Well, departing from my normal technical writing and cynicism, I felt the need, the need to type.

You see, I had spent the last 11 months planning on taking the full month of July off to rewrite my book “A Novice Guide to Optimizing and Tweaking Every PC” (and to change the title). Unfortunately my time was cut down to 2 weeks including travel time. As a result, I decided to read the over 600 e-mails I have had to put on the back burner and worry about out book later.

You see, not only am I a writer, speaker, President of SBN (www.SBNMO.org), Secretary of the Marshfield Shooting Club, board member at my church, husband and father of three, I am actually a practicing computer geek.

I own and operate a technology business (www.WardConciliation.com) and that makes life busy. Since I am no longer in my 20’s and the 30’s will be gone in a few months, I am not getting up at 6 am and going to bed at 2 am anymore and something had to give.

As a technician I really need time to “study” and keep ahead of the trends, as a writer, I need to get out information that is applicable and the many e-mails I get do just that. As a result, the past year has been interesting. Customers have been taken care of, my oldest went to college and I finally had to stop teaching in June –just too much going on.

This week’s problems it that I am so tired of reading e-mails that I am about to go running around bouncing off the walls and talking to myself. That last part scares me, when I talk to myself it drowns out the other voices in my head.

Some of the events this last year in technology were:

Microsoft dropping support for Windows 98 and ME and XP SP-1
AMD buying ATI
Seagate buying Maxtor
Web development all but abandoning HTML and Java Scripts in favor of preformed CSS programs.
Windows Vista and Office 2007 were released
Microsoft began using their terrible WGA in an attempt to “fight piracy” – it appears to actually fight privacy but that is another rant welling up in me.
OfficeMax closed a lot of locations and quit using mail in rebates.
Video card technology has gone from one to two video cards (SLI or Crossfire technology).
Intel and AMD release first “dual-core” and now “quad-core” processors.
The Wireless “N” standard is still trying to be approved (3 plus years after products hit the shelves)
AT&T became Cingular and then Cingular became AT&T – I think
Google introduced “CheckOut” to compete with PayPal and eBay immediately kicked CheckOut users off their site (guess they like having the monopoly)
Lot’s of personal data was leaked by AOL, the Veteran’s administration and another dozen or so big companies.
Office Live by Microsoft and Google Docs have come of age
HD DVD and Blu-Ray were released
Millions of notebook batteries from many laptop makers were recalled
And another “Green” push was started – but not for any political reasons of course.

These are all big things that needed to be researched and discussed. Skipping too many e-mails results in embarrassment. Oh, well, enough ranting, time to get back to reading.