Julie Meloni of No Fancy Name is one of my favorite authors, and not only because I scored a copy of her intuitive Blogging in a Snap book in a BlogHer contest. She's also a techie-type person who's willing to admit to a less-than-full commitment to the electronic lifestyle: Despite my laptop being on and connected to the Internet nearly 24/7, I really own no other gadgetry (save for a fairly normal cellphone and an iPod Nano). My sticky notes are really and truly sticky notes, stuck on my laptop and scribbled on by hand.

monkeynotions reports a funny IM conversation she had with a friend about eTech, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held last week in San Diego: me: i spoke to a friend who just came back from eTech me: he said almost everyone in the room had their laptop open me: and no one was paying attention me: he said there were even two guys who spent all their time on their laptop in the lobby me: heh my friend: wasn't this year's theme in eTech Attention Trust? me: yah me: hahah me: which makes it even more ironic

Camilla of Popgadget responds to Wired magazine's simplistic classification of women gamers: Wired published an article about women and games, reporting how once again women who like playing games tend to be placed into two distinct categories, the casual gamers and the "rough" gamers. I still have quite a hard time trying to understand why someone even bothers to analyze the women's gamer market so scrupulously if the end result is so utterly lame.

I'm sure you know what HTML is. But what about OPML? BlogHer Hobbies editor Debra Roby says it makes her think of Oompa Loompas. It reminds me of my two-year-old's request for "opa-meal" at breakfast time. OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language, a human-readable text format for managing hierarchical, ordered lists. It's most commonly used to manage lists of RSS feed subscriptions, but it could easily be used for other applications, like to do list management or saving a playlist of music. If you export subscriptions from the Web-based news reader Bloglines, you'll get an OPML file. OPML is big these days because people who read lots of blogs are looking for better ways to manage the information overload that often results from subscribing to too many feeds. OPML is a foundational technology for addressing that.

If you're not already reading writer and programmer Kathy Sierra's blog Creating Passionate Users, you might want to check it out even if you normally avoid techie talk. Kathy has done time as a game developer and a Java programmer; now she focuses on writing books for the bestselling Head First technology series she co-created. Kathy is especially interested in how the brain works and how to help it learn better. Reading her essays, you can't help but get excited about learning.