This new skin has been in development since last December, and I'm making it available tonight with a bit of trepidation. I'm about 95% certain that it works, but it's nearly two a.m. now, and having worked on it for quite some time today, it's time to either put up or shut up.'Snow-comes' is one of the designs that has been sitting in my 'incomplete' folder for quite some time, awaiting the creation of the code that would serve as its backbone. The design itself is not terribly difficult, as it's a standard two-column weblog design.

This is the code that powers the syndication of wondergeeks.net, the portal site for my group of friends. For some time, we were using a standard RSS-and-Perl solution, but we had a good deal of problems with it.Problem 1: Non-ASCII characters

He wrapped his hands around the martini glass. I watched, with one eye on my pad thai and the other on his finger, which idly swirled his toothpick-speared cocktail olives around in his glass.

Call me a professional eavesdropper, but it's pretty hard not to pay attention when you're trying to have a quiet dinner with your spouse at the local Thai restaurant, and the flaming queen sitting at the bar is asking the waiter, "So what are the rules on orgies in Alabama? How many people does it have to be? Fifteen, sixteen?"

Eat your pad thai, girl, I thought. He's drunk, he's getting drunker, and it's just going to get funnier—as long as he doesn't realize that anyone's listening to him…

Lot A was for the newer cars. Lot B was for trucks, vans, ATVs, SUVs, and anything that didn't quite qualify as a "car." Lot C was for older cars.

We were the sixtieth car in Lot C at tonight's auction down in Cullman. While waiting for the first fifty-nine cars to be processed, Jeff and I had plenty of time to talk over how much we wanted our reserve price to be. We knew we wouldn't get a lot of money for the car—it was, after all, an eight-year-old Sundance—but we wanted to see if we could do better than the trade-in offer we'd received.

On the drive down to the auction, I found myself laughing as I thought about all of the places this little car has taken me since 1994. Nine states: Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois.

"Oh dear God. The db people got to you"—said Danno, upon learning of my current activities.

"Crack dealers!" I said.

"When they say 'the first query engine is free,' that should be a tipoff…"No kidding. So here I am, sitting here, helpless, a junkie looking for her fix and staring this error down: "Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in…"

I omit the rest. Why bore you? Suffice it to say that I finally swallowed my pride and started hammering on database stuff today. Just a teensy little table, I said, just one, and I'll see if I can make it do what I want it to, and maybe I'll branch out from there.

He is legendary in this house; his steps are stealthy and quick. You'd think that you'd hear him when he pulls up in the driveway, but his vehicle has a degree of silence and stealth that many secret agents would envy.

The brown suit is just a disguise, and we know it; what better way to disguise a ninja than as a UPS deliveryman? After all, they are friendly and harmless! How much can one fear a man whose job requires him to drive an enormous truck with no doors, while wearing the drabbest shorts known to man?Not to mention the socks pulled up, unfashionably, to his knees!

In your world, UPS men are pasty-skinned men in bad socks and orthopedic shoes, men who look down from their wind-tunnel truck cabs and wave at children in nearby cars. They are the harmless purveyors of heavy packaging. (Hey, Clark Kent was a reporter, and that seems an obvious little gambit to us now.)

In my world, it's a little bit different.