After a long hiatus, I've been pressured to update this blog again. What better way to start than by redirecting to other blogs?

First, my sister is now documenting the exploits of her daughters.

Second, my friends and former bandmates, Jason and Ann Rerun started their own blog and also contribute to one featuring rare punk MP3s.

Third, my friend and former bandmate Andy Malkus is attempting to post a new song demo every week. I hope to contribute to some of those.

Hope those keep you few readers busy for awhile!

I was recently hired by closerlook. This inspired me to touch up the blog, which so far has involved a new Art Deco color scheme and integration of sIFR for Flash-based custom fonts in the titles. The cool thing about sIFR's method is that the XHTML still validates.

Which brings me to another change - getting rid of bad Blogger code. I spent a lot of time getting my page to be nice and XHTML Strict only to be undone by Blogger's refusal to simply use & instead of & in their embedded comment and edit code. So, I had to drop the Quick Editing feature and manually rewrite the Blogger-created links in the template. Unfortunately, there's one issue I can't fix - when someone enters a line break in a comment, Blogger inserts <BR /> instead of <br />.

I have other flashier updates in the queue, too, that are sure to impress the one or two friends that visit this site every six months!

NPR featured two interesting interviews yesterday and today. First was Dick Armey, with whom I disagree politically on just about every issue. The thing is, he was reasonable and clear-eyed, and I agree with his assessment of the Republican party. They will lose the House and the Senate, because they have wasted the last 6 years. I may not agree with his plan for Social Security reform, but I agree with him that it needs reform. But the Republicans have concentrated solely on supporting the President, right or wrong, and trying to maintain their political majority.

Which brings us to today's interview with Rep. Rahm Emanuel. His manner could not have been more different from Armey's. He was basically combative and desperately trying to keep the interview "on message" - the message being simply "vote for us because we're not them".

Now is the time for the Democrats to seize an opportunity. Nobody's happy with the current state of the war or our muddled domestic policy (these days, the Republicans are the ones creating and supporting a massive, centralized, expensive government agency). The Democrats don't have to harp on those issues; they've already "won" the argument simply by being an alternative.

What they need to do is set out some clear policy goals and articulate them to the voting public. The next Presidential election should be a shoo-in, but the last one also should have been. If they fall into the same morass that the Republican-controlled Congress has - simply trying to establish and maintain party control as an end in itself - then our country will be no different.

In a fit of World Cup fever, I added a stylesheet switcher. Click on the team abbreviations to restyle this blog based on my favorite kits!

ORIG | ANG | ARG | NED | POR

I'm all excited about IE7 now that I managed to get a standalone version running. That link gets you most of the way there - you have to do a bit more work to get the advanced features working.

Firefox will still be my browser of choice. But from a professional standpoint, it's so great that in a year or so we can feel free to use PNGs with alpha transparency and most pseudo-elements (why no support for :before and :after, though?). I'm already trying to strip out the * html hacks I love so much from my company's hosted websites now that I understand the simple beauty of conditional comments.

So, that's it for my web developer post. Now I can turn to less nerdy pursuits.