delivers just that, with somewhat freakish characters that appear to be saying what is actually being said. As the site says, for as little as $9.95 a month, you can have a SitePal on YOUR very own site. It appears the company also makes custom Pals, as I found one for Santa Claus.
I have a subscription to Harper's Magazine, and I try to read it as regularly as possible (although that's tough when we're all in similar boats with a million things going on). In this year's February edition, I came across a pretty good article titled "Sick in the head: Why America won't get the health-care system it needs" by Luke Mitchell.