Why Do They Tempt Me?: You know how I can get obsessive about redesigning this site. I thought I was done but I stumbled across the holy grail of site design, which is described as three columns with a fluid center column without using tables. If you are HTML savvy, you know why that's so cool. Here is a sample site with that page style. Note how you can resize your browser and only the middle column resizes. Doing that with tables is easy. Doing it without tables is rather mind-blowing to me. (Tables are notorious for appearing differently in different browsers, meaning if you test your design in IE, it can look quite different in Netscape.) I guess I have to put another redesign on the to do list.

Searchin' Here and There: I may have finally found something as good as Google for searching. It's called iLOR and part of the reason it's so good is that it's based on Google, so you get the same site results, but it adds some excellent functionality. For example if you hover over a link you are given the options to go to the site, open in a new window, open in window behind the current one, and best of all, "add to your list." "Add to your list" opens a small window and allows you to select a sublist of the sites listed in the complete search. Why is that good? Often you'll run a search and get dozens of pages of result. You might page through a bit and click through on a site that appears to have what your looking for. You get a couple of pages on and you realize it's not what you wanted, so to get back to your search results you have go back a number of times or find the search results site in your history. Sometimes it's easier to just re-run the search.

With iLOR you would just go through the first however many pages of you search results and add any site that looked like it might have what you want to your list. So you get a nice little subset of the sites you found that's hanging around in case you run into a dead end. iLOR calls itself a research engine. Trite, but accurate. I've bookmarked it.

Say What?: If you're feeling fiesty and intellectual, and you have an interest in the use of language, you could do a lot worse than read George Orwell's famous essay Politics and Language, then turn on CNN and see if you hear things a little differently. Orwell suggests these rules for proper language use:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.


2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.


3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.


4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.


5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.


6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Although not intended for fiction, I take them to heart when writing and editing (especially the last one).

In The Ears: Listening to Jamiroquai's Synkronized. Laser-sharp, melodic, disco-funk. I believe I shall get down with my bad self.