Sci-Guys Review: Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt"

I posted before about the interview I did for the Sci-Guys podcast. What I didn't mention at the time is that I've always wanted to be a reviewer. Well...I mean, I am a reviewer for CPU magazine and such, but I really wanted to be more in the vein of movie reviewer extraordinaire Roger Ebert. I've long believed that part of Ebert's enduring popularity hinges on his intelligence and perspective. He brings decades of both professional and human insight into his reviews. Often, they're as much about life as they are about movies. This is what sets Ebert apart. Any keyboard monkey can spin a snarky put-down, but very few can achieve elegance, humor, and wisdom all while writing "just" another review.

That's what I've always wanted to do, but computing doesn't allow much leeway for humanity in its media coverage. The best of my efforts in this direction can be found in my Architects of Tomorrow, Volumes 1 and 2 ebooks. But yeah, I get it. How much humanity and perspective can one inject into a Wi-Fi adapter review? Not much.

After the Sci-Guys interview, I had a crazy idea. I dropped a note to the guy who'd interviewed me, Sci-Guy John, and asked if there was any chance that I could do little reviews of short fiction ebooks on the show. He floated the idea around his group, and they agreed to give it a spin.

My first attempt at this appeared in Sci-Guys podcast 094. (You know they're geeks, because only nerds who survived Y2K would think to put a "0" in front of their otherwise two-digit show numbers.) My little segment appears about half-way through the show, and it got edited in just before going live, so there was no time to work with the audio levels and such. That's I sound like I'm French kissing the mic.

I'd encourage everyone with a funny bone and a strong stomach to enjoy the show, but if you just want the text of my review, here it is:

William’s Short Shorts: “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

One day in sixth grade, in the middle of this otherwise godawful anthology of short stories for young readers, I found “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury. And my head exploded. It was my first taste of speculative fiction, that dark area of literature where the creepy and fantastic collide. Speculative fiction is as fascinating as it is disturbing, and it’s usually most disturbing when it makes you question your own humanity.

On one level, “The Veldt” is a parable about modern man and our love of technology. George and Lydia Hadley are recent purchasers of a Happylife Home, something straight off the Street of Dreams and then filtered through The Jetsons.

This Happylife Home’s main feature is its nursery, which is a dead ringer for the holodeck. Keep in mind that “The Veldt” was originally published in 1950, almost four decades before virtual reality and the holodeck arrived in Star Trek: The Next Generation. So when Bradbury describes the nursery as a space where 2D walls are able to simulate an African veldt grassland and its animal inhabitants with incredible 3D realism, and the environment is created from scans of the imaginations of the Hadley’s two children, this is science fiction at its forward-looking finest.

But “The Veldt” doesn’t focus on technology. Rather, it’s about how the Hadleys have become crippled by their dependence technology. The father needs more sedation at night. The mother is a nervous wreck. And their two children are spoiled brats who want to spend every waking minute enveloped in their video games—I mean, Happylife Home nursery. Faced with the shouting and pain of ripping their kids back into reality or letting the obsession continue, the Hadleys keep their kids on the electronic teat. The African environment grows increasingly real as the parents’ panic escalates.

So, when would you try to pull the plug? I mean, we just want our kids to be happy, right? It’s so easy to let technology lull us to sleep. But sometimes happiness goes too far. And don’t we all worry, deep down, that we might wake up just be a little...too late?

Even now, reading “The Veldt” still sends a shiver up my back. You can find it in Bradbury’s story collection, The Illustrated Man. This story opened my eyes to speculative fiction and changed my life. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and it seemed a great piece to kick off an ongoing series of short story reviews here on Sci-Guys. With the rise of ebooks, people are gradually rediscovering how incredible good shorter fiction can be. Not only can it pack the same punch as a novel, it’s often a better fit for people with busy schedules, and you can pick most stories up for less than a buck.

For now, don’t miss “The Veldt,” spelled V-E-L-D-T. I don’t see it on the Kindle or Nook yet, so this one time, please look for it on paper first. But whatever you do, don’t miss this story, and thanks for checking out my short shorts.

My First Interview as an E-Publisher

I've listened to loads of author interviews over the years, and I've certainly conducted quite a few as part of my journalism career, but I've never been on the receiving end of things...until now.

If you enjoy speculative fiction, especially on TV, and you like your banter a bit salty, I'd encourage you to check out the Sci-Guys podcast. It contains my first-ever interview as an author, and the four guys who run the show were generous enough to dedicate almost 18 minutes of the show to me and my thoughts on e-publishing. If that's not enough, you can also stream/download the even longer version here.

If you follow indie publishing, much of the discussion may seem like old news. But if you're a fledgling writer or haven't decided to get serious about finding alternatives to traditional publishing, I'd encourage you to give it a listen. I sure had a blast doing the recording at the Sci-Guys Crawlspace Studio. It's literally a crawlspace, complete with gravel floor and a space heater we had to unplug in order to run my laptop. In this terrible picture I snapped with my smartphone, you can see the plywood walls and insulated ducting wrapped in holiday lights.

Humble beginnings, perhaps, but it was a blast, and I'm looking forward doing more with the Sci-Guys in the near future. Meanwhile, grab a drink, put your Netflix stream of "The Walking Dead" on pause, maybe dust off some of your old Star Wars action figures, and give the Sci-Guys podcast a listen. It's like enjoying the antics of your favorite class clowns in high school, only now they're grown up. Kind of.

Following "The Followers"

Who knows how stories really start? Polished ideas begin like bits of interstellar dust, floating around random and formless. But add in gravity and time -- lots and lots of time -- and eventually those tiny motes will collide, stick, accumulate, and, at the key moment of critical mass, ignite into a star.

For my new novellete,"The Followers," that first mote appeared when I came across this photograph. It was part of a Yahoo! news story about the Medford Historical Society displaying a new collection of rare Civil War photos. I was struck by this scene of marital normalcy in the midst of America's most tragic and bitter war. Cute little kids at Daddy's feet, wife doing the laundry. Oh, and somehow the family is tagging along behind Daddy's regiment as he marches 15 miles or more per day and occasionally has to go fight in the midst of unthinkable carnage.

Around the time I found this photo, I was also working through another story idea, a near-future piece about bioengineering and zombies. I'd been putting notes together for weeks and had zombies constantly gnawing in the back of my mind.

Two specks of dust in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly, they collided in my imagination...and stuck.

I took U.S. History during my junior year of high school. Typical of most history courses, I found it immensely dull and forgettable. If you think about it, making history that boring is pretty difficult. History is one long epic saga filled with intrigue, battles, sex, human sacrifice (figuratively and literally), double dealing, great loves, the bitterest betrayals, and ultimately the fate of the world. How could anyone not love that? Turns out, pretty easily so long as you reduce it to a bunch of sterile factoids crammed into an emotionless textbook that you stare at for 50 minutes while trapped in a little plastic desk. U.S. History was turned from a thing of vibrant fascination into this desiccated, lifeless, but somehow still shambling shell. What more appropriate backdrop, then, for a zombie story?

On an impulse, I turned to Wikipedia and searched for the Battle of Gettysburg. Apparently, there was enough of junior year U.S. History still hidden in my subconscious to lead me toward another dust mote that was compatible with the accretion still gathering mass in my imagination. Detail after detail clicked into place. At a time when we remain increasingly nervous about Iran's nuclear intentions, thoughts of weapons of mass destruction are never far from the headlines. Add that speck into the mix.

What if zombies were such a weapon? What if one side had been able to wield that weapon at the most pivotal moment of the most pivotal battle in American history?

I opened my "Ideas" file on Google Docs (virtually all of my in-progress files now live in the cloud) and typed this:

July 1863, outside of Gettysburg, PA. Union army commander General Meade has his back against a wall, his forces having failed to defeat the Confederate leader, General Robert E. Lee. After two days of death and retreating to higher ground around Cemetery Hill, the Confederate forces have the Union surrounded on three sides. Then comes word that Union reinforcements are nearing. The Confederates must smash the Union army the next morning while they can.

The story starts with one of the camps under Confederate General Longstreet, who controls the western forces. Longstreet knows that Meade is a weak, indecisive general prone to not pressing an advantage when one materializes. Meade has not allowed General Grant’s ideas about total war to dominate the Union army, but Longstreet actually agrees with Grant. Longstreet knows that they need a total victory across Pennsylvania, and Lee, the eternal gentleman, may not have the guts to be merciless. Look at all of the prisoners they’ve taken. Longstreet wants a knockout blow and is weighing options with his officers. Longstreet calls for a 10-minute pee break, goes outside, and is approached by a private. The private wants to show him something. He takes Longstreet back to a tent behind the camp -- one of thousands of such tents typically inhabited by the families of soldiers who follow behind armies. The private beckons Longstreet to follow him inside of the tent. At first, Longstreet refuses. Then they hear a low, ragged moan from inside the tent. It sounds like a woman, but...not quite.

I visualized the ending scene of the story as clearly as this beginning, and I loved it instantly. Thirty minutes later, I'd put holds on every Gettysburg-related book in my local library's collection, kids' books included. The best of the bunch by far was Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears. If you have an interest in the subject, I highly recommend it.


You might think that the moment of critical mass and story ignition came today, upon the story's publication. I don't see it that way. The real moment happened during my research when I found out that General Longstreet had lost three of his children to scarlet fever less than two years before Gettysburg. Instantly, I went from having a cardboard prop to a real man, filled with pain and loss, trying every day to hold himself together in the midst of this Civil War insanity. With that one last speck, the story reached its tipping point, and today's publication became inevitable.


I started writing the first draft on April 23, 2011, almost ten months ago, and finished on September 3rd. The story weighed in at over 12,000 words, and I thought, "Good Lord, will people actually read all the way through this?" I had originally envisioned the story at half that size. But every time I read it over, the more I felt that, if anything, I was skimming and leaving way too much out. Rather than keep second-guessing myself, I decided to bring in an alpha reader or two and start gathering responses.


Right off the bat, it was clear that the story had a fundamental flaw in logic: why not simply have the zombies attack before the battle? Events were happening because I needed them to happen for the plot's sake, not because they were byproducts of characters' desires. (A solid plot derives from character, not the other way around. This is why action movies with no attention to character development fall flat and why, come to think of it, history classes are so dull. All of the character has been stripped away.) The second draft's mission was to remedy this, and by third draft, I think the bugs were worked out.

One of my editors from CPU magazine, Vince Cogley, volunteered to be a beta reader. He applied his editing skills and (hitherto unknown to me) gift for imagination in speculative fiction toward draft #2 and proposed a different ending for the story. Originally, the scene with General Meade was the final clincher. Vince's feedback resulted in draft #3 tossing out this scene and replacing it with the final Longstreet scene you have in the published version. The trouble was that each had its own merits and reasons for being present, but you can't have two endings in one tale. I fretted over this for two weeks, unable to decide which ending I liked better. Then, one night while putting the kids to bed, it struck me: this wasn't like picking a prom date. With a slight bit of twisting, I could keep both, capturing the plot and back story benefits of Meade's scene while preserving the emotional impact of Longstreet's final actions.


And that, y'all, is how "The Followers" came to be. I hope you enjoy it and will pass the good word on to your friends. Please check it out at Amazon or Smashwords. If you see fit to leave a review, I'll be doubly obliged, and my hunger for human approbation will be satisfied...for a while.

Evolution of a Killer Cover

I'm a firm believer in paying for professional services. My CPA costs several hundred dollars per year, but he's got decades of experience and knows how to trim thousands of dollars off of my family's tax bill every year (legally!) in ways that I couldn't hope to grasp. When you need legal representation, you don't try to muddle your way through a court case; you hire an attorney. Almost invariably, good professionals will return several times over the cost you paid for their services. This begs the question of why I've been so slow to take my own advice when it comes to publishing ebooks. Judge for yourself if I've made a smart move...

*  *  *

When you sell a novel to a traditional publisher, the publisher typically takes responsibility for producing cover artwork. But when you're a small, independent publisher of your own material, you often start out with no budget for artwork and no prayer of generating enough revenue to have such a budget. As a result, the fledgling self-publisher does the best he or she can manage for virtually free. The trouble is that the results generally look free. Since we all inevitably judge books (and also short stories since we're talking about ebooks) by their covers, this does not bode well for sales and success.

A little over a year ago, I released my first ebook title, a poetry collection titled Rough Crossing. The photograph was donated by a friend, the ridiculously talented pro photographer Gary Wilson.

As you can see, it's not much of a cover. I have very little experience in graphical design, and it shows. The photograph itself is outstanding, but as a book cover this image fails almost completely. The text is illegible when the image is seen at thumbnail size -- which is how people will see it 90% of the time on ebook retail sites -- and all of those steel beams look like a tangled mess. Now, I know that nobody reads poetry, plus I'm giving the book away for free through Smashwords, so I don't lose much sleep over this early experiment.

Fast forward one year. I've now released a free collection of technology essays, two ebooks of fascinating "celebrity" interviews, and a short but sweet horror tale called "The Sound of Autumn Night." In each case, I've done the covers myself. For the short story, I bought two images from a royalty-free photo service. The total cost to me was $10 or $12 and an hour or two of Photoshop time. You'll probably agree that the cover's appearance matches its cost.

Heading into 2012, I've set myself a much more aggressive self-publishing schedule. First up on my to-do list is a short story I've been working on since last spring, a Civil War-era zombie story called "The Followers." Now that I'm into the home stretch on revisions and preparing to publish, I had to make a decision about the cover art: go big or go home? I've done the home thing up until now, and the results have been...well, they could be better. Ready or not, I think it's time to take my game up a notch.

One of my magazine editors volunteered to help on the story editing, and his input has, I believe, helped to improve the tale considerably. More to the point, though, his wife, Andria Cogley, is a design professional. We worked out a deal that my budding budget could manage, and I sent off an initial cover concept based on two royalty-free images pulled from iStockphoto.

Because cannons figure prominently in the story's battle scene, I thought that having a cannon on the cover would be pertinent to the content and convey the Civil War setting. As for the zonbi (an older alternate spelling that I use in the piece), I knew there was no way I could portray my key monster as I'd described her, bound and gagged on the floor of a tent. The makeup, modeling, photography, and time are far beyond my capabilities at this point. So I wondered about the one key standout characteristic of my creature and decided it was her eyes. With that, I was able to locate a piece of photography that could serve. I threw together the image you see here and sent it to Andria.

She requested a little time to sketch something out, and I expected a doodle, like something you'd do with a Sharpie pen and a cocktail napkin. This is what came back to me a couple of days later:

I was stunned. An electric thrill went through me the moment I first opened the image. I suppose that feeling you hear about when authors receive their very first copies of their first book in the mail might be more intense or fulfilling, but I'll tell you what. Every time I looked at this image, I couldn't wipe the grin off my face. Still, I knew it was a first pass. I replied back, noting my amazement as well as a couple of criticisms. One, I wanted the title to be bigger. I'd learned my lesson about readability at thumbnail sizes. Second, I thought the eyes were too sexy. The zonbi needed to be roughed up a bit. She was decaying, after all. My wife commented that she looked like a green version of the Na'vi chick from Avatar.

That was when my editor friend replied that his wife, Andria, had done the photography herself -- from a self-portrait. Ah. Awkward.

A few hours later, this revision came back. So much better! I confirmed that the text was indeed legible at the tiny size Smashwords shows for search results. I loved the scar running down the left eye (our left, not the zonbi's). But in doing the texturing, I felt the left eye had become oddly darker than the right. There was also a gap in the right eyebrow that had mysteriously crept in. Speaking of which, I commented that those were some very well-maintained eyebrows and lashes for a a Civil War-era corpse.

Andria did another version, lightening the left eye and patching the right brow. However, I now felt that the scar running down the eye looked too pale, making it look more like a Photoshop effect than a wound. Quickly and without complaint (at least that I could hear from 2,000 miles away), Andria issued a fourth revision, and I couldn't be happier.

I made this the background image for my triple-display Windows desktop. I still get a thrill every time I see it, and the constant reminder keeps my mind churning on what should be the final text revision now in progress. Hopefully, you agree with me that this is a kickass cover, and now I feel even more pressure to make sure that the story itself lives up to the incredible artwork.

The moral of the story, of course, is that it really is worth the money to use professional services, especially when you're trying to build a business. I'll be extremely curious to try and assess what impact the cover image has on sales over the coming months.

It's OK Not to Know

In high school, I had a teacher/mentor named Tom Collins (no, not the drink) who taught me history and comparative religion but also a bit about human perception and life in general. His influence on my thinking was immense. One of his most oft-repeated mantras, spoken reverently like a Zen koan and always enunciated for emphasis in his slight Southern drawl, was this gem: "It's OK not to know."

Now, I went to a top-shelf private school, and one of the things on which you pride yourself in such places is having the intellectual tools necessary to find the right answer -- to anything. If you don't know something, you research, research some more, and keep researching until you figure it out. Getting this message drilled into me for four years was probably a key component in my future career as a journalist.

Being told "it's OK not to know" made no sense. What the hell do you mean it's OK? It's not OK! Not knowing is no better than being wrong! In fact, it's worse because at least if you're wrong it shows that you probably tried to get the right answer. I'd like to think that after two years of intensive study with Tom I finally understood what he was getting at. In reality, though, I probably didn't. Not entirely. Because here I am, over 20 years later, still trying to put the wisdom of those five words into practice every day.

As a culture, we hate not knowing. "Is is better to spank your kids or not? You don't know? Seriously? Don't you want to be a good parent?" "How are you going to vote in 2012? You don't know? Well, clearly you're an uncaring and ignorant sop who's content to leech off of society." "What are you gonna do with your life? You don't know? Well, that sounds like a recipe for failure. You're screwed."

It feels better to have an answer, any answer, than this terrifying chasm of ambiguity in front of us. The trouble is that when we jump to conclusions and reach for answers prematurely, we burn precious resources. Consider all of the people in college who don't really know what to pursue, but their parents are spending tens of thousands of dollars for them to be there, and everybody expects them to have a major, so they pick Psychology. Two years later, some epiphany hits, and they change to Materials Engineering. Now they know (or at least think they do) and are on a positive, motivated path. In the meantime, though, they've burned all that time and money going in the wrong direction because they felt an answer was necessary immediately. Not knowing was simply unendurable.

Knowing takes time, and unfortunately it usually takes more time than we're willing to wait. I'm reminded of my ridiculous dating career, in which I went through a succession of girls/women who were clearly wrong for me. I was flailing about, making terrible choices because I just didn't know what I wanted. After all, having made some decision was surely better than the loneliness and embarrassment of no decision at all...right? Then I met the woman who would become my wife, and I knew. How could I be so certain? I can't articulate it for you. It's like the difference between building a log cabin with tree stumps compared to accurately measured and cut timbers. You can see when it's right. You can feel it. You just know.

Knowing takes patience and fortitude. You have to understand that not knowing now is an essential part of the process of knowing later.

Which brings me to this blog. I follow several blogs, and they all seem to know what they're about. They keep tightly focused on their given topics, and each post clearly furthers that author's agenda. I think that's what a blog is supposed to do. Otherwise, why spend the time on it? I have mouths to feed, and if I wanted to wallow in my own thoughts, I'd talk to myself in the shower.

I originally envisioned this blog as a sort of "DVD extras" repository, a showcase of leftovers from my day job, thinking that this might benefit my journalism career somehow. For some people, I'm sure this approach works. It doesn't for me. I can feel the drafts and crazy tilting of that log cabin made from tree stumps. Flailing about, I've wandered through topics on education, low-carb dieting, and who knows what else. Clearly, I don't know what I'm doing here.

But that's OK. I believe it's OK not to know...yet.

There's the rub. The difference is the "yet." If you don't know what you want to do with your life, that's fine as long as you're working on it. We've got to make effort toward understanding. We can't just throw up our hands, say "well, I tried!" and watch more TV. That's just asking to fall into the pit of ambiguity and never be heard from again. When you don't know and you stop trying to reach answers, you're effectively dead weight.

I'm going to flatter myself and say that I think I've been experimenting with this blog rather than simply casting about aimlessly. With each post, I'm trying out new things in my mind, waiting for different ingredients to gel. I am "actively waiting" to know, if that makes any sense.

Over the last few months, I've seen glimpses of the direction I want to travel, and I'm very excited to see a path emerging under my feet. How will this blog fit into that path? I don't know...yet. I do know that I don't want to be a mouthpiece and repeat the works of others, nor do I want to offer yet another voice of commentary on current events. I just don't think I'm that unique or clever. But I'm not afraid to wait and keep experimenting, because when the answer arrives, I'll feel it, and hopefully you will, too. The timbers will stack neatly, the drafts will be plugged, and that cabin is going to be awesome.

Five Ways Your Old PC Can Help Create Super-Kids!

Being someone who works with and reviews a lot of computer gear, I have a fair collection of old, junky, really freaking slow entry-level PCs. Those nettops and netbooks that seemed like such a great idea when they debuted a few years ago? Got those. Old dual-core desktops in an age of quad- and six-core? Check. The Logitech Google TV unit that totally tanked here in the U.S.? Installed and in use. I've even got three VGA LCD monitors. Not DVI, not HDMI, not DisplayPort. Just old school VGA. You know what the difference is between VGA and VHS? Me neither.

However! I've also got two elementary school-aged kids, and they don't need to run eight browser windows alongside Photoshop, the entire MS Office suite, two more instances of OpenOffice, and iTunes, all while running active ripping software in the background. (Yes, that's my usual app load every day.) All they want out of their computing lives is to run browser-based games, and for that most of my secondary systems will work perfectly.

I'm willing to compromise with the kids on their computer time. They can have their gaming time, yes, but in return I want them to learn. There are so many gaping holes in their education, it's appalling. I'll try not to get into my long-winded rant about our K-12 educational system here, but suffice it to say that a) I think most parents are on their own when it comes to filling in these holes and b) after so many years of personal computing, most of us now have at least one or two such secondary systems laying about and gathering dust. Here are five uses I've found for such "mostly dead" machines that could make a world of difference in your youngsters' lives.

1. Typing. 

I don't know about your school system, but mine still seems to think it's 1986. Cursive gets taught to third-graders (and promptly discarded by fourth grade). Fifth graders have never even heard of PowerPoint. Students can't construct blogs for class projects because the district bans all student access to such sites. So far, the only purpose I've seen for the computers in my kids' school is to help quiz them on standardized tests. The machines aren't supposed to teach them anything, only help the school meet its state benchmarks...which, by the way, it fails.

I have always deplored handwriting, especially cursive. It's slow, untidy, laborious, and open to misreading. Compared to computer-based typing, it's simply an inferior method of written communication. Even worse, it's a bottleneck. Of course, all writing is a bottleneck. You have ideas in your head that need to get to the page, but there's this translation thing in the middle that has to happen, and sometimes that translation happens so slowly that you get bored or frustrated. This happens to my boys constantly. Handwriting stifles their creative development because it's so inefficient. People have told me that "some studies" have shown how the constant motion of handwriting helps to stimulate a certain region of the brain. Last time I checked, typing involved equally constant motion of the fingers. I bet no one tested that, though.

Solution? At the end of 2010, I paid $10 for a downloadable copy of Typing Instructor for Kids Platinum. (The price has gone up to $20 since then.) Ever since, I've had my boys practice with the software two or three times per week, 15 to 20 minutes per session. It's a fun mix of basic skills building plus video games. I wish the designer would update the software with more current-looking and challenging games, but the software suffices as it is.

The result is that, one year later, my nine-year-old can type at 30 WPM and my just-turned-seven-year-old is hitting above 25 WPM. [Correction: Thirty minutes after posting this, the little one also passed his 30 WPM challenge. Nothing motivates quite like sibling rivalry.] I have an incentive system for them to help with motivation, but the bottom line is that they're both now skilled enough to make typing their primary mode of written communication -- and both of them enjoy it! They think it's a blast to express themselves through a keyboard. In contrast, neither of them has had a kind word to say about handwriting as taught by their school. Ever.

2. Music.

Unless you're studying track mixing, it's obvious that nothing can replace learning to play music on a real instrument. Still, any musician will tell you that there's a lot of theory that goes along with true musical understanding, and this is where the Web can help.

As an example, check out Theta Music Trainer. Rather than try to chain your kid to some boring music textbook, why not let him learn the theory intuitively through game play?

Alternatively, don't underestimate the power of YouTube and streaming video. There are untold numbers of how-to videos on YouTube, but they can tend to be a bit scattered and haphazard in their quality. For something more systematic, look for subscription services, such as the one offered by Next Level Guitar. Compared to a one-on-one tutor at $30+/hour, such videos can't provide the same sort of personalized feedback, but if you're on a budget, getting all-you-can-watch lessons for $29/month or $75/quarter is not a bad deal.

3. Foreign language.

The same idea holds true for foreign language studies. I grit my teeth every time I think about my boys doing colored paper cut-out projects rather than learning Spanish or Mandarin. Once again, it falls to the parents to fill in the skills our children will need later in life that the schools are blatantly ignoring. Can that old PC help? If it can play YouTube, absolutely.

One of the best free sites I've found so far is SpanishDict. Short of having a live classroom or shelling out major money for a package such as Rosetta Stone, SpanishDict's collection of sequential videos, flash cards, reference resources, and more make this an excellent starting point for Spanish learning. I'm sure similar sites must exist for other languages, and if they don't, they will soon.

4. Math and science.

If you've followed or known me for any length of time, you know I'm a die-hard Khan Academy fanatic. There are many, many other sites for learning math and science, but this is far and away my favorite, with the cleanest interface, most effective lessons, and best management tools. The site is so good that, with only a $5 investment in a pair of small whiteboards and dry erase pens, both of my kids were able to complete arithmetic and move into pre-algebra long before their peers. My youngest boy even asks to pull up random Khan Academy science videos as a reward for good behavior. Last night we watched the video on whether the real universe is smaller than the observable universe and both of them found it interesting. Can you imagine an elementary school kid being exposed to ideas like this in the classroom? And there are literally thousands of videos and exercise modules -- all free, all for you.

5. College preparation.

Imagine if your child could get a free pass to sit in as many MIT classes as she pleased. You'd freak out, right? "A free MIT education?! No way!" But that's exactly what MIT's OpenCourseWare effort provides. There are over 2,000 courses from the eminent school's catalog, many with videos of every lecture, course notes, reading lists, on and on. The only things missing are the tests and homework feedback. And the labs. OK, and the parties. But you get the idea.

No employer is saying, "So you watched all of the course work necessary for a degree in Biology, but you didn't do the work? Well, that's good enough for us." But if you were a high school kid wanting to build expertise in a field and you had some spare time, or even if you were an adult wanting to bolster your knowledge in a field that could impact your income, wouldn't you take the time to study some of this material? Could you possibly find a better or more authoritative source?

If MIT doesn't suit your taste, check out the list of other institutions involved in the OpenCourseWare initiative: Tufts, University of California, Paris Tech, Kyushu University, on and on. And again, all it takes to participate in this mind blowing, world class educational opportunity is a cast-off computer with enough horsepower and Internet bandwidth to run YouTube.

You know how competitive and globally "flat" the economic landscape is becoming. My children's prospects for the job market in 10 years or so are daunting to say the least. If our kids don't have these skills and knowledge, rest assured that their international peers, all of which will be able to telecommute over the Internet just as easily as we can, certainly will. Most of us have the gateways to these digital assets sitting idly in a corner or closet. Brush them off, plug them back in, and turn your kids loose into a world of learning that none of us had the chance to enjoy and leverage when we were young.

Top Reviewer Tackles "Architects, Vol. 2"

You never really know if a given strategy is any good until results start to arrive. I sent a copy of my recent ebook, "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 2," to Amazon top reviewer (currently #114 in the world) BigAl for his perusal. He'd read and liked Volume 1 well enough, but would he find Volume 2 repetitive? Would the shorter length seem lazy rather than accommodating? Would the interviews be as interesting? I had no idea...until now.

BigAl posted the review on his Books and Pals blog, giving Volume 2 four our of five stars and this conclusion: "Anyone with an interest in technology, where it has been, and where it might be going, should enjoy this new volume."

I couldn't ask for better than that. Thanks so much, BigAl! And for those of you who've also been kind enough to download the new book, if you could spare two minutes to leave a quick review on the title's Amazon page, I'd be immensely grateful!