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Before moving to Baltimore, I had had little experience riding most types of mass transportation. Back at home in Louisville, I occasionally took the bus places, but most of my other experiences were infrequent. I can count on one hand the number of cities (Chicago, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco) where I had ridden some form of public transit.
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.
The day after the election, I had a chance to check out all of the front pages from around the world. It was remarkable how many international newspapers had Obama as the top story, and as expected, a number of U.S. papers devoted their entire front pages to election coverage. I created an Obama collage of the papers as a tribute to our next president. Feel free to use as a screensaver or desktop image!
You may have noticed that I recently changed the name of my new book to "Corporate Ties." I haven't had a chance to change all of my marketing material yet because, well, there's only so much time in the day, right? After thinking about it and discussing with others, "Polos to Ties" worked great for the local audience, but from a book sales standpoint, a random person might not notice the fashion connection.
According to the Detroit Free Press, there are giant sunflowers scattered all over the Ford Motor Company grounds. A panoramic view of the sunflowers is available on the Free Press website. This is the coolest thing I've seen in awhile!
There are a plenty of new careers and opportunities these days, yet you rarely see anyone entering the piracy field. Some people have invented their own versions of a shipwrecked pirate - stealing stereos, hacking into computer files, playing baseball in Pittsburgh - but few take their chances on the high seas.
On the other hand, the Assocated Press said pirates killed more people in 1998 than the year before. The International Maritime Bureau reported Malaysian pirates, who killed 67 crewmen last year, are "getting increasingly violent."
Pirates? Violent?
This is probably one of the strangest articles I've ever written, because it pertains to me communicating with a bunch of people and finding out hardly any information. The bad part, however, is the lack of cooperation bodes badly not just for the few individuals I contacted, but the entire book industry.
Out of all the mysterious things on your computer and/or the Internet, cookies seem to be near the top of the list. From SearchCIO.com, a cookie is defined as a file on a Web user's hard drive (it's kept in one of the subdirectories under the browser file directory) that is used by Web sites to record data about the user.
I have a little extra time this week, so I decided I would find an extremely thought-provoking aspect of technology to write about.
Then I thought, forget that, I'll just put together a couple of essays from my volumes of research on the adult Web site industry. Then I thought, no, I should really save that for something big, like Columbus Day. So I landed somewhere in between for this week's column.
I've been told by my publisher that my book, "The Developers," a book about ... hmm, not much of anything, is almost ready. It is due to be finished May 10. I'm currently busy trying to prepare a few things and make contacts for the books. With the first printing, there will be 200 copies made available to the public, so if you are interested, please visit the books page for more information.