It's an honor just to be nominated...

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I guess you've got to be brain damaged to not worry about stigmatizing yourself by being a decent human being. How embarrassing it is to be friendly and companionable with someone you don't know. What shameful behavior that is.

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About a year and a half ago, I quit my day job as a programmer and started burning through my savings (and at the end, borrowing money from family) in a quest to work for myself by making my own websites.

15 months later, I have one fairly successful website, a half-dozen or so failed websites, a bunch of debt, ruined credit and I'm back working for the man. For all you would-be webmasters out there, here's my $25,000 dollar lesson:

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HELSINKI, Thursday (UNN) -- Your mobile phone takes photos and video clips, plays music, receives and sends email, browses the Web, has a PDA built in and, of course, does text and picture messaging. But engineers at Nokia have proposed yet another feature to be added: "voice chat."

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Now for my favorite part of the whole annual affair. I go into the house, stamp the snow off my boots; rip the 24 page off the calendar and settle in in front of the fire, warming my stockinged feet and nursing a mug of ginger tea to settle my stomach. I ask you: what kind of mad barbarian would think of putting raw eggs in milk and drinking the mess? Disgusting. That may be fine for a that Scandinavian fellow they use in all the pictures, but I'm Greek and of course I'm lactose intolerant. Just once I wish someone would leave out a nice plate of olives or some flat bread with coarse sea salt and bit of extra virgin oil.

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With the cost of college textbooks up 62% over the last decade,^[1] pressure is building for an alternative model of publishing: the free book. Five years ago, an author had to be very persistent --- maybe even a little crazy --- to try the new approach. But now a whole new infrastructure is springing up to make it easier.

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In this day and age, flying to cities not served by an airline hub (especially to smaller communities) often requires a flight on an aircraft of 70 seats or less. This type of aircraft can also be used for flights where frequent service is required, such as the northeastern United States or short hops within Europe. Although these types of aircraft normally fly trips of 700 nautical miles (NM; 1300km) or less, a few regional jet routes can cover up to 1100 NM (2000km).

Several aircraft companies make (or used to make, in some cases) such aircraft; the most popular ones are made by Bombardier, British Aerospace, Dornier, Embraer, Fokker, Raytheon, and Saab. Seat map sites such as Seatguru can tell you where on the plane to sit for maximum comfort, but don't really provide much information about which planes are the most comfortable. Also, Seatguru can be miserably inconsistent, as some types of aircraft have different recommendations for identically configured aircraft being flown by two different airlines. With that in mind, I will provide my insight in this area on those planes on which I've flown.

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It's a sad state of affairs at K5 when the front page is a 15 word haiku ... so how 'bout a holiday story since it is the Christmas season. The Christmas Lights Webcam features 26,000 lights and 3 inflatables along with 3 webcams where you can view it all. And in case you want to annoy the neighbors, you can turn those 26,000 lights on and off along with inflating/deflating Santa, Frosty the Snowman, and Frankenstein. Yes, Internet folks around the world can control Griswold's lights.

The web site suggests Internet surfers who enjoy the show consider donating for Celiac Disease Reearch and so far, almost $3,000 has been raised for the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research.

But there is some history to this story ...

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An agitated passenger was shot this week in Miami for disobeying a police order and allegedly threatening a bomb. Why is no-one upset? Are we that fearful of security that both liberty and humanity must be sacrified?

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I live in Sydney. Yesterday a friend who lives overseas emailed me to ask what was going on. This was my reply.

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But Cronulla and the Sutherland Shire are struggling to remain in their white-bread time warp.

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