Budding music critics have until midnight tonight to sign up for Eric Olsen’s offer. Yeah, I had never heard of him either. :-) But, I think it’s a good idea, and a step in the right direction. This type of advertising is so much more effective than a TV or magazine ad. It’s also more effective than the radio DJ who seems to like every single record from every single artist. Advertisers have known for years that word-of-mouth is the best advertising, but so many of them don’t seem to know how to generate it. Hopefully, this will cause some light bulbs to turn on over people’s heads. Anyway, I signed up both News Goat and OKMensa. We’ll see what happens.

Ain’t mailing lists great? There was just a post on the CSS list that fixed the problem I was having with News Goat in Netscape 4.7x.

Here’s what was happening: The “Goat History” div would float to the right of the “Goat Places” div when it was supposed to be below it. Same with the validation icons. Adding this:

<br clear=”all” />

After “Goat Places” and after “Goat History” fixed the problem. It still doesn’t look pretty, but at least it doesn’t look dumb. :-)

There’s a discussion on one of the web design lists about how to create a personal website these days that’s not a blog. Seems like as good an excuse to write as any… :-)

News Goat seems to be all the way back. The good people at RackShack were kind enough to turn on the servers for a short time, so that Cyberwing’s victims could get their data. I had all my entries, but they were scattered about, and there were multiple versions, so it was nice to download the “official” set.

This week, Angela & I finally set up Smart Goat as an official company. We are now “Smart Goat, LLC” with the papers to prove it. The funniest part was, when we went to the tax commission to file the paperwork, the lady who helped us was interested in having a web site designed. :-) Don’t know if we’ll hear from her, but it was a nice way to start a business.

Don’t ever, ever ask my advice on choosing a web host…

News Goat (and most of our sites) are coming back to life. What happened? I’ll give you one guess.

I’ll throw a story together about this whole thing, because it is an interesting story. Right now, I’m a little busy trying to get everything back the way it was.

And now we’re home. Sorry I didn’t get to post anything here — our hotel’s “business center” charged $0.10 a minute to use their computers. How dumb is that? I could see if people were standing in line to use them, but the computers were just sitting there, useless. They didn’t appear to be in high demand at all.

The conference hotel had public Internet terminals, however, but they tended to be busy. What time I had I spent posting to OKMensa.

My first draft of this entry included a very long diatribe about airport security. I decided I wouldn’t subject everyone to that, so I pulled it out and made it a story. If you decide to skip it, don’t worry, you’re not missing anything. :-)

Most everything else of interest can be found in the various stories at OKMensa. It was your typical Mensa event — lots of strange people reveling in their strangeness.

One small point about the web design workshop I attended — I want to host it next year. :-) It was a very good overview of how to design a web site, but they left out a lot of important points about designing a good web site. Things like standards, separating content from layout, and usability were not adequately addressed.

Speaking of usability, I have a bone to pick with the Phoenix airport. Driving to the airport on Sunday, I was following the signs to Terminal 2, which listed our airline. Then, just before the various lanes split off, I saw that the sign for Terminal 4, besides listing the airlines housed there, also listed “Car Rental Return.” Since the signs for terminals 2 and 3 (There is no Terminal 1. Weird, huh?) did not mention “Car Rental Return,” I rushed to follow the sign that did. Once I got there, the guy checking in the car asked what airline I was on. I told him, and he said I should have returned the car to Terminal 2, which is now 2.5 miles away.

So, because of signs that are incomplete, we ended up taking the inter-terminal bus back to Terminal 2. Whoever decided what to put on those signs should be dragged out in the street by Jakob Nielsen and beat with a very large compass.

We’ll be heading to the airport soon. I hope to post lots of reports both here and on OKMensa about the AG.

Last night, however, I thought it was hopeless. I visited our web host, and saw a message saying they were moving all their servers this weekend and all sites would be down for 2-3 days. D’oh! And, their site was crawling, so it was a long time before I was able to get to their support forums and find out that it was only the sites hosted at their data center — which we, fortunately, are not.

So, the weekend of blogging will continue on as scheduled. Hopefully someone will notice. :-)

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

Go here to see what color your name is interpreted as by your favorite browser.

This could be a very nice resource as I begin work on the Crafty Goat redesign.

• Place a copy of Blog Goat where I can download it at the hotel.
• Create template story about AG awards luncheon on OKMensa.
• Print list of nominees.
• Confirm reservations.
• Pickup a copy of Terrorism For Dummies to read on the plane. Never mind. :-)