I'm back!

Yes, I survived my week-long staycation, where I played a lot with my kid and did some home-improvement projects. ("Project" may be too strong of a word, actually.) The tech news, however, does not take a break.

In catching up on my Google Reader RSS feeds, de-cluttering my inbox, and mulling over some tech tidbits I discovered last week, I thought I'd share a couple items with you.

:: The Maryland Technology Development Corp., the state agency that guides tech development, said Friday that its president and executive director, Renee M. Winsky, was stepping down Aug. 28 (Here's The Baltimore Sun story). John Wasilisin, TEDCCO's current vice president and chief operating officer, will be the acting president and executive director upon Winsky’s departure next month. Today, we got word from the Washington Post's Kim Hart that Winsky will be the new executive director at the Tech Council of Maryland (which has been executive-director-less for nearly eight months.)

:: The blogosphere got fired up about the awarding of an $18 million government contract for a Maryland tech firm (Smartronix Inc.) to redesign Recovery.gov -- a site that will track federal stimulus spending under the Obama administration. Many are questioning why the government is spending so much on the project.

:: On my break, I read one book: The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich, which purports to tell the tale -- with dramatic flourish -- of the founding of Facebook. I found it to be a good, quick read, though I -- along with others -- are still trying to figure out how to really categorize the book, either as non-fiction or fiction. (The Baltimore Sun's Jill Rosen has a good story on the book.) Mezrich is up front in talking about some of the artistic liberties he took to make the book readable. And a prime mover of the tale -- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's principal founder -- didn't grant Mezrich an interview. Do I think it's the definitive story of Facebook? No. Actually, of all the real-life characters in the book, I found Sean Parker to be the most interesting. Parker, a co-founder of free music-sharing site Napster (which was shut down due to lawsuits), is depicted as a sparkling force of nature moving through Silicon Valley. The guy sounds like he's worthy of his own book and movie.

:: I also started reading another book. Free, by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired. I downloaded the book, for free, via Amazon.com straight to my iPhone. You still have to pay for a hard copy. I'm at the point where Anderson talks about the psychology of free vs charging even one penny for a product. Just by introducing a cost -- even if it's just one cent -- throws up a psychological hurdle for most consumers. A cautionary lesson for those businesses contemplating "micropayments" on the Web?

:: Change your passwords. A Twitter employee's Google account got hacked and the hacker dumped 300+ internal company documents to the tech press. TechCrunch has been publishing some of them, causing some furor. TechCrunch also questioned Twitter about its security practices for its server, whose password was allegedly, simply, "password." Yikes.

:: Lots of people went wiggy over Amazon.com deleting illegal copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their pricey Kindles. Amazon said it won't delete ebooks again. Lots of healthy debate right now on how far a company that sells digital content can go to pull back illegal versions of it it may inadvertently sell (as Amazon claims it did.) It seems we all have a long way to go in crafting privacy and commercial best practices and laws for these new gadgets in our lives.

What else did I miss, Balt techies??