Those who know me personally know that I’ve been on a bit of a tirade recently about corn syrup. This really hit home recently over something as simple as a bottle of Pepsi. What’s the scoop?

I just received a Nintendo DS cartridge that contains the Opera browser. It also ships with a memory expansion pack, which plugs into the port in the bottom of the DS. Given the DS’s size, and the lack of a keyboard, how good of a browser can it be? In this installment, we’re going to look at the DS browser, along with some mobile websites of interest.

Maybe it’s due to the shorter attention spans of today’s youngsters, or even the advent of instant messengers and texting via cell phones, but is anyone else beside me a bit dismayed by the decline in basic writing skills on the internet? I certainly am.

Some of my close friends wonder why I’m such a Scrooge McDuck when it comes to the holidays.  Can you imagine why?  You walked into stores a few weeks ago, and the Xmas displays were already shoving aside the Halloween decor.  You tune in the radio, and the stations are already playing holiday songs.  And a few people are already claiming to get their shopping done before December hits.  (And in this economy, one has to ask, “With what money?”)  Putting aside the whole spiritual aspect of Xmas, it used to be a time to get together with friends and family.  True, it has been commercialized for decades (after all, Linus even said it was run by a “big eastern syndicate”), but the whole aspect of “The Holidays” has become annoyingly and helplessly obnoxious in the past dozen or so years.  Personally, I can’t wait for the holidays to pass.  This whole orgy of commercialism, rammed down our throats for more than two months straight, all over one freakin’ day out of the year, just irks me no end.  The only “true meaning of Xmas” in the 21st Century is to take us for everything we’ve got, whether the marketing is crammed down our throat, or we’re guilted into it.  No thanks!  Fast forward me to January 2008, and I’ll be happy.

For nearly the past two decades, I’ve been an on-again, off-again reader of PC Magazine, having first picked up an issue at some point in the mid 80s to learn more about the computer I had purchased a year or two earlier. After a couple of issues, I was hooked, and was a subscriber for many, many years. I still visit their site regularly, and have seen various columnists and editors come and go. One notable (or one could say notorious) columnist is John C. Dvorak, who has had not one, but two columns in PC Magazine (his own opinion column, and “Inside Track”). I’ve always admired his style, even if I never agreed with him 100% of the time. He’s been on TV as well as radio, so he’s no stranger to the broadcast world either, and has written for countless other publications in addition to PC Magazine.