This complete ballot analysis is almost certainly the closest we will ever come to a full analysis of what 'could have' happened in the 2000 presidential election.

Interesting reading...

So the observant reader might be wondering what's up with that bar of boxes just beneath the masthead. (err, on the main page, not if you're looking through individual articles)

It's a new way to navigate and visualize the page! In a nutshell, each rectangle is one story on this page. The first (leftmost) one symbolizes the top story on the page. The color of the box is the same as the header color, which indicates whether the story is less than 24 hours old, between 24 and 48 hours old, or older than 48 hours.

Clicking on the bar will jump you to that story in the page. This is intended to make it easier for people who come once a day. They can just click on the last dark-blue bar and jump to that article, and can scroll their way up after that.

Similarly, and possibly even more useful, the little circles at the right end of the boxes indicate whether that article has any user comments, and if so, how old the most recent user comment is. that way you don't have to remember how many comments there were or, worse yet, keep checking comments to see if there are any new ones. Just look for the blue circles for recent comments. Depending on how late I stay up tonight, clicking right in the little circle may also pop up the comments window directly.

I'd love to hear what you think of the functionality and implementation, and whether you'll use it in practice.

Happy Monday!

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Response to feedback: Making it more intuitive - One of my earlier designs called for summing up each post into a word and putting that single word in the post's box. I decided against it because it's too visually distracting (and because I dislike changing the database schema every time I make an interface tweak) but I might give it a try. I could have it in grey, turning to black on the rollover. This would also provice a convenient solution to issue #2:

Anchor tags aren't working in Netscape/Opera/Lynx - Yeah, they use the onclick property of the TD tag, and a lot of browsers can't deal. I'd use a transparent gif with an A tag, but I can't make it stretch correctly. As long as the comment box is sometimes there, stretching it to a percentage will either result in nonclicable box areas or comment boxes that wrap to the next line, both of which are worse. The other problem is that there's no affordance of clickability, since the cursor only changes to the finger when you're over the comments button. Lastly, clicking on comments brings up the comments and drops you to the post, which I'll cop out and say is a feature, not a bug, but if you're just catching up on comments, you probably don't want to scroll to the top every time you want to check out another post's new comments.

It won't make sense after this post falls from the top - I just added a "?" at the end, which links to this post. Let's all just smile and ignore for a second that the bar only appears on the home page, and the explanatory post comes up on a page that doesn't even have the bar it's trying to explain. I have an answer for that, but it's part of the Fury 4.0 redesign (oooh Fury four-point-oh... Okay, so it's just me), so it'll have to wait.

Length mapping makes some boxes too short - Fixed. I added a 'minimum size' buffer, so the really short posts don't look as short. This is actually more accurate because originally it used the number of bytes in the body to compute the %, but it didn't factor in the real estate of the title and the box, comment link, and all that. Now things won't get super crowded unless you have your window pretty narrow and I make a lot of posts in a week.

One more question: Does this bar just make sense for the home page, or would it be useful on the topic and date pages as well?

Okay, this one's just for Californians, or those looking for entertainment (okay, all of us).

Check the availability of your vanity plate. You can also do a substring search to find plates like yours, to get more ideas.

I'm thinking that if anyone ever steals GRR ARG I'll try for "OMG STFU"

New on Meme-o-matic: Odd Todd. It's Todd, and he's pretty odd.

Buffy The Musical Songs in MP3

There is a god.

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Updated link.

Maybe I spoke too soon. Looks like HP doesn't love Compaq as much as Compaq loves HP.

Buffy: The Musical was amazing. Joss Whedon wrote all the songs himself, and it covered so many Broadway styles from ragtime through swing, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s (though not much 90s), with what I perceived to be stylistic nods to Les Miz and Into The Woods, and Rent, as well as several others.

An excellently well told story and, unlike so many other 'aberration-style' episodes from other shows ('a very special Blossom', etc.) this one was actually a highly pivotal arc episode, setting the path for huge changes for nearly every person in the show.

After last season's 'Body' episode going without so much as an Emmy nomination, I don't have any expectations, but I do have high hopes for this one come next September. It seems that once a season Joss creates an absolutely amazing work ("Becoming - Part II", "Hush", "Body" and now "Once More, with Feeling").

It just keeps getting better.

Time-lapse driving movies is a project I've wanted to do for a while. It's nice to see I'm not the only one. I actually tried it once, seven years ago, with an original QuickCam and a Powerbook Duo, but the duo fell off the dash and froze, and that ended that project.

Now if I could tie that into data recorded by my new GPS receiver, I could get a nice little data-montage of location, speed, and video. Oh for that land of days without end...

There are some items that are simply geek chic. The stock geeks have the same items in their utility-belt. A year ago it was a Nokia 51x0 or 62x0 cellphone, a Canon Digital Elph S100, A Palm V, and some sort of music accessory. For me it was a Archos MP3 Jukebox.

Now things are getting smaller. The Nokia 82x0 and the Samsung (argh, what's it called, anyone?) have taken the place of the older Nokias, iPods are sure to reign even amongst those without macs of their own, and the PDA trunk has bifurcated into m500/505s, Visors, and (for the supercool) color Cliae (I declare the plural of Clie to be Cliae). The S110 and S300 are cooler (fractionally) than the S100, but this new mini-digi-cam camera would take the cake, if only it had a resolution better than 640.480. That time will come.

(btw, I'd like up all those product refs to description pages, but I'm just too busy today, but not too busy yo write to you. Never too busy for that. :-)

Corporate relationships are so cute:

Compaq loves HP
 and
HP loves Compaq

Aww....