ALL THE Q'S FROM A TO Z

CHRIS ADAMSON is a software programmer living in Georgia. He talks about Java, the technology industry, and the experience of being a father-to-be.

JON ANDERSON is an Air Force captain who started his career in a Minuteman missile silo. Lately he's an engineer who helped launch an initiative to modernize the U.S. military's collection of Global Positioning System satellites. He talks of life with a finger on the nuclear trigger, why GPS is available to the public and what keeps a guy with his resume working in the Air Force.

WILL BAKER lives in Vermont, where he's the director of a public housing project. He talks about why his state's the place to be, how he became an existentialist and why his three-year-old daughter has become his most important mentor.

GARY BAUM is a high school newspaper editor in Southern California. He talks about white kids who think black, advertising aimed at his generation and the post-Columbine environment at his school, among others. Some of his replies run long, but the patient among you will find he's a pretty keen observer of the teen scene.

RALPH BECKER has a daughter with a problem -- an almost unknown disease that saps her strength and gives her strange facial rashes. Not really life-threatening, but still a major intrusion on the life of a little girl. He talks about how Julia and family cope with something called juvenile dermatomyositis, and how others can do the same.

MARTY BECKERMAN is a high school student in Anchorage, Alaska, who writes for the Anchorage Daily News' teen page and has a Web site dubiously titled "humorcolumn.com." I chalk up to youthful exuberance his use of the word "humor" in his site (what better way to guarantee nobody will find your stuff remotely humorous?), but I gotta tell you, folks, the guy can wield descriptions like "curiously torpid" (to describe teenage girls) with the best of 'em. He writes almost exactly like I'd expect a 16-year-old guy to write, except that almost none of them can, like 98 percent of the adult population.

BRUNS is the editor in chief a new webzine called almost.org, dedicated to recounting people's favorite near-sex experiences. He talks about his motives for mining the deep well of sexual misfortune, plus his thoughts on living in the Beltway (his tales of DC househunting have reached Ahabian proportions at his online journal, ratbastard.org.)

BERNIE used to be a ghostwriter but his soul was reborn in the carapace of a cockroach. Taking a page from the book of a cousin named Archy who wrote for a New York newspaper way back at the dawn of the 20th century, Bernie writes an enigmatic but typically dead-on media column for the Web site of the San Francisco Examiner. He can't reach the shift key, being a six-legged creature and all.

MIKE CASH is an American truck driver hauling cargo in Japan. I happened upon his Web site -- featuring pictures shot from the cab of his truck -- and knew right away he was SevenQuestions material. Turns out his story is every bit as interesting as I figured it'd be.

SCOTT O'NEAL COLF flies planes for a living but on his days off he gets down to earth, or more precisely, under the earth. His hobby is excavating privies (outhouses by any other name) and he has a nifty little Web site telling why it's such a fine thing to be an amateur archaeologist probing among these remains of days gone by.

LINDSAY CRYSLER is a veteran Canadian newsman and journalism school professor. Interviewed by guest inquisitor John Mahoney, an accomplished Canadian newsie in his own right, Lindsay talks about a life in the news biz -- be sure to read to Question 7 for a classic newspaper scoop tale.

GODFREY DANIELS lives in Arizona, loves strolling under a desert sky and has made a momentary celebrity of a working phone booth in the Mojave Desert. He also has a strange and delightful habit of taking a porcelain bust of Richard Wagner, the German composer, on all his travels and making sure Wagner appears in all his snapshots takes. He talks about Wagner, creating art cars and his thoughts on having been in close proximity to people who shove microphones in people's faces for a living.

CLIFF DAVIS is a dentist, hot-rodder and former nihilist. Cozy up to your monitor with a fresh cup of java for this one: His answers run long but fit in with the best of the bunch here (anybody equally at ease with dental probes and dual-quad carburetors is aces with me!)

LINDA DeVAULT has one of the most compelling life stories I've come across -- four kids, a successful business and widowhood all before age 35. Most of it is in her online diary, but her Q's offer a helpful (and slightly less heart-rending) introduction.

JAMIE DUPREE is a Beltway-based reporter for Cox Radio who's spent many of his workdays of late chasing soundbites from U.S. presidential candidates. He shares his favorite tales from the campaign trail.

DEBBIE FARMER is a self-syndicated newspaper columnist, which means she's had to scratch and claw and otherwise struggle to get her stuff noticed -- all the while keeping kids, house and husband in line and keeping her wit about her.

BEV GIBBS has always been Aunt Bev to me. She was born in 1930, remembers the day Franklin Roosevelt died, and has read up on just about everything ever written on the JFK assassination. She lives in Peoria, Illinois, where most of my relatives live.

MIKE GUNDERLOY lives on a farm in Washington state, where he and his wife Dana (who met online, of course) tend a garden and a growing menagerie of two- and four-legged critters. Mike writes technology books for a living and does some computer consulting in between his agrarian chores.

ELIZABETH HILTS made the rounds of radio talkshows a few years back when she wrote "Getting in Touch With Your Inner Bitch," a guidebook for those who keep getting trod upon and are getting tired of the heelmarks. She also writes an online soap opera called Charmers Landing and shares the heroic honor of having edited a few of the columns I used to write for MediaInfo.com.

TAMMY HOCKING is curator of the Simpsonian Institute, a site oozing with precious tidbits about America's first TV family. I found it appropriate that the webmaster for the premier Simpsons fan site lives in Australia, beneficiary of this any many other U.S. cultural exports (Drew Carey's really big down there, too. Ugh.). Tammy talks about why Homer, Bart and the gang are such a hit beyond American shores.

MICHAEL IVEY is a Georgia techie who believed in the SevenQuestions concept so deeply that he volunteered to take it over after its inventor lost interest. He talks about religion and technology, and how they relate to each other.

MIKE JASPER is a musician, drunkard, writer, reporter and one of about a dozen or so living humorists worthy of the term. He lives in Austin, Texas, where the music is hot and the gals hotter, to hear him tell it. Some of them have actually gone out with him.

MARYANN JOHANSON runs one of the best movie review sites on the Web. She writes well, respects her readers and avoids the traps a lot of "professional" reviewers fall into -- no stars, no thumbs and, best of all, no pointless pretentiousness.

MARY COOLEY-JONES works for the newspaper in my hometown, where we spent a good many work moments discussing how things will be when she rules the world. She talks of life on the gridiron with her high school football-coaching husband, Bob; why Savannah, Georgia, is preferable to her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri (and not just because she met Clint Eastwood on the set of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"); and what guys could learn if they took a women's studies class.

MADELEINE BEGUN KANE has been married to the same guy for 21 years, lives in New York City (Bayside, Queens, to be exact) and gets paid to write humor. Editor's note on "humorists": the real ones don't write comedy -- jokes, praftalls, gross exaggerations that made Dave Barry the title character in his own sitcom. The difference between comedy and humor is the difference between "Friends" and "Dr. Strangelove." If you can appreciate the difference you'll probably appreciate Madeleine's work. There's a link to her Web site at the top of her list of answers; be sure to click on it.

PATRICK KELLER is a recent college grad who's living proof you can never watch too many movies or read too many comic books. He earns extra credit for having worked with fabulous Hollywood babes (I believe his job was fetching their coffee) and surviving to tell the folks back in Iowa.

GREG KNAUSS has a Zelig-like quality among people who write on the Web -- his stuff turns up all over the place and always in the proximity of the shining lights. He's a techie by day but by night he just can't stop writing, which is good because he's, well, damn good at it. One of his most notable exploits of late was a spot-on suck.com spoof of slashdot.org, that haven for the digital true believers. Another of his favorite haunts is the critically acclaimed teevee.org, home to lots of people who despise television so thoroughly that they cannot stop themselves from watching it.

BRIAN KOLLER has seen movies made in every year going back to 1914, and has reviews of them at his Website. His movie thoughts also appear at epinions.com, where he's rated as the most popular reviewer. He'd also like to get it through people's heads that the secret to appreciating Elvis Presley is to, well, listen to his music.

JASON KOTTKE is a Web site designer in Minnesota (also known as the best advertisement for California in the continental United States) and keeper of the venerable kottke.org site, where he keeps a daily weblog and tells just a touch of his life story. He talks about why weblogs are the latest thing, and a bit about Web design. Like Brian below, he's an epinions player.

BEN KUFRIN is an old college buddy who grew up in Chicago and moved to southern California to become a cinematographer. I asked Ben about his work, figuring there must be others who've seen the Ocars for Best Cinematography given away and wondered "Well, that's nice, now what the hell is cinematography?" Ben's dad, incidentally, is a fairly well-known still photographer, so it was only a natural evolution that he'd go into moving pictures.

MIKE LEUNG is an artist trying to make a living putting his drawings on T-shirts and selling them online. It's a fairly dramatic departure from one of his most recent jobs, which was running computers for the United States Air Force.

FLOYD MAXWELL is a Canadian techie and chemical engineer who has stacks of stories about his world-traveling, zen-studying dad. He talks about plastics, engineering and life with Father.

ELLEN McDONOUGH travels alone, takes a lot of pictures and recounts her exploits at her Web site. She tells of the advantages of going it alone, the magic moments she's experienced, the differences between Mexican and Egyptian pyramids, and how to avoid the post-vacation blues.

DEAN MERMELL is a San Francisco-based freelance film editor and digital filmmaker. I happened across his work during a visit to ifilm.com and was so taken with something he'd done there -- a Buster Keatonesque six-minute masterpiece called "Modern Life" -- that I knew I had to interview him for SevenQuestions. So, today he discusses the high points of making digital movies, and why perhaps you and your neighbors should be making them, and can be, thanks to new software and hardware that puts sophisticated filmmaking tools in the hands of regular people for the first time.

M.O.A.T.M.A.I. is the handle of a German guy whose Website, appropriately titled hellonearth.com, shows what one might encounter if his dentist were the reincarnation of the Marquis de Sade. He talks about the things in his life that don't hurt, and the contrasts between Germany and the U.S.

WES MODES is like yours truly -- grew up in the Midwest (Indiana, no less) but couldn't stay away from Silicon Valley. He's unlike me in that he jumps trains for a hobby. Like me he has fond memories of going to the drive-in back home. Unlike me he has a high-tech job that pays the freight required to live in very cool places like Santa Cruz, California. I'll stop this now before it becomes insufferable (charitably assuming it hasn't already).

DAVID MOLL is the entertainment editor at the Peoria Journal Star, my most-previous employer, where we used to collaborate on the covers of the entertainment section (our greatest triumph was coining the term "Rope Opera" to describe pro wrestling.) He's gained the respect of his coworkers by organizing weekly karaoke outings at a local dive that by coincidence is within walking distance of his swinging bachelor pad, site of many a drunken gathering of local newsies. highlights: lyle lovett in peoria | why karaoke is cool | trials of an entertainment editor | best book he's never read

JIM MOTAVALLI has written a new book on alternative-fueled cars in which he reveals that combustion engines are the next great thing of the past. He wears ears two seemingly opposing hats: he writes about cars and runs the editorial operations of E/The Environmental Magazine.

JISH MUKERJI works (and plays) in Toronto and shepherds an online flock of 750-plus folks. He talks about what happens when folks meet in the real world, and why beer is so critical to such comings and goings.

ROBERT NILES is executive producer of the online version of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. He was just down the road when the Columbine kids went nuts and his site became ground zero for news-craving surfers (and he scooped CNN!). He talks about the lessons of Columbine for news people, the future of the newspaper biz and just how serious the News is about beating the pants off its competition at the Denver Post.

JOHN ORR is a co-worker, sometimes blues guitarist and all-around giant of a guy. He's been online for as long as computers have been, having gotten his digital feet wet in that distant era when AOL was a service worth having. His latest online adventure is called Triviana, a collection of folks united by a common interest in trivia and a communal interest in each other.

STEVEN OVADIA is our latest correspondent from Queens, NY. He's a couple years outa college and making a stab at breaking into the rock-critic business.

MIKE PINGLETON, who works on the heavy iron at the Supercomputing Applications center at the University of Illinois, is a gifted writer who's had a fascinating hobby since childhood -- well, fascinating if you're into snakes, lizards, salamanders and other scaly, squirmy, crawly things.

PIERCE PRESLEY is a former Marine, recent college grad and current newspaper reporter in Bentonville, Ark. He tells how he survived bootcamp, how he almost got court-martialed and why he's in the news biz today.

MIKE REED works for a university in the middle of Tennessee and refreshes my faith that the smart, talented folks aren't necessarily confined to the world's "great cities." He talks about his online journal, his job, radicals on campus and the most important thing of all, his boy, Max.

MACK REED a former Los Angeles Times reporter, lives in Southern California and creates news Web sites for a living. Today's entries are of most interest to people who follow the news biz, or anyone entertaining notions of attending the annual Burning Man festival.

RIP RENSE blames Superman for encouraging him to become a newsman. He worked for L.A. newspapers for years, but now has a raft of freelance gigs. He tells of his early days in the news biz, funny things that could happen only in a newsroom, a few scoundrels who got their comeuppance and his bout with a disease that made his life hell for three years. A long read, but good to the last byte.

BETH REID, my wife Melissa's best friend since before most Web surfers were born, was matron of honor at our wedding and Melissa's host one summer in Europe before they were old enough to realize they had no business being on their own across the Atlantic. She, her husband Jon and son Nathaniel live in Lafayette, Indiana, where she's a professional homemaker and Jon's an executive at a home-grown software company.

PAUL RIDDELL writes science fiction, non-fiction, essays and anything else that'll bring in a buck, and has really been to conventions where grown men wear pointy ears and carry would-be fazers set to kill, except that they're toy replicas of something that hasn't been invented yet.

MOIRA RICHARDSON works as a cook and has lived in Youngstown, Ohio, which reminds me a bit too much of my own hometown. She keeps a weblog/online journal that tells much of the story, but her Q's fill in some of the blanks.

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