Earlier this year, Yahoo News interviewed Republican candidate John McCain. They asked him a simple question: "What kind of computer do you use? Mac or PC? His answer? "Neither. I am an illiterate who has to rely on my wife."

Scary stuff if you ask me. In an era where terrorists have laptops in their caves and Bin Laden organizes his followers through the internet, the idea of a President who can't log on is terrifying. Not being plugged in is the equivalent of being Out Of It according to Anna Quindlen in her recent Newsweek column. And being OOT just isn't an option for any of us regardless of age.

The majority of Americans ARE online with many older Americans using e-mail for years. My mother is 87 years old and regularily surfs, answers e-mails, and maintains a webpage. She is not alone. Surveys of the older, well educated population finds that three out of four use the internet on a regular basis.

Food and beverage marketers are spending more than ever to reach kids where they live -- online. Games, cross-promotions with movies and TV, contests...it's the new frontier for marketers trying to reach the new generation. And it's a frontier where the regulators who usually monitor these sorts of things are not yet arrived.

That's what a Federal Trade Commission report released Tuesday has found. The largest food and beverage companies spent about $1.6 billion in 2006 on marketing their products to children. And more than two-thirds of the 44 companies responding in the survey reported having online activities geared toward youth.

The commission studied spending directed at children ages 2-17. A huge $492 million was spent marketing soda, the commission found, with a vast majority of that spending directed toward adolescents. Fast food restaurants reported spending close to $294 million, which was divided about evenly between children and adolescents. For cereals, companies spent about $237 million, with the vast majority of that targeted to children under age 12, according to the report.

Seems so old fashioned, clipping coupons. Sitting at the kitchen table with your coffee and little pair of scissors. Something your Aunt Tish was famous for. If it seems musty, and not something people do so much anymore, you're in good company. Coupon redemption has been falling for the last decade. Until recently, that is. And with an online twist, of course.

According to this report in the New York Times, the number of visits to thrift-oriented websites that feature coupons are up by about a third in the last year. And sites like Coupons.com and Couponwinner.com are reporting spikes in traffic.

Why is this? Leaping food prices and $4 gasoline for starters. According to the article, the founder of Coupons.com, Steven Boal, says traffic has grown steadily in recent years, but spiked upward last fall as consumers got "more aggressive" in their finding and printing out coupons, especially for everyday products like milk and cereal.

I don't have a Twiiter, I've never had a Twitter, and I never will have a Twitter. But in a sign of social networking site's soaring popularity, and possibly of the apocalpse, the USA Today's business section has done a feature story on it.

For the uninitiated. here's a quick summary of how the site works: people sit at their computers (or cell phones/PDAs) and type what they're doing at that very moment -- watching a movie, driving, working, cooking, heart surgery, etc.

The site has grown exponentially in popularity over the past year, with a current rank of 939 on Alexa. That's good enough to make it one of the biggest destroyers of office productivity in the market. Here's the thing: if you're Tweeting about what you're doing, you're not really doing that. If you say "I'm cooking", that is not strictly speaking true. At that very moment you are Twittering.

First, there was Mary Poppins, and for a brief time, a short-lived 1970s sitcom called Nanny and the Professor. Then Supernanny, the popular ABC series, came along. And so I guess it should be no surprise that an entrepreneur has figured out a way to capitalize on America's interest in nannies. Welcome to NannysCircle.com.

It's a web site that's aimed at helping families organize themselves. As in the kids, just as much as the adults. In fact, if a family takes the web site to heart, I can envision how you do wind up with your very own virtual nanny.

And before you think to yourself (as I did), "Oh, brother. Can't parents take care of their own kids?" -- the rationale behind starting it was very admirable. It was built as an online tool to help provide structure and organization for families who had kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. But apparently it worked so well, that they're now offering it as a full-fledged family organizational tool for everyone.

This week, as I had dinner with two professional women who also work in the field of accounting, we discussed the concept of retirement. How many people do you know who talk about their dream of retiring early? They're planning on retiring in their 50s and living a life of leisure for the rest of their years.

The concept doesn't sound horrible if you've saved enough money to do so. But is it really all it's cracked up to be? I mean, Americans are living longer. It's not out of the question to think that we might live to be 90 or 100 or more. I just can't imagine not working for the last 40 or 50 years of my life.

You see, we professional ladies all said that we like our work. It's fulfilling. We make good money doing it. We actually enjoy it. So what will retirement look like for us? Certainly not sitting around counting our piles of money.

Papa John's, proud to be the first national pizza chain to offer online ordering, is now even more pleased with itself because it's the first with a widget. (it is also gloating about being the first to offer pizza ordering by text last November.) The widget, a little program that sits on another website, let you order your usual pizza with just a few clicks. Or order up to 21 days in advance. Or in Spanish.

Papa John's claims this isn't pointless gadgetry, but responding to customer demands. It spent $15 million perfecting the online ordering technology, but say 20% of its orders now come in that way. That's a surprising amount of internet pizza, but would these people just have made themselves a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if they had not been able to order electronically? Is calling in an order that hard?

Now everyone's got to have online ordering. Bill Barol satirized Domino's quest for online ordering in a recent Fast Company story. Pizza Hut, not wanting to be left out, has their own express ordering program -- though you are stuck on their site, you can't order off Facebook like you can with Papa John's. Then again, do I really want all my friends seeing me eating Papa John's pizza all the time. Or that's what I thought till I looked on Facebook and saw that Papa John's has its own page and 603 fans -- though I don't see any that have the mypapa widget yet.

The first time I heard about e-books, I was in journalism school back in the early 1990s. I remember lively debates about whether newspapers, magazine and books would be rendered obsolete by the turn of the century, replaced by electronic versions you could hold in the palm of your hand. At the time, these predictions seemed both blasphemous and futuristic.

Last year, when I read about Kindle, Amazon.com's e-book reader, I still didn't believe wireless reading devices would catch on. Kindle sold out in hours after it was released in November, 2007, and remained out of stock for months.

Now Kindle is back, and I read in paidcontent.org that Amazon has lowered the price by $40, which is surprising, given its success when it was launched. It's now going for for $359, still more expensive than Sony's competing digital book, which sells for about $300. Apparently, as production of the Kindle reader increased, manufacturing costs decreased, in turn lowering the retail price.

Now that gas is, for all intents and purposes, at $4 a gallon, we can begin the exercise of looking for the cheapest gas in town. Because hey, the difference between a $50 fill-up and a $55 fill-up is significant when we're all counting our pennies.

You can do this the old-fashioned way -- drive around until you note which gas stations have a line down the street, (and take your place at the end of it). Or you can do it the high-tech way and plug this URL at GasBuddy.com into your Blackberry.

Enter your city, state and zip code, and it comes up with a simple text list of the gas stations in your neighborhood, from cheapest to most expensive.

Maybe you can do this as you're waiting at the end of the long gas line this week, in preparation for your next fill-up. Far be it from me to suggest you take your eyes off the road while getting this information.

This is going to be a serious life-skill going forward. With that in mind, here are five more ways to easily find cheap gas. (courtesy of LifeClever)

In 1994, when I was 24 and living in Los Angeles, there was a serious earthquake. I'd been a resident for two years by then, so it wasn't exactly my first quake. But at 6.7 on the Richter Scale, it was definitely my most serious.

Known now as the Northridge quake, 57 people died, 12,000 residents were injured, buildings collapsed, cars were crushed, the electricity died across the city, and there was, quite literally, panic in the rubble-filled streets. Many businesses shut down for a day or two, and when it was all said and done, there was an estimated $12.5 billion in damage. The whole thing lasted approximately 20 seconds.

So it's wonderful to hear about an earthquake-sensing project that's in the making, that many people with a personal computer -- at least a new one -- will eventually be able to participate in. Elizabeth Cochran, a seismologist at University of California Riverside, came up with the idea in 2006, but according to a recent press release just issued by the University of California, the "Quake-Catcher Network" will be publicly released, tentatively this summer.

It can't predict what you'll be when you finally grow up, or whether that tall dark handsome someone is on your horizon, or whether the baby you're expecting will be a boy or a girl, but Voyant claims it can help forecast the financial impact of going back to school, getting married or having a baby.

The new Java application, available for free download and use, is designed to evaluate personal finance in the context of "life stages," like child-rearing, retirement and marriage. Wizards help users set up timelines that can can be revised to reflect the vagaries of fate and desire.

Consider my husband's 40th birthday, when we learned I was unexpectedly pregnant with our third child. Voyant could have quickly run the new scenario against our pre-existing financial data and thrown up a visual snapshot of the feasibility of him retiring before 65. If the application's claim of "game-like usability" extended to animated graphics, it might show snowballs, melting quickly in hell.

Perhaps some knowledge is best left to sink in slowly.

But for those who can handle a glimpse of the future, Voyant promises to make the implications of key life decisions more concrete.

The application also marries social-networking with number crunching, permitting users to engage with others over the platform. Other features include individualized recommendations and referrals to financial planners in specific areas. Voyant supports both Windows and Mac OS.

It's almost diabolically clever.

As if it isn't hard enough to try and eat low-calorie foods, pizza chains are starting to attract customers by offering GPS technology so we can track the progress of how our pizza order is going. Soon, at several chains, there will be no more waiting anxiously wondering where that doofus driver is. (No offense to any pizza delivery drivers reading this, but when you're hungry and impatient, everyone is a doofus.)

So here's the thing. An 11-store chain of Papa John's restaurants in northern Alabama have been using an online-tracking system created by a startup business called TrackMyPizza. In this case, customers can watch online as their deliveries move street by street to their front doors.