Hey kids.

I got a B for that essay I wrote about Salem, McCarthyism and The Crucible. Which surprised me just slightly, what with it being written in four hours and all. Though at least it was not a close thing. Apparently about half the teachers who moderated it felt I deserved naught more than an E. On account of it being a bunch of opinionated bullshit with very little in the way of evidence to back it up. Luckily for me the other half would appear to really like opinionated bullshit, and I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Beautiful.

Hoom. For the past few weeks I have been concentrating far more on design than on content. As can be seen at my vanity-site:

   

This very column has undergone a radical redesign, in appearance if not content. Gone is the shoddy, bolted-together email look. Come is the 'I am a professional website designer, honest!' look. Why has this happened? Investigate the following sites, weep over their goddamn beauty, and realize how I felt when I came across them and realised I had been wasting my life...

   http://www.caoine.org/
   http://www.factory512.com/
   http://www.shodown.net/
   http://www.ablow.org/
   http://www.mangled.org/

Well, with regards to design anyway.

So. Those pesky A Level exams loom in the very near future. Hence purty web design must wait until after. But come the summer holidays? I shall be going ape-crazy, starting a project I imagine will take me the rest of my life...

To make a website about every single animal that has ever existed on the planet Earth.

Sweet, no? A page about every animal that has ever existed... That is a lot of animals, Bubba. Hence my reckoning it will take the rest of my life. And the best part? Apart from the pictures of armadillos and Tasmanian devils? This project will be an opportunity for me to play with design. Because the greatest problem I find when I design a very nice page is that I have nothing to put on it. Now I will. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to Animals. Which ones are good to get lifts from, which ones are bad... Or something like that.

It is Michael and Ian's gig right now. Thought I might have made it, but it would seem I did not. Ah well, I will just have to wait until they are rich and famous... Then I will be able to Napsterise them.

Speaking of which... Anyone know where I can get a copy of this fabled 'freenet' program? The one where there are no centralised servers, and all swapping of files is routed through a huge string of computers, leaving those fine 1%ers with most of the MP3s untraceable? If you do, please let me know where I can get a copy.

And that can be it.

-Caleb