Monday, June 26, 2006

How to Get a Book Published

This post was the original location where people could comment on my little primer on getting a book published. Since I've moved my blog to my own site, I've also moved these comments to this location. (All of the comments have been saved, they have just been moved.)

Monday, June 12, 2006

Bureaucrats kill kids

At least, that seems to be the implication of a report by Matier and Ross in today's Chronicle. Three children died in a house fire near where I live. The closest fire station couldn't handle the blaze alone. The second closest station is one right near me. But no trucks rushed to the fire from that station. Why? Because it's in an unincorporated region of the county, and the city of Richmond and Contra Costa County have not been able to come to an agreement about cooperation on resources to fight fires (Richmond was afraid it would spend more on putting out county fires than the county would spend on putting out Richmond fires).

Dead of smoke inhalation are Devieonne Portis, 9, Jerimiah Cradle, 4 and Isis Cradle, 2.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

That's not evil? (check out these links)

I know it seems like I'm on an anti-Google campaign, but I'm not really. After all, this site, blogger, is a G site, and I use G-mail, etc. etc. Often they are good at interface and ease of use.

But because I've been working on getting my website better indexed again I've been doing a lot of reading about search engines, and things come up like this:

Google's informal motto is "Don't be evil."

Yet they have colluded with the Chinese government to censor search engine results in China. An article by John Scott on "Google's Moral Superiority" dramatically demonstrates the results of this. Check out the differences in an image search for "Tiananmen Square" on google.com and google.cn:

1. http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
2. http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen