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I love the hell out of this game. And so will you.

I get a business report once a week from InfoWorld, just to see what sort of things going on in the real world may affect my publishing business. Here’s the latest: AMERICA ONLINE (AOL) confirmed that there is a security hole in the lat est versions of its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) chat program, corroborat ing the findings released by an independent security group Wednesday. AOL will fix the problem by the end of the week. AOL has "identified the issue and developed a resolution that should be deployed in the next day or two," said Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman. The fix to the hole will take place on AOL's servers and will not require users to download patch es, he said. AOL is unaware of any users being affected by the security problem, he added. I love the way those guys over at AOL fix things. "Here’s a problem, just so you know. We’ve fixed it, with a solution that’ll be transparent to you. Sorry for the inconvenience." That's the way to run a business. My favorite search engine, by far, is Google. My pal Alex Amado turned me on to it back when it first started up (his roommate Matt worked on the developers’ team), and I’ve never really used anything since. It’s just that versatile. Now, they’ve partnered with catalog companies to showcase searchable catalogs on the Internet. I’m betting someone’s just figured out how to make money using the web. Somewhen, one of my British pals turned me onto vnunet.com, a British technology website. Today, they had an interesting article about implanti ng microchips into humans as an anti-terrorist move. Coming so close upon the announcement from NASA that they are plan ning on using miniaturized spy-satellite technology to replace rods and cones in blind folks’ retinas, it seems as though, even absent the flying cars, the jetpacks, and the silver hair and diagonal zippers, that perhaps we really are living in the future.

Let's hope 2002 is better than 2001. Can't get much worse, can it?

The Penultimate Cannon January 11, 2002

For those of you reading these from the beginning, you may be reassured that today’s column is a return to the choice diatribes that marked the first few months of these columns. In the beginning, I was pissed off about

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