Some Advice for Aspiring Authors

Last week I had a chance to do something that I've been wanting to do for some time--take off my web guy hat and put on my writer hat at work. Since all of my writing efforts (blog, tutorials, books) takes place entirely outside the realm of my day job it was fun to sit with some students and talk about the process of writing.

The students I spoke to were part of a summer writing camp that taught them about both the writing and the publishing aspects of being an author.

Based on my experience as a semi-professional writer, here's what I thought I would have wanted to know if I was just getting started as a writer who hopes to get published. Even though the great bulk of my writing is on technical topics and software products, many of the things I tried to impress on the students are relevant no matter what kind of writing you're doing.

1. Get Organized: I got to hear James Patterson give a talk a few weeks ago, and the main point in the talk he gave was that every endeavor needs an outline, and especially a book. If you expect someone to spend money to print or publish your work you'll need to demonstrate that you have a plan, your plan is workable, and it's something you can communicate. Yeah, kind of boring, but if you want to have someone take a chance on you by dedicating the resources of their company to your work, you'll need to be prepared to demonstrate a plan.

2. Understand that Publishing is a Business: Yes, this is also a boring topic--or at least certainly not one that makes your eyes sparkle with enthusiasm--but understanding the motivation of your publisher can make it easier to work through the whole publication process. They want to make money. You may only want to have your voice heard, to be part of a creative community, to heave your work seen by lots of people. But no matter what creative spark drives you, what drives the people who own the web site or magazine or publishing house or newspaper where you might be published is money. They need money. Otherwise they won't stay in business and there won't be anyone to publish your work. So don't take things too personally or get too annoyed when they make demands that may seem arbitrary.

3. Be Prepared to Work as a Team: For a little preview of this point I brought along a copy of my original submission of a chapter from my latest book. I then let them see the marked-up and commented-on by multiple editors version that had made its way through the editing process. And Lordy, Lordy, it can be a process. I'm not sure that there is a direct correlation between the amount of paper in a published work and the number of editors that will work on it, but it sure seems that you have to work with an awful lot of people. From the acquisitions editor or project editor that initially works with you, the project editor who handles all of the production tasks and keeps things on track, the copy editor who checks your grammar, and the technical editor (in the case of the kinds of books that I write), there are an awful lot of people involved in getting your work into print. Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and play nice with these people, even if you don't want to, but that's the real world for you.

4. Toot Your Own Horn: You are your best salesperson, and yes, you are going to have to sell yourself. Someone has to take a chance on you and invest in your talent, and you have to convince them that you're worth it. See Point #2 above.

5. Work at Your Craft: Writing is a craft just like woodworking or photography or surfing. There are technical aspects to the work that have to be honed with lots and lots and lots of practice. And its only when you get the technical aspects right that you can move into the creative realm, whether that's a well-turned phrase or a hand-cut dovetail joint, you'll only rise to the top of your craft by constantly working and pushing yourself. For writers there are two keys to your craft--reading and writing.

A. Read everything you can get your hands on, and don't limit yourself to one style of writing. There is terrific writing all around you, from the newspaper to magazines to blogs to books. You need to seek out good writing and great writers and read as much as you possibly can.

B. As for the writing, I firmly believe that having a blog is the best way to prepare yourself for producing work that you want others to read. Sure, a journal is great and getting your thoughts out and into the written word can happen in many ways, but a blog has some real advantages and in many ways is the best preparation for writing for hire. Unlike a journal you know going in that a blog will be read by other people, and if you stick with it and you have something interesting to say many people could potentially read your work. But what I find valuable in blogging is the whole notion of writing for an audience. Having to tailor your work for others, instead of strictly for yourself, is a totally different kind of work from journal writing. And taking that leap of faith that others will actually read what you have to say and be moved or enlightened or educated or entertained by puts a whole new spin on the way that you write. Students, of course, should discuss having a blog with their parents, and be very wary of writing things that could reveal too much about themselves personally, but for practicing the craft of writing you can't go wrong with a blog of your own.

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Lazy Days of Summer

I've been plenty busy, but I've been lazy about my writing. Sorry about that.

I'm heading out the door soon for a family get-together with the in-laws.

In another state.

At great personal cost.

Which has to be filed under "The things we do for love", or "The things we do to maintain marital harmony", or "The things that we do when issued ultimatums regarding the future withholding of all potential affection, if you know what I mean".

Oh well. I'll be back in the saddle next week (or, I could experiment with live blogging from a family reunion with your in-laws. Then again, that could have farther reaching implications that I'm prepared to deal with. Better not.)

At any rate, I'll be back in a few days. Lord knows what kinds of things I'll want to write about by then.

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Wanted: Nearly Sensitive Greeting Cards for Guys

The months of May and June are a virtual Carda-Palooza around our house what with Mother's Day, my wife's birthday, and our wedding anniversary all falling within a few weeks of each other. It's a terrific burden for a guy, but for each of these events a trip to the Hallmark store is required and some time spent browsing for something thoughtful and tasteful and heartfelt. Basically, that's more heartfelt than most guys can endure, but every year I soldier on.

The thing is, I'm not getting much help from the greeting card companies. How many ways can you write "I know I don't say this as often as I ought to, but golly honey I sure do love you."

Blech.

Like many other guys, I do in fact tell my wife I love her, and fairly often I think. There was that time in January, and again in March. Or April. I forget.

Just kidding. Really, I'm pretty good about telling my wife I love her and she does the same with me. We appreciate each other and even if we might fuss and spit at each other from time to time we get along pretty well. But this presents a dilemma when it comes to card shopping.

The fact that I do tell my wife I love her basically means that about 90% of the birthday, Mother's Day, and anniversary cards are out of contention. The religious cards aren't for us, and those goofy cartoon ones that usually have some variation of "Hubba Hubba" don't do it either. So what now?

I've tried lots of strategies. I usually try to find something that's pretty and doesn't say too much at all, then write something a little more personal inside.

But come on greeting card companies! Why can't we get some cards for those guys like me that are Nearly Sensitive? You know, not exactly meterosexuals, but not K-Mart shoppers either if you know what I mean. Those of us somewhere in between. Something like:

"Hey baby, you're still hot.
And you sure get me going,
As soon as I get back from grocery shopping.
I'm going to give you a foot massage.
While you're folding laundry

I love you."

Now that hits the right notes, except for the part about being terrible poetry, but you know what I mean. Something in between "I'm sorry for being a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal and never thinking about anything romantic other than getting you in the sack" and "The butterflies landed on my brow and brushed me with tiny kisses when I was thinking of you dear."

Please.

Lucky for me the card season is over and I can get back to not thinking about these things in terms of calligraphic expressions on heavy card stock. Instead, let me just go on giving a certain someone a little swat on the fanny when I get a chance, and telling her often that I love and appreciate her.

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Highly Unqualified Test Graders and the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test

Yesterday the grades for all public schools in Florida were released to much self-congratulation by our governor, and much to the credit of teachers and students and parents throughout the state the scores have improved once again this year. Bully for us.

This is a truly high-stakes test since teaching positions, the jobs of principals, and the graduation of students and progression to the next grade level all depend on how well they score on this series of tests. And God forbid that you fall into one of the lower levels children, as here in Florida that means we'll strip you of all your electives, place you in remedial classes, and diagnostic test you until your little fingers are cramped from gripping #2 pencils and bubbling answers. Even if you're one of those students who has done well on your test, if you have the bad luck to attend a school where the grades aren't what they should be you'll still endure all that extra testing, still likely lose your art teacher and PE teachers and computer teachers in favor of "coaches" whose primary job is to see that everyone passes the tests, and still have lots of pep rallies and promotions in an attempt to motivate everyone to do well on those tests. And oh yeah, we'll need to start school for everyone in your entire district sometime during the middle of summer so we can get all of that testing and diagnosing and pep-rallying done in time for the actual tests in the spring.

High-stakes indeed.

And with such high-stakes tests you can be sure that the state is doing everything in their power to see that tests are graded fairly and accurately and.......

Whoops. No, sorry, that's not in fact the way we're going to do it. It will be much better to contract out the actual grading of the tests to a big corporation that can do it for us. Sure, that makes sense. Besides, we can't be expected to find $82 million to give to schools to get that done. Much better to privatize the whole thing and give that money to a company that will do it for us. And of course, they'll completely abide by the terms of the contract that specify the qualifications of the test graders and see to it that all of them are fully qualified. With college degrees and experience in teaching that makes it possible for them to make qualified judgement calls about the essays that they have to read. And the company will pay the test graders a wage that is sure to attract those qualified candidates.

Oh. That's not what we're doing? You mean that test graders are paid $10 an hour, and many don't have degrees in the area they're grading?

And many don't have degrees at all?

Well, my bad for assuming the state would apply the same amount of pressure on the company responsible for grading the tests as they do on those who take them and those who prepare their students for testing.

Maybe this is one of those selectively high-stakes deals then. Where only kids and teachers have to be responsible.

Apparently politicians and corporations have a different set of standards.

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What Platform/Resolution/Browser/Version Should I Design For?

When I wrote my first book on Dreamweaver 4 way back when I spent a fair amount of time on the simple notion of knowing your audience before you painted the first pixel on the screen or jotted down your first idea of what the site should look like. It seemed to make sense at the time, and over time and with more experience I've come to understand that knowing who you are designing for is the key to every decision you make about your site's design, functionality, navigation, and content. That's been brought home to me even more forcefully as I now have a chance to do side-by-side comparisons of the two sites I spend the most time on thanks to Google Analytics.

In my day job I manage the instructional portal for a large school district in Florida. The site is open to all, but is accessed primarily by employees and students of our district. As a result, these users are viewing on the approved platform (Windows) and the approved browser (Internet Explorer) for our organization, and the numbers bear that out. Here's a recap of the design metrics returned by Google:

Platform: Windows - 97%, Macintosh - 3%
Browser: Internet Explorer - 94%, Firefox - 3%, All others - 3%
Screen resolution: 1064 X 768 - 58%, 800 X 600 - 29% (thankfully no one has viewed at 640 X 480)
Flash version: Version 8 - 65%, Version 7 - 35%
Colors: 32 bit - 70%, 16 bit - 25%

So based on those numbers I could make an informed decision about that particular site. IE and Windows are dominant and my designs need to take that into account when I'm working and testing. And that's about what I expected. If I want to use Flash 8 methods for publishing video, for instance, I need to understand that some percentage of my viewers may not see the content properly. Likewise, with a relatively large number of people viewing at 800 X 600 I still need to work to those dimensions when creating layouts.

The second site, this very blog, tells an entirely different story. My audience for publishing here is a vastly different group of people. While the school district site can, and is, visited by people with a wide range of computer experience and level of web sophistication, most of the folks who visit here are web geeks, education technology geeks, or just your run of the mill geeks. About what you'd expect from people who read blogs in general, and particularly this one. And the statistics bear that out:

Platform: Windows - 82%, Macintosh - 18%
Browser: Internet Explorer - 45%, Firefox - 42%, Safari - 9%
Screen resolution: 1064 X 768 - 33%, 800 X 600 - 6%, All the rest are at 1152 X 864 and higher
Flash version: Version 7 - 9%, Version 9 (all you beta testers out there) - 9%, Version 8 - 82%
Colors: 32 bit - 96%, 16 bit - 4%

So, design decisions for this blog could (if I were doing a redesign anytime soon, which I'm not) would be vastly different from the school site. Could I risk a layout that was target at 1024 X 768 for instance? Yeah, I think I could. A couple of facts from the stats tell me why:

--Lots of my viewers have large monitors
--Lots of my viewers are on Macs where viewing a maximized window is rare
--The number of viewers on Firefox and other browsers leads me to believe that this is a geeky group that will likely not be disturbed by having to resize a browser window to see the full page

Digging in further, those simple stats tell me a lot about the folks who visit here, and I could make other decisions as well. Web safe colors? Pah! A thing of the past for this group. I can design with whatever colors I want when nearly all my visitors are using 32-bit colors. Can I use the latest and greatest video and coolio stuff in Flash 8? Sure thing. Do I need to test across a wide range of browsers for this audience? You betcha.

Even though it's been a few years since I gave advice on knowing your audience before starting to design, the facts haven't changed. And the question and response hasn't changed either:

What platform/resolution/browser/version should I design for?

It all depends on your audience.

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Create a Polaroid Photograph in Fireworks

My latest tutorial at CommunityMX takes a look at how to simulate the effect of a Polaroid photograph in Fireworks.

I was originally inspired by this tutorial at About.com on how to do the same thing in Photoshop Elements, but wanted to see what steps I would take to achieve the same effect in Fireworks.

As it turns out, it's way easy in Fireworks with the use of some simple drop-shadow effects and basic vector manipulation. Here's the introduction from the tutorial:

Do you have a drawer full of Polaroid photos somewhere? Perhaps they're old vacation photos or shots from a family reunion. Wherever you might have taken them, the trusty Polaroid camera was for a time the best way to get instant photographic gratitude. A push of the button, and whir of the motor, and the camera would discharge a hunk of plastic that would magically show your picture in just a minute or so. And if you're really old like I am, you might even remember an earlier time when you had to peel a protective paper away from the picture and fan it in the air until the image dried.

In many ways that was a simpler time and images that simulate the look of a Polaroid snapshot still evoke a certain sense of nostalgia. While the Polaroid camera has gone the way of the 8 track tape player, the look and feel of Polaroid pictures can still be used for great effect, particularly when you want to capture the feel of an earlier era. In this tutorial you'll learn how to turn your own images into Polaroid snapshots and capture that earlier time.

This is a commercial tutorial. It is free for subscribers to CommunityMX or available for a few bucks as a one-off purchase.

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Creeping Up on 1 Million Hits

Gosh, who'd a thunk it? This blog is about to go over it's first million hits, with a mere few hundreds remaining as I write this before the counter rolls over.

If I had the wherewithal to do it I'd run a contest to congratulate #1,000,000 as they hit the blog. Since I don't I'll just say thanks to all my readers out there and look forward to the next million visits.

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Getting all Analytical with Google

I've recently been approved for an account with Google Analytics and I have to say this is one way cool and extremely useful tool. Best of all? It's free. Not only that, but you can use Google Analytics on any of your sites and can use it in sub-domains, separate domains, and just about any other place that you want to study the traffic coming to your site.

In my case I'm using the tools provided to study traffic coming to the school district site that I manage and I can already see some terrifically valuable uses for the data provided. Sure, it's pretty interesting to see the geo-location map populated with little icons representing where in the world people are visiting from, but of even more value are the metrics for things like browser versions, platforms, Flash versions, and so forth that give me useful information on my site's visitors. For the record, Internet Explorer is the dominate browser used in visits to my site (not surprising since that's our standard browser in our intranet), 57% of site visitors have their monitor set to 1024 X 768 (but 30% are still viewing at 800 X 600), and over 65% of visitors are at version 8 of the Flash player (less than 5% are at version 6 or lower).

That's good stuff, but there is much, much more that can be done as well, including taking a hard look at the entry page where visitors are entering my site, where they navigate to when they get there, and what pages they exit from. And, as I mentioned, much much more.

To get started you'll need to apply for an account and the approval process takes a while. I waited a few weeks for my invitation to appear, but once it did the process of adding tracking to my site was incredibly easy. I added 4 lines of JavaScript to my main Dreamweaver template for the site, updated the 265 pages (Yikes! When did that happen?) in the site and the nightly sweep was ready for review the next day.

While you're waiting for your invitation to arrive you might want to visit Google's Conversion University where you'll find excellent articles on how to examine site metrics. Even though my site is not for profit and we don't run any advertising, there's lots to learn there about how visitor behavior can drive the design of a site. And if you're running Google Ads or have a commercial site you can really profit from some of the tips they have for converting page views to cold hard cash.

Great stuff here from Google once again.

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The Day Mighty Mouse Ate Dreamweaver

I'm happy to report that the new G-5 tower that I've been lusting after for some time finally arrived this week, and I've been one happy computer camper. Or was, until Wednesday afternoon when suddenly my little world was turned upside down and I went from smugly congratulating myself on not seeing the Spinning Beachball of Death while I was working to one harried and horribly upset Mac-head. Here's the whole sordid story.

Monday the new G-5 arrived in all its glory, and after an hour or so I had the entire contents of the old iMac copied over to the new machine and was happily working away while fending off the envied glares of my co-workers. Along with the new machine came the usual Apple peripherals, including the new "Mighty Mouse" mouse with the little scroll ball.

When I got my new iMac at home I ditched the Mighty Mouse right away, opting instead for the much more ergonomic and friendly Logitech MX 500 mouse, but I thought I'd give the Apple device another shot, so for the first few days I was working away, attempting to get used to the shape of the mouse and the quirky way that the scroll button/ball reacted to inadvertent taps or pushes. I was horribly disappointed, but neither was I real happy with the Mac mouse, but I thought I'd give it a little time to see if I could establish a relationship with the thing.

But then, disaster. While updating a template in Dreamweaver in preparation for a major reworking of the primary site I work on there was suddenly nothing to see in Design view. No web page preview. No nothing. Just a huge expanse of gray where my page preview should have been. Switching to Code view revealed that everything was still intact, but I could no longer see diddly-squat on the page. Dang, this is not good. Maybe I broke something in the template?

I tried opening other pages that I'd not been working on, but still nothing. Tried starting a new page from scratch. Nada. Zip. Nothing.

Oh crap.

OK, OK, well, let me run that new update that's available for Dreamweaver. Maybe that will fix things up.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Just a gray screen of nothingness.

So, let's get really drastic here. Uninstall Dreamweaver entirely. Kill all the associated files in the library and every other place. Empty the trash. Repair permissions. Reinstall Dreamweaver. Run the update. And now, surely, when I open things up I'll see.....

Nothing. Damn.

So now I'm at the point where I'm ready to wipe the hard drive and start all over again. Luckily all the important work I'd done was already on the server and after downloading to the Windows machine I had backups of my work and I'm ready to get serious about re-imaging.

Lucky for me, it was late in the day at this point and I decided to wait until the next day to begin the process of erasing the hard drive on the new Mac and starting over. In the meantime, a few e-mails to people in the know on Dreamweaver confirmed that no one had seen this particular behavior before, and what I was seeing was truly in the realm of the bizarre.

So the next day at work I thought I'd open things up in Dreamweaver one more time to confirm that there was no Design view to be had and then set about the re-image. But wait a minute. What's this? Way down at the bottom of the window a tiny sliver of an image gleamed forth from the expanse of gray. Could it be? What if I....? Oh for gosh's sake!

My Design view had never been gone in the first place after all. What had happened was the extreme expansion of the Head View toolbar in Dreamweaver, which had somehow been dragged to the very bottom of the window. So what I had been seeing was not a malfunctioning Dreamweaver, but a toolbar that had somehow grown to over 600 pixels in height. All I had to do was drag the toolbar back to its correct size and all was right with my little Dreamweaver world.

Now, I never consciously expanded that freaking toolbar like that in the first place, so I have no idea how it got to be that big. Shoot, I hardly ever use toolbars in Dreamweaver at all, other than the Insert bar, and I'd actually forgotten that I had that one on. Head View gives you a tiny little toolbar at the top of the window where you can select and edit your head content as needed. It's so unobtrusive that having opened it for something or the other in the past I just never closed it up again.

But my theory is that I must have somehow bumped that little scroll nubbin on the Mighty Mouse and inadvertently dragged the thing all the way down. I sure don't remember doing that. All I remember is looking up at the screen and thinking "What the $#)(*# happened to Design view?"

The moral of the story? Uh, well, I guess it's not to jump to conclusions and to look harder when trouble-shooting application problems. But, since I'm not likely to start doing that at this point in my life the real moral is that the Mighty Mouse must die. Sorry Apple, but that is one seriously crappy device. While I may love most things Apple with an undying yearning that causes me to reach deep into my wallet every time Steve Jobs pulls on another pair of old sneakers, this mouse of yours blows.

It's back to my old pal Mr. Logitech for me.

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Yes, I'm Opinionated

Well, another day at work, another meeting with the team that I work with, and another opportunity for me to spout off. What can I say. I'm not at all shy about, well, anything. Want me to give a presentation in front of a large group of people? Sure, no problem. Sit and talk with senior management? OK. Discuss the good and bad of software products with vendors, even when I have a decidedly unflattering opinion of their product. Yep, I can do that.

Or worst of all, put me in a room where policy and procedures are being discussed, especially those that impact our ability to do our jobs and do what's right for students and teachers and you're going to hear from me. It's just the way I am. Sometimes my rants lead to change, sometime they don't, but that hasn't stopped me from letting fly when I have something to say, much to the amusement of my coworkers and the discomfort and patient forbearance of my boss.

Recently the boss asked me if I've always been this way. I think his question went something like this. "Have you always said whatever was on your mind? Well, yes, and that got me thinking about a time when my big mouth had me standing at attention with a very large and very angry full colonel chewing up one side of me and down the other.

The year was 1982 and I was a hotshot commander of a field artillery battery (equivalent to a company in size) recently deployed to Germany. Our unit was an experimental one that had shipped overseas en masse as part of a new strategy to deploy entire units instead of sending troops one at a time to replace soldiers that had completed their duty commitment. In this new arrangement our entire unit was brought together in boot camp and we had trained together as a single unit for 18 months before being sent to Germany to face down the dreaded Russian menace. Me, I was the new commander that had been hand-picked by the general at our base in Colorado--guy by the name of Colin Powell--to lead the battery to our new assignment.

As a result, we were definitely in the spotlight and in our first field exercise the brass and even the press was buzzing around to see how we would perform. No problem. We'd trained hard and had a pretty well-oiled machine and were ready to show our stuff.

Now, in the field artillery one of the key operations we had to perform was the occupation of a new firing position. We would roll down the road with our six 30 ton howitzers and their support vehicles, rumble into position, get the guns ready to fire, and get ourselves camouflaged as quickly as possible. It was an intricate dance of men and machinery, with the 100 soldiers in our unit drilled endlessly on their duties. The goal was to get into position to fling a few hundred pounds of high explosive projectiles towards the target as quickly as possible without tipping off the enemy that we were there. Then we would pull up stakes, roll down the road, and do it all over again. We called it shoot and scoot and it was a key to our survival.

On this bright October morning everything was working to perfection. The guns rumbled into position, the troops dismounted, the camouflage nets went into place, and the first shot was blasted towards the simulated enemy.

And then He was there. The Assistant Division Commander in the person of one Colonel William O. Crouch, one mean son of a bum who struck terror into the hearts of every officer and soldier in our unit. Of course, I'd heard of Colonel Crouch, but hadn't had the pleasure of making his acquaintance yet.

As the smoke cleared from the first round, Colonel Crouch came striding across the firing position, bellowing my name in a voice that would curdle milk at 100 paces.

"Cavanaugh" he thundered, "just what kind of $%^##* outfit are you running here? Just what the $%$&~!! do you call that?"

"Sir?" I said. "I don't understand what you mean."

"That $$#^#*# soldier doesn't have his weapon. Where the #^#&!! is his %((*@!!! weapon?"

"Oh, well sir, he has it on his back, see? He has to do that so he can put up the camouflage net."

"God*$%&## it! What the %^#&@!! is he going to do if the enemy is in that treeline?"

"Sir, we had an advanced party sweep this area. The tree line is clear."

"What did you say?"

"Sir, the tree line is clear. Plus, we have men on the two .50 caliber machine guns on each of the armored vehicles there. I don't believe the soldiers here need to have their weapons in their hands during the occupation of the firing position."

"Are you arguing with me lieutenant?"

"Well, not exactly sir, but the way we do this makes more sense. If the soldiers have to handle their weapons and the camouflage net at the same time we can't get covered up."

"I want those $#&#^#! soldiers to have their weapons with them."

"Sir, that makes no sense. They have to climb over the top of the howitzers and if they get their weapon caught they could fall. This way is better."

"Did I $%*#*^!! ask you what you thought? Are you telling me you know more than I do lieutenant?"

"Well, no sir. But the way we do this....."

I think that's when there was a solar eclipse of the sun. Either that, or the air was so filled with curses and invectives and spittle that it was simply blotted out.

No matter. At this point I was standing at attention while the battalion executive officer stood shaking his head at my ignorance in attempting to disagree with Colonel Crouch. I would have laughed if I hadn't been so busy rigidly holding myself in the "position" as the colonel came within inches of my face, demonstrating a mastery of Anglo-Saxon curses that surely would have earned him a Phd were there a university offering a course of study in the profane.

But I thought I was right, and while I could have taken the easy way out and agreed with the good colonel and yes sir-ed and no sir-ed him until the cows came home, I wasn't about to stand mute when I thought I was right and he was wrong and I had good reason to feel the way I did.

Did I learn anything from that episode? Sure. Stand back from Colonel Crouch if you're going to disagree with him and be prepared to get your butt royally chewed out. But I sure didn't learn to keep my mouth shut.

Despite that episode and a few more like it in my various careers, I still disagree with the boss when I think I have a good reason to do so. And I don't think that's likely to change.

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Just a Little Something for June

Gosh, my calendar over on the left for this month is completely blank. So, just so no one thinks I'm pushing up daisies, I thought I ought to post *something*.

So there you go.

Excuse me now, I have to run. Homosexuals are at the door wanting to undermine my marriage. Guess I better see to that.

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