First, the good news. Neil Gaiman reads this site, which is really quite a compliment, since the man is one of my favorite authors.

He's worked in several genres, but I first came across his work when he was collaborating with Dave McKean in the classic Sandman series. The two did several books together, my favorite being the strange and moving Mr. Punch. He collaborated with Terry Pratchett in Good Omens, and he's written several great novels, including American Gods.

William Gibson, one of the defining authors of the "cyberpunk" movement and author of the classic Neuromancer, also reads here.

I'm also referenced on this very odd site. I'm not sure what's going on, but the idea that ninjas may be acting on an extraterrestrial level certainly gives me pause.

They save me from wading through nuggets of wisdom like this, from akryr@hotmail.com:
WTF?!?!! I try to register on your site but it doesn't work…98% of the world uses Explorer, so get …

No, the site wasn't hacked. Stop asking. I've been using an old version of WordPress (1.6 IIRC) to manage content, and it looks as if it finally gave up the ghost.

To be honest, I hadn't even moved up to 2.0 a year back. I'd stuck with the older version because the bulk of formatting and scripts for this site are handmade, and I was worried that upgrading would make a mess of things.

I don't know why I keep trying. As Homer Simpson once observed, "trying is the first step towards failure." I think he was onto something.

I had a stylesheet that I liked and almost worked with Explorer. Almost. There are three nagging problems, though.

The first is with linked images. I've defined the default link color as a pleasant green to match the site layout:
a:link {
color: #5e882c;
text-decoration: none;
}

I've had problems with Comcast as a customer. Sometimes big problems. Most recently, I noticed huge amounts of lag on my connections and interference on the phone lines. Most troubling was the type of problem I was having. The connection would be fine, then it would throttle down to zero over the course of a few minutes before restarting.

That's usually a sign that it's being managed and rationed.

I went ahead and updated to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) tonight. The whole process went smoothly, with only a couple of hitches, which I thought I'd share.

I think it was Sartre who once wrote something along the lines of, "walking away in disgust is not the same thing as surrender." Or maybe it was Camus. I'm pretty sure it was one of those Existentialists. Or maybe Absurdists. Probably just a little crazy, too.

In any case, insanity is defined as the practice of repeating the same action over and over again, expecting different results. That's kind of my relation with Internet Explorer.

This CSS code can crash Internet Explorer 6 if embedded in a page:
*{position:relative}style>table>
IE7 appears to load the page, but if you open a new tab, it crashes on navigation.

Try it …

New site theme up, and a few fixes to the CSS so that IE6/7 wouldn't render fonts so small.

It's a bit easier now that I can run Explorer without having to reboot. Turns out it doesn't …

The site's been taken down at this point, but for the last few days, Microsoft was distributing Ubuntu Linux.  The page on Microsoft's Marketplace site was removed this morning, but there's a Google cache of it here.

I understand Lindsey Lohan's a big deal these days. She got arrested for getting blotto in public again.

Of course, I really don't know exactly who that is, so let's skip to something more substantial, eh?

Like Estonia. For the geographically-challenged, it's a small country south of Finland that was forcibly integrated into the Soviet Union, then liberated in 1991. They're generally unassuming on the world scene, though the Estonians I've met are a nice bunch. Over the last month, their government computer networks have been subjected to a targeted DDoS attack.