You have to know what you are looking for to know when you find it

You have to know what you are looking for to know when you find it

Hi neighbors. Another election is over! Whether your favorite team won or lost, we are all in the same boat for the next few years. Lucky for us, our forefathers built some life preservers into the Constitution.

Obama won the election, but my advice would have been the same had McCain won -- remain vigilent! Elected officials work for US. We must remember that and we must constantly remind them of that.

So far I haven't heard any conspiracy theories about "fixed" electronic voting machines. I'm pretty certain that allegation will come out sooner or later.

The world is so high-tech now. Many people fear that the "Big Brother" scenario isn't that implausible any more. I don't think we need to be that paranoid, but it is interesting to note what gadgets are out there.

My son and I were talking about Jules Verne the other day while watching the newest version of "Journey to the Center of the Earth." As a fiction writer myself, I have to admire any author who can have their work still be so popular more than a century after it was written.

Do you remember "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?" That was a Verne novel about an atomic powered submarine. The real kicker is that the story was written in the 19th century.

Watching the new Knight Rider show this week, we were reminded that the bigger (and more complicated) they are, the easier they may fall when it comes to computers at least.

It seems having a "back door" is a common occurrence and that is how many hackers gain access to other people's computer data. Like most thieves that slip in through the back door of a house, a hacker can slip in through the back door of a computer program and steal what is inside it.

I've often heard it said that locks only keep out the honest people and that a thief will find a way around any lock invented.

Like most people who own a home computer, I spend a good sum of money periodically to keep my data protected from thieves with firewalls, spyware snipers, worm wrestlers and virus destroyers. Sounds like a war going on all the time doesn't it? Still, I suppose even the military and government have computers that hackers can eventually gain access to if they didn't change the "parameters" of the programs every now and then. That would include, I suppose, putting new locks on the back doors.

I'll admit, I tell myself I understand all this jabber on one level, but mostly it's all Greek to me.

Computers are wonderful tools, toys, educational resources and communication devices. But you have to be careful not to believe every thing you read. Simply because information or opinions appear on an Internet web page doesn't mean the information is correct and that the opinions aren't using twisted information to back up their viewpoint.

Teachers wisely point this out to their students who use the Internet for homework assignment research.

Whatever happened to the encyclopedias? Remember those huge books that came in a set and were so fascinating to browse through? Now we browse through the Internet using a search engine that uses elements like key words and spider searchers to find page after page that mentions whatever word or phrase you type into your search engine.

Of course, not all of those references may have anything to do with the topic you thought you were searching for.

The way I understand it, the search engine finds the word you were looking for anywhere it is mentioned in whatever usage possible. You can get some strange connections to almost any word or phrase.

For instance, a search for "artifacts" turned up more than 19 thousand possible results. Narrowing the search to Myan artifacts brought the possibilities down to a little more than three thousand results.

My advice is from hard-learned lessons. Keep your searches very selective and try to pinpoint exactly what the subject is you want to know about.

Otherwise you might find a quarter of a million listings of web sites that have one or more words that you have typed in to search for that may or may not be related to what you actually had in mind.

Until the next time friends remember, whether or not you get what you want when you look for it, might be determined by how definitive your search actually is. The flip side is, the results can also be determined by a lot of verbiage using some select key words.