Now anxiously awaiting the tenth U.S. president of his lifetime, Tom Kephart approaches each day with the grace of a panther and the caution of a small boy with a pointy stick. He's been writing about technology issues since his first review of his grandparents' eight-year-old Admiral model P17D21 television. Something about "rich black and white tones of the Captain Kangaroo show;" alas, the rest is lost to posterity.

With a curiosity about people and things limited only by an unfortunate fear of riding on buses, Tom has traveled to several of the United States in search of adventure. Someday he hopes to visit California.

Tom is married to his high school sweetheart. He has one adult child and one still hoping to make it to adulthood. A dog and a cat round out the all-American family.

He has been a freelance writer, graphic designer and programmer for over 21 years, but that's only three in doggie years.

He sings for beer in karaoke bars in his spare time, and also directs and acts in community theater productions.

Though Tom loves the outstanding benefits of being a freelancer, he is as attracted to shiny piles of money as the next guy. If you're looking for a writer, contact him, provided you have shiny piles of money. Actually, dingy piles of money are okay, too.

Tom's also available for your next web design and development project, having labored over HTML code for over a decade, sometimes even remembering to close his tags properly. Experience with CSS, JavaScript, DOM, XML and other letter combinations adds to the fun when he's working on a project. He is an evangelist for open source content management system software, having had good experiences with Joomla!, Wordpress and his current favorite, Drupal. He's also available for bar mitzvahs and debutante balls, provided you want to hear a guy with a shaved head sing the blues. Who knows? You might.

After three decades of watching the tech world spin madly past and being a small part of it himself, Tom Kephart continues to be fascinated with the creative spirit of new technology. And, of course, vintage television receivers.

Today's statistics from MessageLabs show spam making up over 50 percent of all incoming email, though the rate peaked over last weekend nearer to 70 percent. Even more of a concern is the increase in malicious spam, those unwanted messages that have content or attachments that contain various forms of malware, like viruses, trojan horses, or attempts to obtain personal information through phishing. The virus rate has averaged 0.7 percent for the last week, with phishing attempts running at about 0.4 percent.