Friday, 07 January 2005

Around the world in 30 days: I'm back from the biannual trip home for the holidays. Every other year we go back to scenic Marion, Illinois (pop. 18,000) to visit my folks… and every other year Mother Nature sends Marion a snowstorm on the day we're trying to drive down from Chicago. This year wasn't as bad as 2002, but we did drive past ten cars that had skidded off I-57 and into the ditch.

This year's fun Christmas toy was an actual, working light saber. ("Working" in the sense that it glows and makes "vvrrrrrrmmm" noises when you swing it around, not in the sense that you can deflect lightning bolts or cut off people's hands with it.) You really haven't tested the limits of airport security until you've flown from Chicago to Sydney — the long way around — with a light saber as carry-on baggage. (Surprisingly, except for one brief delay in Kuala Lumpur while the security people called a supervisor, this did not create the problems I was expecting. My all-time record for "testing the limits of airport security" is still the Miami Incident, which I've never blogged about; I should put on my Joey deVilla hat and tell that story someday, but for now let's just say that I know what happens to people who put guns on the conveyor belt.)

It had also been a while since I twiddled with the site's appearance, so there's a new style sheet ("Coral") for your viewing pleasure. The background picture is one I took of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, near Heron Island, and I'm doing some cutting-edge CSS tricks that will probably crush Internet Explorer into tiny little whimpering fragments — but if you're using Mozilla, Opera or Safari, check out the menu to the left. (The inspiration, as usual, came from Eric Meyer's css/edge site.) If you don't like it you can switch back to the old appearance by choosing "Frost" from the "Choose a Style" menu, or you can fiddle around and find your own favorite. Enjoy!

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:49 pm. comments.