On Saturday, I took a walking tour of local Alexandria restaurants. As much fun as this sounds like it was (and it was), it was work! The write-up will come out at some later date. I don’t want to give too much away ahead of time, but it was a lot of fun and I [...]
Today marks the first day that I’m sending out a query letter not for a magazine or newspaper article but for a book proposal. It’s been more than a year since I put the finishing touches on the first quarter of my manuscript, and then all these things got in the way for both me [...]
Yesterday I attended the Alexandria Archaeology orientation for the summer sessions. This means that I’m now certified to grab a trowel and help excavate artifacts. As I sat in the air-conditioned, church-basement-like room of the George Washington Masonic Memorial, memories from my undergrad archaeology classes came rushing back. Beyond the science of archaeology having some [...]
I got to write Names and Faces for the Post again, which is always exciting. For just one day, I become an expert on Britney and LiLo and Brangelina and other people who I usually try to ignore. But writing about celebrities is somehow much more entertaining than reading about them, so when it’s my [...]
Playing with graphics, HTML, and CSS is like being on vacation for me, which is why I’ve spent the day and a half since returning from my “real” vacation by messing with this blog. I think the majority of weird, layout-breaking HTML and broken graphics are behind us by this point, so feel free to [...]
I. The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, ‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love, What a beautiful Pussy [...]
Great post last week from Growing Your News Website about journalists responding to conversations that involve them, even when these conversations are taking place not on the MSM dot-com that employs them. Great example: Erie Media-Go-Round mentions the Erie Times-News probably every other day. But ETN reporters never join the conversation. Sure, in this particular [...]
Last week I learned that the Watertown (NY) Daily Times, despite putting all its content online for free, is losing out to a competitor, NewZJunky.com. Howard Owens, awesome blogger and journalist, wrote “Never before have I seen a newspaper.com get trounced in its own market by any competitor — not even a TV station. NewsJunky.com [...]
For what might be the most random and unpractical Tool ever, I present Wordsmith.org’s Internet Anagram Server (or “I, Rearrangement Servant”). I suppose this would come in handy when you needed to be witty, or if you had a character in your novel who loved anagrams, or if you were a blogger trying to come [...]
I am a fan of a new 20% project Google has rolled out: translation bots in Google Chat. Add a specific e-mail address to your buddy list (my bot of choice is en2ja@bot.talk.google.com) and if you send it a message, it will spit back a translation. This is a lot faster than Babelfish and what [...]