So a friend of a friend came over the other night, pitching a pyramid scheme. He just told me he'd started a business. I figured (and kind of hoped) he wanted to sell me handyman services. Actually he wanted to get me out of debt.

"But I have no debt," I said. He told me I needed to keep an open mind.

I remember the last time someone told me that. It was two Mormon missionaries. To be nice, my wife and I let him keep talking.

DNS is so important that Google decided to get into the business.

Normally DNS isn't anything we think about. And you probably shouldn't, unless your job happens to be maintaining one, like mine once was.

But trust me, if you want your Internet connection to be just a little bit faster and more reliable, you need to keep reading.

In Kansas City, baseball fans are celebrating. In St. Louis, they're fuming.

It's usually the other way around. Right now, Royals fans are celebrating Zack Greinke's highly deserved Cy Young Award. In St. Louis, fans are complaining that Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright, expected to finish 1-2 in the voting, got "snubbed" and lost to San Francisco's Tim Lincecum, who won a total of 15 games.

Greinke, for what it's worth, won 16.

It wasn't what I set out to do, and it definitely wasn't what I expected to do. But genealogical breakthroughs rarely are either, it seems.

My mother and I have now collected more than 9,000 relatives in our genealogy. Needless to say, you literally need a computer to keep track of all of that. There are three families I feel the greatest affinity for. Two of them are Scottish, and Highlander families at that.

Myth: Nobody wants to get into my computer because I don't have anything important saved on it.

Fact: I don't care who you are or what you do with your computer, security is important. Do you want the Russian Mafia using your computer? The North Korean military? Al Qaeda?

If you're OK with that kind of vermin using your computer, then do whatever you want. I hope you don't have problems sleeping at night. If you don't want that kind of vermin using your computer, I suggest you read on.

I tend to lean to the right. For as long as I understood what it meant to be conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, I called myself a conservative Republican. In college, I wrote a newspaper column for 3 1/2 years brashly titled "No Left Turns."

In last year's primary, I voted for Ron Paul for a couple of reasons. One, a lot of things he said made sense. Two, at least he sincerely believed in the things he said that didn't make sense. And three, he's a doctor. When Ron Paul predictably didn't get the nomination, I voted against John McCain and for a Democrat, Barack Obama. The main reason was health care.

One of my monitors died this week. It doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to, which is a good thing. Flat panel LCDs are more reliable than CRTs were. The dead monitor is an LCD, but it was a cheap and nasty Dell 15-inch made in 2001. I bought it used, and for much less than it was worth (even if it was made for the modern-day equivalent of Packard Bell), so I got my money's worth out of it.

This weekend I went monitor shopping, with a budget of one hundred bucks.

Today was the first Patch Tuesday in nearly four years that I didn't have to worry about professionally. Since Microsoft released 13 patches today and Adobe released two, my former coworkers might be wondering if I knew something. (I didn't.)

But I still patched my machine at home, and I recommend you do too. Macintosh owners, you're not immune, so I have some homework for you too.

On Sunday, we took our son to the Indianapolis Children's Museum, the oldest and one of the largest--if not the largest--establishment of its kind. I didn't really know what to expect, so I picked up a brochure and had a look.

The brochure recommended either starting or ending the day on the 4th floor, with a carousel ride.

On Saturday night we stopped at Wendy's for dinner. It wasn't an intentional choice--we would have preferred something more distinctly Indianapolis, but the St. Louis area Wendy's franchisee went bankrupt, so there are only a couple of Wendy's left in St. Louis, none anywhere near our house.