Bud Smith
wrote his first book for Que about buying computers fifteen years ago-and had
to do his online research for it using dial-up Internet. Since then, he's lived and worked in
Silicon Valley; London, England; Auckland and Christchurch, New Zealand; San Francisco and
Oakland, California, and written a dozen more books. And he does most of his online work at
broadband speeds-except when he's using the Web on his cell phone, which is as slow as his
old dial-up modem. Bud runs a WordPress-based blog at RunawayDaily.com.
Michael McCallister is devoted to the idea that technology need not be feared and can be mastered
by anyone. He has been writing about technology in general, and open source software
in particular, for the whole of the twenty-first century, and part of the previous century, too.
He tries to help build the open source community, from which derives WordPress and so much
else that is good, true, and pure in life (the parts of life that run on computers, anyway). While
Bud has moved hither and yon, Michael has lived the relatively boring, stable life in the central
United States (Milwaukee, Madison, and Boulder). Michael has been running "Notes from the
Metaverse" on WordPress since 2006 at metaverse.wordpress.com. Find out more at www.
michaelmccallister.com.