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If you've never read anything by Dave Barry, then you're probably unaware how close to the edge of the cultural abyss we are skating. If you are familiar with Dave Barry's writings, then you probably can't wait to get your hands on a copy of Big Trouble. See what I thought.

I also finished Eric Idle's The Road to Mars. The book was not as satisfying as I had hoped. I explain why in my book review.

No, I haven't died.

A few months ago my computer died. Apparently the motor that controls the heads on the diskdrive wore out, and no longer tracked all the way across the disk. So I started getting all kinds of bizarre errors, where the computer thought it was looking for files in the right place, but the heads were in entirely the wrong place. To make a long story short, I had to buy a new drive, and reinstall a whole bunch of stuff. Luckily, only a few of my data files were on the bad disk, so not a lot was lost. Phew!

I'm slowly catching back up to stuff. I've been adding some long deserved NOT the Worst of GeoCities awards. Edit: The awards have been removed.

Hey, I got another award! Edit: Since the site design has changed at least twice since then, I thought I might as well remove all these awards, too.

I also wrote a book review of Elizabeth Moon's Once a Hero. The book isn't a recent one, but I decided I should read it before checking out Moon's latest Rules of Engagement.

Hm. It's been a long time, again. I seem to be making a habit of this. This time I've added two new book reviews, of Robert J. Sawyer's Illegal Alien, and of Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog. Other updates in the meantime included miscellaneous corrections, and a couple more awards.

At some point in the past couple of months I apparently also finished Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, another collection of essays by Steven Jay Gould. See what I thought.

Haven't gotten any less busy, although I'm almost finished reading my most recent book. I'll let you know how I liked it. Meanwhile I've found an interesting web service, FreeFind. I added my site to their service, and a form on my search page to search my site. I've set their spider to re-index my site every two weeks, which is apparently much more frequently than AltaVista does. (The last time AltaVista indexed my site was over four months ago.)

Since my client side search form depends on visitors knowing the right keyword, I've added a page that lists all the keywords I'm currently indexing. See if you're impressed. Edit: The search page and the keyword index both have been replaced by a search form that uses Google directly.

Hope you all had great holidays! Well, New Year's is still coming up, so have a safe journey into 1999, and DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE (as if I'd have to give this basic advice to the obviously brilliant people who are reading my site).

Anyway, I just finished reading the book Generations, which explains a pretty fascinating theory about history. Read it, and you may think someone handed you a chrystal ball!

Ok, new book reviews. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy is Orson Scott Card's excellent book on writing and selling science fiction stories. The Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe is the lengthy title of a great handbook to help you do all the housekeeping chores.

For something completely different I read P.J.O'Rourke's Eat the Rich. See what a liberal like me thinks about O'Rourke's latest paean to capitalism.

Finally, there's Very Seventies, a collection of magazine articles chronicling events and personalities that marked that decade.

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukka! Happy Kwanzaa! Happy New Year! (What did I leave out?)

After about 3 years, I have decided to redesign and reorganize my site completely.

I've reduced the complexity of the frames, which should make the site work a lot better with some browsers. It is also a lot less dependent on JavaScript, although, of course, all the neat stuff still uses JavaScript. If you want to see what it used to look like, I've saved a screen shot of the old look. Edit: The screenshot has been removed.

Ok, after all that hard work, I deserve a comment from my valued visitors. Don't I? So sign my guestbook or drop me a line, you hear? Edit: The guestbook has been removed, and there's a new email address. (The old one that used to be there until today - seven years since this entry was added - explains why I am still getting spam there, even though I haven't used that address in ages.)

Wow! It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, one of the sore points of my design has been that I have a growing keyword list for my client-side search. It's gotten so large that it is seriously slowing down loading the pages. I decided to redesign that part, so that the only time that list gets loaded is when someone wants to do a search. I've tested it with my Netscape browsers, and with MSIE 4.0. It seems to work fine, but let me know if there are problems, ok? Edit: The search script has been replaced with a Google search form.

If you've let me know about broken links (thanks go to Peter Copeland, co-author of Living with Our Genes), I've taken care of that, as well.

It's been brought to my attention that the music that I have on my page is difficult to get started since the controls aren't visible with some plugins.

Well, the controls would be fine if people were satisfied with the NetAudio plugin that comes with Netscape 3.0. But since folks will insist on installing things like LiveUpdate's Crescendo plugin, or do even stranger stuff like not use Netscape 3.0, and since none of the plugin manufacturers are trying very hard to make their controls consistent with one another, I had to come up with something different. Well, what do you think?

I moved the music frame to the top of the left-hand navigation frame, and used simple HTML links to load files that just play the music. Now you can play the music, regardless of the plugin. And if you have a plugin that displays a usable control in a 16x16 box, you can use that, too. It even works if you don't have JavaScript, although then the buttons aren't animated. Edit: I've removed the music controls, and left just the links to a couple of midis that I thought were too cool to remove. I also don't know if LiveUpdate even supports the Crescendo plugin, anymore. Their site didn't respond when I tried it recently.

When I went to the library today I discovered that another book I've been nursing along, Living with Our Genes is overdue!

Well, I hurried to finish it, because this book is a great companion piece to The Mismeasure of Man. Here is the bookreview of Genes. I think it provides a careful balance to Gould's point of view. What do you think?

Wow! I've been busy with all kinds of stuff, so this hasn't been getting updated nearly as frequently as I like. Anyway, there's a bookreview of Finity's End up. C.J. Cherryh is one of my favorite authors, and this book was a great read.

I had fallen behind on my GeoTour, so I quickly added the remaining winners for April, and am now a week into May. It may be cheating, but you wouldn't want those great pages to miss out on their deserved awards, would you? Edit: The GeoTour and its awards have been removed.

There have been various other updates, as well. I have loaded Netscape 4.0 on my PC, now, and made some changes to make my pages look better for that browser.

Yesterday I got an email from GeoCities saying that I am now a Community Leader, and that I only have to wait till Friday for my name to be added to the list of Community Leaders. Considering that I sailed through the training and internship in about two days, it's sure taken a long time. Well, patience is another quality that a Community Leader has to have. That I already know quite well.

JJ from the Friends of Athens Webring made me aware of a problem with my pages when viewed with Netscape 4.0. I checked it out and found that in 4.0 I can't have JavaScript outside of the HEAD or BODY sections. Since I was using JavaScript in the FRAMESET tags to make my frames more dynamic, it wasn't working well at all. I fixed it by moving the script into the HEAD section, and adding script to create all of the framesets dynamically. By leaving a non-dynamic version of the framesets outside of the HEAD section, the frames are still kind of usable with JavaScript disabled.

All I can say to JJ for pointing out the problem to me is "Thankyouthankyouthankyou!"

Edit: Of course, none of the layout described in this item is used, anymore.

The Random GeoTour is growing apace. Spice da Moogle has created some additional Not the Worst of GeoCities buttons for people to use instead of the one that I came up with. Edit: The GeoTour has been removed.

Meanwhile I've added Garrison Keillor to my list of favorite authors, and made some further updates on that page.

Added a bookreview of Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies by Patricia A. Turner. She makes a compelling point, but I think that that some of her book is a bit overwrought. I wrote up my thoughts on the book as they relate to urban legends, as well.

Also added a bookreview of Starship Troopers. The movie is due to come out on November 7th, in about two weeks, and I am curious just how closely the movie will reflect Heinlein's writings. Since I read the book much too long ago to remember it well, I read it again.

Many updates. I added an awards page - in vain hopes, I suspect. Edit: The awards page has been removed.

I updated my material on my authors page, including updating comments about authors, and adding a bunch of pictures. You wouldn't believe how tough it is finding good pics of some of these dudes - and dudettes. You'd think they had leprosy or something.