June 2000 Archives

And most bloggers are jerks and/or mental deficients so I don't know if I want to call my website a "blog" anymore and be lumped together with a bunch of people I don't have anything else in common with.

No, I'm not going to link, or even name, the source, except to say that it is, obviously, someone who used to keep a site that they chose to call a blog. Derek Powazek, who recently decided to drop out of weblogging, had enough class to realize that his biggest problem with weblogs was that he wasn't enjoying keeping one, and didn't feel the need to be condescending to anyone who still was. I'm sick of getting insulted for maintaining a certain type of site because I'm having fun doing it (except when someone writes me off as a lowlife for doing so), even if there's nothing unusual or exceptional or outstanding about it. The heck with it; Matt expresses this a lot better than I can right now.

I've been playing a lot of Sim City lately, since the Unlimited edition came out. While the official website for the game has more useful information and downloads than most game company sites, I've started seeking out sites that have more detailed information on game play. The SimCity 3000 Resource Center has an extensive Knowledge Neighborhood with detailed answers to specific gameplay questions. There's also a Sim City 4000 site for discussion of what players want to see in the next iteration of this series.

An interview with "Chairman" Takeshi Kaga, the host of Iron Chef. [via randomWalks]

Now when I die, don't think I'm a nut;
Don't want no fancy funeral, just want my gold King Tut.

For the low, low price of $63,000, you can have your body mummified when you die. If nothing else, you gotta love a guy who calls himself "Corky Ra" and works out of a metal pyramid.

The Sacramento Bee has a few suggestions for dealing with complaint calls and letters:

Dear Sir, Thank you for having the courage of your convictions to call and let us know, anonymously, that you have a strong command of profane language.

Dear Sir, Thank you for calling it to our attention that the 2,000 employees of this company are all incompetent and motivated by a desire to do a bad job, waste your time, and personally make your life miserable. We appreciate your business.

Dear Sir, I think you should be aware that some idiot is writing letters and signing your name. You might want to investigate to avoid legal action.

[via Media News] Why don't I watch television news any more? Because there isn't any. It's all advertising.

Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to give users a boot to the head by removing the ability to create a useful bootable floppy from 2000 and ME. In particular, this creates numerous problems for system BIOS updates. I'm predicting third-party utilities from folks like Norton and McAfee to create a special non-Windows boot diskette. Afterthought: Hey, isn't that essentially what the DOS utilities for creating Linux boot disks do? It should be simple to place the program and diskette image into an easy-to-run Windows executable, shouldn't it?

Important rule for webloggers: If you like to attribute links, blog them when you find them. Found some of the coolest background tiles during my morning stroll, and I've already lost track of where I found the link.

Finally tried making the French Onion Soup recipe that I got from Good Eats, a wonderful cooking show on the Food Network. I can't say it's quite as good as my old recipe, adapted from a cookbook (Betty Crocker's New Cook Book, I think), but I do like some things about the new recipe. It's been far too long since I tried my hand at making soup, and it's still pretty darn good. I'll have to try combining the two recipes sometime soon and see how the synthesis works.

<font> tags are of the devil. If there is one tag I dislike more than the dreaded <blink>, it's <font>. I'll admit, I do a lot of stuff with depracated tags and attributes that would be better handled (assuming proper browser support) using CSS, but <font> tags are such a nuisance to maintain that I avoid them whenever possible. I think the only ones on this site are within cut-and-paste snippets like the webring code.

Sometimes, I'm glad nobody reads my site. I've already managed to stop myself four or five times from posting angry comments to a certain thread (which has been up for less than an hour) on MetaFilter. I don't even want to make detailed criticsisms here, in case they get linked. Let's just say that posts to the effect of "I don't want to see this type of post, so let's change the rules" are signs of the Apocalypse. There are also a few issues of etiquette that I'd like to bring up in the appropriate place (MetaTalk) when I've had time to cool down.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. I like having some of my data on the net, and the ability to access it from anywhere. I don't want to be dependent on the net for my computing needs, though, and I definitely don't trust Microsoft to make the decisions about what should be on the net and how it should be accessed.

[from the lands of faerie] Cows in Chicago. Fish in New Orleans. Pigs in Cincinatti. Moose in Toronto. So many cities are doing these wildly-decorated-animal-statue public arts projects that the individual interest is getting lost. One of these projects that does still appeal to me, though, is St. Paul's Peanuts On Parade tribute to Charles Schultz. Statues of a beloved character like Snoopy seem to me to have much more character than those of generic critters, and the album linked from this page shows some very fitting tributes to Sparky.

Actually, Bryan, if you want Running Man action (the book, not the movie), the next wave of TV reality shows may give it to you.

With the pitches coming fast and furiously, Variety reports ABC is close to a deal with executive producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for "The Runner," a nonfiction take on "The Fugitive" in which a lone contestant must elude capture by average citizens.

Personally, I still believe "reality" is what happens when you turn off the TV and go outside.

[via wannabe] It's a good thing there wasn't a Fire Eating and Fire Breathing FAQ when I was in college. While there is a slight possibility I wouldn't have tried this myself, some of the friends I would have passed this around to in the cafeteria would definitely have done it. (Hey, there were some of my friends at State who weren't pyromaniacs. One or two, at least!)

On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a man desssed in a Confederate gray uniform displayed a Confederate flag. For an hour, he marched carrying the flag, on the beach next to busy Highway 90, at a site where a Confederate flag (among others) flew for many years. Along with his brother, he ignored the catcalls of passers-by.

By the way, the man displaying the flag, and his brother, were African-American.

Recent work on Egyptian pyramids sheds new light on the working conditions for the builders of the pyramids.

"This discovery proves that the builders of the pyramids of Giza were Egyptians and that they were not slaves as some archaeologists have claimed," Hawass declared.

"They prepared the tombs just like they did for the pyramids complex, with the funerary temple to the east of the pyramids and a causeway leading from it to an offering basin at the foot of the causeway," he said.

"They prepared these tombs to last forever just like they would do for the queens and kings. Slaves would not do that."

I'm not entirely convinced that this proves the workers were free, but it does indicate that they were likely treated better than we would expect for slaves.

[via re-run] I'm surprised this new article on real-time video manipulation doesn't mention the alteration of Times Square in a CBS New Year's Eve broadcast. Bryan invokes The Running Man, but I tend to think of it either as "Looker technology" or (in honor of an old episode of the Max Headroom TV series) a "Trojan Sheep".

It appeared to be offline for a while, but I'm happy to see that The Corporation is once again distributing their fine humor product. Most importantly, they have resumed their sponsorship of The RGB Ribbon Campaign to Eradicate Free Speech on the Internet. It is a matter of great concern in the weblog community these days that unqualified people are creating their own websites, posting to public discussion sites, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. I suggest that the first step in opposing this plague of "ideas", "viewpoints", and "opinions" is to show that such foolishness will not be tolerated. A good way to declare support for this cause would be to prominently display the RGB Ribbon from The Corporation's icon galleries.

Surely temperature-sensitive memory plastic has more potential uses than just recyclable cell phones.

Windows ME (Millennium Edition), which has just gone gold, is supposed to be the final release (OK, service pack) of Windows based on the Win9x codebase. Until the next one, of course.

I just rediscovered the Online PhotoLab that was mentioned on /. a while back. There are a lot of photo sharing sites on the web, but this one seems to have a lot more image-editing features than most. It's also a GIMP-based application, created by Spencer Kimball, one of the original GIMP programmers. If I create a public online album, I'll be sure and post details here. Update: Just to play around, I created a sample album, even if it only has one image (from a Ren Faire) at the moment.

I'm coming to like free web applications better and better, at least for non-critical services, and have been looking for new ones to try out. Apps.com may be the web app directory I've been looking for. It has a categorized listing, with user ratings of the apps. No detailed reviews, though you can sign up for an account and keep your own private notes.

Another Outlook Worm is making the grounds. I know computers are complicated, and many users don't understand attachments. However, the users who got infected by this one, after the recent ILOVEYOU nightmare, don't seem to have the self-preservation instincts of a three-year old who has learned that things on the stove can be Hot! I'm not saying you should never open attachments, but you can apply a bit of common sense.

When you receive an email (from someone you know) that contains an attachment, just send them an email that says "I just received an email from you that has an attachment. Did you send it? Is it OK to open?

And if you receive Q2_2000.xls from someone who promised to send you some recent sales figures, that's probably a safe bet. But if you don't know what an attachment is, please find out.

I signed up at Epinions.com, only to find out that they don't seem to be accepting suggestions for web sites. Too bad, because I wanted to write some things about some web applications I've been using, and possibly start some discussion on them. I might try submitting a few book reviews instead, but I've also considered creating a separate weblog of my own for writing about books.

One hundred years ago, Chinese commoners (with the support of the Dowager Empress) rose up against foreigners and Christians in the Boxer Rebellion. June 20,1900 marked the beginning of a two-month siege of foreign legations and a Catholic Church in Beijing. The Internet Modern History Sourcebook (which I should look at more later in its own right) has a really good first person account of the rebellion.

Even as a male gamer geek, I'd managed to ignore the charms of Lara Croft, Joanna Dark, Rinoa Heartlily, and a multitude of other interchangeably lovely female video game characters. However, I've finally encountered a CGI cutie that I can't resist. Ulala (pronounced Ooh-la-la, and deservedly so) is the orange-clad go-go-dancing star reporter for Space Channel 5, and protagonist of the game of the same name. In the game, Ulala is trying to stop an alien invasion of Earth. How? By dancing better than the animated aliens, of course. (Similar to how someone else once attempted to handle a zombie attack.) The game plays like an electronic "Simon Says", in which you press buttons to echo the dance moves (and rhythm) of the funky extraterrestrials. The best part is that as you rescue hostages, they join your entourage and start dancing with you; after a few successful rounds, you have a dance troupe rivalling that at the opening of Austin Powers. If you can be bothered to look at anything other than Ulala, the rest of the game has an incredible 60's retro-futuristic look (think Disney's Tomorrowland). I'm still not that far along in the game ("My shoes are too tight, and I have forgotten how to dance"), but it definitely rocks, both literally and figuratively. I gotta go, they're playing our song...

Allez Cuisine! Twernt points to a good piece on the cult status of Iron Chef in America. When I introduced my mother (a great home cook in her own right) to the program, one of the reasons she enjoyed it was that she felt no need whatsoever to try to cook the contestants' dishes. Unfortunately, there's no new word on the C&D's against Iron Chef fansites using Fuji TV graphics, but a revised, graphically sparse, and admittedly unofficial site is back on line.

A couple of nice color theory sites [directly or indirectly via /usr/bin/zannah]: Color Matters and Color Voodoo. Because I obviously have a lot to learn about color.

New feature: Atomz.com Search. I don't care if anyone else ever uses it, as long as I can find old entries like the potato gun sites I blogged a while back. Update: Blogger now has a How To section that describes how other Blogger users can do the same thing.

[via wannabe] We never had anything like The Official Shotgun Rules back at State, but I think we would have amended them to give the driver/owner veto power over Shotgun rights. In addition (since we often piled at least half a dozen people into my Corolla or other small cars), I feel that some consideration should be given to the size of passengers and their ability to occupy certain spaces within the vehicle.

I used Jasc's Paint Shop Pro 6 to create my graphics for this site, but don't hold that against the program. PSP is a fraction ($60-80 in the stores) of the price of Photoshop, and you can download a free trial. It doesn't have all the power of Photoshop, but it's probably more than enough for any non-professional artist.

PSP has a lot of good built-in filters and special effects, and with a handful of clever tips and tricks, you can use those to create much more impressive special effects. One good site to learn the ropes is Mardi Wetmore's Web Graphics on a Budget. Aside from all the tutorials on how to achieve fancy effects, the site can give lots of good inspiration for your own graphics.

The Backflip web app, a web-based bookmark organizer, keeps getting better and better. While Deepleap may have more versatility (I do use it for lookups), and more potential in the long term (due to their planned open development model), Backflip better suits my browsing style. The latest features I like are an improved Backflip Buddy sidebar for Internet Explorer, and a Daily Routine frameset that lets you easily "flip" through a list of sites. If anybody else is using Backflip, and wants to share folders, let me know.

So much for my pollGEAR. When I created it, I was able to set the width of the poll and place it in my sidebar, but that feature has suddenly been shut off. Now I have to fix the design of my non-Blogger pages when I get home. Update: Fixed, at least for now. The htmlGEAR service seems to be on the fritz today.

I don't even know what Cf is off the top of my head. Guess I should look it up. Californium!?!?!? I've only been to California twice in my life!

One microgram releases 170 million neutrons per minute, which presents biological hazards. Proper safeguards should be used in handling californium.

At least it's radioactive enough to be Considered Harmful.

I mentioned this a while back on my old blog, but I now have some better pictures. My mother is retired, with too much time on her hands, and has taken up quilting and genealogy as hobbies. Around New Years' Day, she made a quilt around a piece of "Year 2000" fabric for a millennium quilting contest (which she won). I was so impressed with this wall hanging that she made another one for me. Note: I may be palying around with the arrangement of these thumbnails in an attempt to get this page to render the way I want it to.

[via Monkeyfist] The relativistic heavy ion collider has been put into operation without incident. Good; I would have been very upset if someone had blown up the Earth without my involvement.

[via Haughey] Scott "Reinventing Comics" McCloud is now drawing an outstanding Online Column for The Comics Reader. I've recently picked up his Understanding and Reinventing Comics books, and he writes about much more than traditional four-color superheroes. A lot of what he has to say is applicable to any field of visual communication.

ICANN: TLD's RSN [via DG]

I'm trying to decide which disturbs me more: This Addams Family Barbie [via /usr/bin/zannah], or the plush dolls of Neil Gaiman's Death and Delirium that are advertised in the latest issue of Transmetropolitan. Update: Separated at, umm, Death?

Here's an unsolicited product endorsement: I like playing around with different fonts, but Windows's built-in font management is, well, lacking. Printer's Apprentice from Lose Your Mind Development is a much better way of dealing with a collection of fonts. It has basic abilities to add and remove fonts, but more importantly, it can print font catalogs and sample sheets, even for fonts which haven't been installed. For example, if you shell out $5 for a "500 Fonts" CD (the source of the "Plover" font used in my graphics), you can print samples directly from the CD, and see if any of the fonts don't suck. It can even print keyboard maps, and complete character sets with ALT-codes, which is very useful for dingbat fonts. It's shareware, so you can check it out for yourself.

It would be a whole lot easier for someone to sign my guestbook if I spelled the URL correctly, wouldn't it? I'll have to remember to fix that link next time I update my templates and non-Blogger pages, hopefully tonight. Update: Done. Plus, I now have a definition page that explains my title, and my idea of weblogging.

It's Urban Legend time again, boys and girls. It seems that the "Midrand" strain of the "Needle in the Ball Pit" meme plague has mutated, and has now set itself in Midland, Tennessee. Anyway, according to the e-mail that was forwarded to one of my sources, a child named Kevin Archer was playing in the ball pit at a McDonald's, got stuck by a heroin needle, and died of an overdose that night. That's five minutes worth of research linked right there. Please, I beg of you, think before you pass on a tale of a death by extremely improbable causes, and check your facts. There are lots of sources for research on bizarre and unlikely stories.

[Via Ghost in the Machine] "I own this country. My technology built it, my will keeps it going, and two thirds of its people work for me, whether they know it or not." If you're tired of the lesser of two evils, it seems that Lex Luthor will be running for president. See you in the funny pages!

London's Millennium Bridge may be one of the biggest fiascos in civil engineering since the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It appears that the engineers were designing for flash over utility; this "slenderest suspension bridge in the world" may look cool, but it gave a number of pedestrians motion sickness during the brief window in which the bridge was open. (By the way, having seen movies of the Tacoma Narrows disaster a few times back in college, I'd have to say that footage is sort of like snuff-pr0n for engineers.)

One of the many sub-genres of science fiction that I enjoy is Alternate History [via LarkFarm], which deals with speculation on what the world would be like if some particular event in history had occurred differently. Many of these stories even postulate (often invoking the Everett-Wheeler-Graham hypothesis) that these alternate universes exist side by side, and that travel between these realities is possible, even by accident.

Most of these stories deal with the big changes, of course. What if Brutus had warned Caesar of the conspiracy against him? What if the Confederacy had been victorious in the War of Northern Agression? What if the gunman on the grassy knoll had hit Jackie instead? By EWG, however, the smallest of quantum events would be just as likely to spawn a new timeline as an event of significance on the crude human scale.

A story I overheard a couple of months ago: A man goes to see his long-time family doctor, who comments on the patient's appendectomy scar, and asks when the operation was performed. The patient is aghast: "But you performed the operation yourself, three years ago!" The doctor has no memory of this surgery, so they both investigate. The hospital has no records of his appendectomy, nor does the insurance company. The patient clearly remembers his dutiful children visiting in the hospital; they remember no such visit. Nobody, except the patient and his wife (who are perfectly consistent in all details), remembers the appendectomy. Yet his appendix has clearly been surgically removed, with a long-healed scar to mark it.

The group of oddballs (I include myself) who listened to this tale naturally began to offer their own hypotheses: alien abduction, the secret labs of a shadow government, psychic surgery, and worse. My personal favorite, though, was paratemporal drift: the patient and his wife are somehow transported from a universe in which his appendix was excised to one in which it was not. Is there, elsewhere in the multiverse, a man locked in legal action with an insurance company which claims to have paid out for an operation he never received? Did two variant timelines merge back into one another? No? Very well, stick to whatever "rational" explanation satisfies you (including, of course, the imagination of a mendacious storyteller). I have another strange idea to play with.

Let's pack it up, Western civilization is over. This singing fish is Amazon's top seller in the "Toys & Games" category. What's worse is that I've seen at least two competing brands for sale on TV.

This open letter to Bill Gates from The Register is one of the most reasonable criticisms of Microsoft I've seen in the wake of Judge Jackson's decision.

I've always thought that LEGO was the coolest toy in the world. It didn't bother me when they started going overboard on specialized pieces, or when they started licensing a line of Star Wars toys. One recent move has kind of disappointed me, though: They have a new line called "Znap", which appears nearly incompatible with any other LEGO brick, and seems to be little more than a rip-off of K'Nex (sp?), another construction toy. I always figured that LEGO was enough of a leader in its field that it didn't need to imitate designs from other toys. (And yes, I did pick up a small set. I guess I'm not that disappointed.)

Stick a fork in it, it's done. I'm either finished with the new design, or just tired of working on it. Anyway, Weblogging Considered Harmful, version 2.0, is now open for business. Good, that means I can go to bed. And yes, the site is fair game for linking now.

Before I go public, I'd like to thank Dreama, Jason, and Melanie for helping me out by previewing the new design.

Tried the page out on my uncle's Macintosh running IE 4.5, and noticed a couple of minor problems with layout, but not enough to make the site unreadable. Both IE and Netscape for the PC appear to insert a linefeed into my "new windows" checkbox form, and IE5/Mac doesn't. If anyone knows how to get rid of said linefeed, I'd love to hear it, so I can just throw in a spacer GIF and restore consistency.

[via GeneHack] Kill Your Blog has appointed itself "Judge, Jury and Executioner" of the weblog community. Its self-appointed mission is to call down vengeance upon those weblogs which attack other weblogs. Do two negatives make a positive? It may not be any more effective at cooling down weblog spats than the non-negative blogging campaign, but it'll probably be a lot more entertaining to watch. Update (6/12): I can't believe that I thought, even in the throes of sleep deprivation, that the aforementioned site was a good idea. I enjoy watching train wrecks as much as the next guy, but once I got some much-needed sleep, I began to suspect (with some horror) that this fellow was taking his mission far too seriously. Fortunately, he seem to have decided to follow his own advice, and allow cooler heads to prevail. Yeah, personal sites should be more civil to one another, but finger-pointing seems an unlikely way to accomplish such a goal. (Hey, why are you calling me a pot?)

One of my cow orkers is an absolute Diplomacy fanatic. He's also one of the people who hasn't yet grown tired of a certain series of beer commercials that's been parodied by nearly everybody in the net. Anyway, he wrote a dispatch in one of his Diplomacy clubs about about the Wartime Alliance of Serbian and Austrian Peoples pact. If you can't guess where this is going, follow the link. This is the same cow orker who walked into my cube one day reciting an old poem. Where would we be without cow orkers to entertain us?

I have tweaked the redesign to my satisfaction and uploaded the changes. Unless I learn of some major problems with the design as it stands, this is the last major change for a while. I may add buttons, pages, or other elements, but those should be fairly minor additions to my templates.

Never steal anything small. [via Ribbit!]

Right now, the question puzzling police is what would the thieves do with a hot Ferris wheel? It would figure to be too difficult to sell to a pawn shop.

And it would appear to be too large to put on the wall of a college dorm room, though I knew some people who would have tried.

[via re-run] ABC has cancelled the Clerks animated series after airing only two episodes. Why do the networks (ABC seems to be the worst offender) develop new series, place them in lousy time slots, fail to promote them, and snatch them off the air before they can build an audience?

The Random Person who writes Dark Currents has finally written some backstory to give a bit more direction to this tale of dark fantasy. I really respect this guy (?) for taking weblogging in a new direction, combining linkage with fiction. I'm tempted to try my hand at this style of writing at some point. I can come up with ideas for brief scenes of a story, but I have trouble putting them together in a coherent whole. As a result, it never seems worth the effort of putting these disconnected fragments into words. RP's approach would let me concentrate on developing the individual scenes without having to weave them together all at once. I've got several ideas for different types of sites I'd like to create; working on the original Considered Harmful has really helped me to seriously consider some of the creative ideas for which I've never before found the motivation.

Age of Empires was fun...

I'm still experimenting with the htmlGEAR web page add-ons, and have created a separate page for a linkGEAR list of weblogs. This plug-in has a couple of features that I wasn't expecting, but am coming to like. First of all, you can order links by popularity, by date added, or randomly, to be re-ordered each time the page is loaded. I like the last option, since it may expose my (nonexistent) reader base to sites they haven't noticed yet. Also, I can let readers add their own links; sounds like a nice way to learn about new weblogs myself. In fact, I explicitly encourage self-promotion. What I don't like is that it limits the list to ten links per page (which is kind of neat for random ordering), even on my administration page. Makes it difficult to see if a submitted weblog is already on the list, aside from my general preference of scrolling over flipping. I've decided that if I have to prune down the list when it grows unwieldy, I'll start by eliminating the most popular links, since I assume those sites are getting sufficiently well-known despite my help.

I decided that my page was loading way too many little graphics, and that there were a lot of things that could be better done with tables than with graphics. So, I'm reworking a lot of my graphics and code, though there should be relatively little change in appearance (just in sizing and spacing). Hopefully, this will result in a faster-loading page that looks better while loading. It'll probably be this evening before I post the revision, though.

Still borrowing other people's code to add functionality to the site. Sudama (?) over at randomWalks has created some nifty little scripts to control whether links open in new windows. Personally, I like to open links in another window occasionally, but hate it when a site opens a new window unexpectedly. Fortunately, Sudama has also created a bookmarklet to prevent links from opening another window.

Another bloody browser incompatiblity: Netscape 4.7 prefers "rect" to "rectangle" in <area> tags. The Webmaster's Reference Library is a Godsend for explaining the practical differences between major browsers.

If I comment on any website features that aren't showing up on the site yet, I'm editing my template as a local file and then cutting and pasting it into the Blogger application. One feature that I'd love to see on a weblogging web app would be the ability to upload a file for an entry, a template, or any other big block of text. Browser <textarea> fields aren't an ideal solution for entering big chunks of text, especially HTML-fomatted text. Captain Cursor thinks that this is one of the major driving factors behind the short-entry format of most weblogs. I'd like Jon Udell's idea for a new <richtextarea> tag much better if there weren't already too many tags that the browser makers don't implement consistently. The best solution I've found so far is to edit my text locally using my editor of choice, and then cut and paste the source into the web form.

I think I'm pretty satisfied with the design of my page, but I'm still trying to add a few elements before the big launch. Right now, I'm trying out some free website add-ons from Lycos's htmlGEAR. I'm trying out a guestGEAR guestbook, which is also available in an "advanced" form which will supposedly allow me to customize the design. I hope Lycos will be OK with the liberties I'm taking with their linking code. I'm also adding a pollGEAR to see how people like the new look. I'd like a linkGEAR to maintain a list of weblogs (and let readers submit new ones), but it won't fit nicely in my sidebar; perhaps I'll just place one on its own page. These guys are also planning new "Gear" like site trackers, bulletin boards, etc. I'll continue to experiment, and perhaps make a few suggestions to the Lycos folks.

If anyone does stumble across this weblog before I "go public", please don't link me. Not yet, anyway. I'm aiming for a Sunday or Monday "Launch"; come the first of the week, the site will be either live or 404-compliant, and therefore fair game for linking. Feel free to let me know what you think, though.

I'm beginning to suspect that my real problem testing out the new site has less to do with the Illuminati and more to do with the BMCSEFH here at the office. The network here is a mess.

One Blogger feature I'd like to see: allow the template designer to make the archived version of a page different from the current page. Bear with me. It would be nice to exclude something like a free site meter from the archive, since most of the services I've seen only handle hits from one specific page. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a crying need for a link to the "active" main page on said main page (Hey! I'm already here!), but it would be very useful from the archived version. Something like <Bloggernoarch> and <Bloggeronlyarch> tags would be cool.

One historical obsession that I've touched on from time to time at version 1.0 of my weblog is the possible "discovery" (the tribal peoples who'd been living here for millennia don't count, since they weren't Explorers) of America by St. Brendan the Navigator. Despite the crediting of this "discovery" to Leif Ericson (bloody Vikings) around the tenth century A.D., there is evidence of an Irish presence centuries earlier still. A petroglyph written in Ogham runes, dated sometime in the 600 to 700 A.D. range, was found in West Virginia by a couple of archaeologists. This carving appears to be a sort of solar calendar to mark Christmas. My parents are going to take a trip to West Virginia (partially to further my mother's genealogical research), so I've been looking for links on the Celtic discoveries there.

Other evidence points to sites of even earlier European presence on the American continents. Roman artifacts dated circa 200 A.D. have been found in Mexico. Matt "Burning Man" Rossi sent me a reference to a book speculating on even more common trans-Atlantic contact in ancient times. One of his many pet theories is that mythic Atlantis was really America, which lost contact with Europe by being covered by ice rather than sinking beneath the waves.

Just my luck. I'm trying to work on my new project with the assistance of the Illuminati, and it appears that they're getting Slashdotted by irate Iron Chef fans. Well, I'll have to admit, as a fanatical watcher of this Japanese import, I'm upset about the scattershot Cease & Desist orders being issued against fansites myself.

Warning. Warning. There appear to be stress fractures in the layout of the page footer when viewed with Netscape 4.7. Proceed with caution.

Weblogging Considered Harmful version 2.0 is now online. Proceed with testing.

I am quite gratified to see that the new design appears to work. There are a few details to complete, but the overall structure of the template appears to be maintaining integrity. I want to do some testing over the next few days, perhaps duplicate a few weblog entries from the old site. I may even get a few experimental subjects friends to eyeball the redesign. If everything works as planned, I may be able to bring the site up to full power over the weekend, and open up for business on Monday morning.

And then the carnage can begin.