Here’s a quick example. Move your mouse slowly back and forth between Link 1 and Link 2. Then do the same with Link 3 and Link 4.

Link 1   Link 2

Link 3Link 4

Notice how much more pleasant the move is between the latter links? And up and down around them? That’s the magic of link padding.

You can take a look at my page source for an example of the code involved. (If you’re using Firefox, you can even isolate the specific code by highlighting what you want to see, right-clicking the page, and choosing “View Selection Source.”) Note that I exaggerated the spacing between Links 1 & 2 to emulate the sort of spacing you might see in a menu.

For more about link padding, check out “Generous link targets in the library” and “Padded link targets for better mousing.”

This is definitely a trick I’ll be employing in the future—and retrofitting to my existing sites!

While I’m usually twitchy at the term “self-help,” especially when paired with “attorney,” and am unconsciously prone to associate the initials CPA with “dull” (however unfairly), I believe that Mr. Bronstein’s recent post about loyalty resonates with truth. (You can skip the section of definitions, if you like, to save time.)

I read the novel in high school, enjoyed it quite a lot, and found the 1971 movie entertaining as well. Both deal primarily with a scientific team investigating a killer microorganism—apparently extraterrestrial—in a secure underground facility. When the microorganism unexpectedly mutates, becoming harmless to humans, but deadly to neoprene door seals, a race begins to see whether the team will be able to override the security system before it incinerates them all by exploding the nuclear reactor that powers the facility. Tense stuff, with just the right amount of science, bureaucracy, and human personality to make for lively reading or viewing.

My old friend Loren Wiseman used to tell me that in a sci-fi tale, an author can get away with one “gimme”—an idea that stretches the realms of possibility past their reasonable bounds. In these two versions of The Andromeda Strain, that “gimme” is the existence of an extraterrestrial bug that continually mutates.

The trouble with the A&E version is that it goes “gimme,” “gimme,” “gimme,” piling one impossibility atop another. It starts with the same bug, then lets it feed on radiation (ignoring the heat of the thermonuclear blast, of course). The microorganism can even reach up to somehow crash a fighter plane carrying a nuclear warhead—and trigger that warhead’s control! Yes, the bug is somehow intelligent. And it’s capable of communicating with pieces of itself across great distances, so that when you find something to kill one sample, the rest of it adapts. Did I mention it was delivered via a wormhole—not in space, but in time. Turns out that the future us sent it back in time because they no longer possessed the deep-sea, sulfur-based microorganisms capable of destroying it, because shortly after the time of this crisis, we/they had done vent mining and inadvertently killed them all.

So, back to the killer bug, which is now destroying all flora and fauna across Utah in a mad dash to the water supply for Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the lab team is facing that security breach from the book. Here’s where things get really silly: Turns out that when they said water-cooled reactor early in the movie, they meant a wading pool at the bottom of the central maintenance shaft through which somebody’s going to have to climb to reach a security terminal—because the flashing lights caused one of the scientists to have a seizure and crash into the only terminal on their level. (This seizure is a nod toward the book, in which one of the scientists misses an important clue early in the story because a blinking warning light on his computer puts him into a fugue state.)

Naturally, a couple of people die by falling into the radioactive pool, but their sacrifice enables the protagonist to reach the next floor up, where he stops the countdown at one second. (It’s always at one second, right?) So the facility is able to rapid-grow a bunch of the deep-sea microorganism, which helicopters then spray on the spreading killer bug and stop it just in time.

There is, of course, a cliffhanger ending in which one small sample of the stuff is sent by a shady government operative to be stored in an orbiting space station. And the U.S. President decides to go ahead with the deep-sea vent mining, now that the threat is over.

So why did I watch it to the end? Well, the first half unfolds pretty well, seemingly just an updated version of the old film. And the third quarter is only mildly stupid. It isn’t until the final quarter that the idiocy really starts piling up, and by then it’s sort of like watching Titus Andronicus—Shakespeare’s one train wreck of a play—or anything by Ed Wood.

Buy the book. Rent the old film. But don’t fall for A&E’s pitch that “No sci-fi fan’s DVD collection is complete without it!” Shame on you, A&E. I might expect a film this cheezy from the Sci-Fi channel, because they’ve stated that as a programming objective, between their more inventive series. But not from you.

The Review: My purpose in reading English Poets of the Eighteenth Century was to better understand the historical “conversation” of poetry that led to the rise of 19th-century Romanticism (my original introduction to poetry: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats), in hopes that that might better explain how modern poetry has reached its current state.

As an overview of 18th-century poetry, Bernbaum’s book is excellent, primarily in that he presents in the preface a fairly detailed history of the age’s beginnings in Orthodoxy and Classicism and the struggle and eventual triumph of Sentimentalism—precursor to Romanticism—then gathers in the body of the book a collection of poems that—while representative of the most well-known writers and works of the century, with a few lesser-known verses included—convincingly illustrates that struggle.

Even if you’re already familiar with the works of poets such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Charles Wesley, Thomas Warton, Thomas Gray, Robert Burns, and William Blake, chances are you’ve not considered them together, in this context. (For me, to see Burns and Blake at the tail end of Classicism, delivering it a killing blow, rather than merely as ushers into Romanticism, makes their genius all the more inspiring.) And if you aren’t familiar with this list of poets, this book is certainly a very good place to start.

You can find English Poets of the Eighteenth Century as a free download at Gutenberg.org, or purchase a used copy from Amazon.com.

I was surprised to find a 20 cent per gallon difference near my own home. That’s at least a couple of bucks on a fill up.

People who publish, however, have to splash as wide an audience as possible—which means having a presence on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, LiveJournal, and maybe even some Harry Potter fanfic site, if that’s your audience.

As a writer, poet, and sometime game designer, naturally I’m interested in maintaining a presence in all those places (except the Harry Potter fanfic site, which I’ll leave to my daughters). The question is, how can you have time to publish if you’re busy visiting all those sites.

Fortunately, if you’re a WordPress blogger, there’s a healthy community of developers coming up with cross-site widgets all the time. If you’ve been following my posts the past few weeks, you know that this blog cross-posts an announcement to Facebook and Twitter. (In fact, the Twitter Tools plugin actually allows WordPress bloggers to Tweet from their sidebar.) No need to log in to both those places to maintain a presence.

This particular post should be adding MySpace to the mix.

Now let’s just hope I’m capable of making a true splash, and not merely a belly flop. ;-þ

—General von Manstein about the German Officer Corps

Hard-working versus lazy. Intelligent versus stupid. Cross-reference the two sets and you have four types of people in the world.

Why do the intelligent but lazy ones rise to the highest office? Because they learn how to delegate tasks. Their talent is in getting things done by appointing someone else to do it.

Why do the intelligent and hard-working not get ahead? Because they’re too busy working to really look at the big picture, or they enjoy the work itself too much to give it up.

Why are the lazy and stupid no real threat to civilization? Because they aren’t demanding, and ultimately they’ll do what they’re told. It’s just easier to “go with the flow” than to have to find a way out. As long as there’s TV and beer at the end of a work day, everything’s cool.

Why are the stupid and industrious a threat? Seriously, have you ever met one of these people? Perhaps they’ve come knocking on your door, asking to show you the way. Or tried to sell you on Amway. Or argued with you that people of another race or creed ought to be destroyed. At best, they waste your time—but all too often they cause actual harm.

Obviously, this is a simplification. Some people are stuck in dead-end jobs not because they have no intelligence or energy, but because our civilization allows them no opportunity. Some others are at the top for no other reason than the great good fortune of having been born there. And just because talk-radio hosts stir up trouble doesn’t prove they’re stupid—they could be intelligent and lazy people with a hidden agenda.

Those caveats aside, I believe this graph is an interesting way of evaluating the world in a general sense. I think I know where I fit in it. (The fact that I took time to hand-code that table says something. I sincerely hope the fact that I could do it demonstrates another. Otherwise I’m screwed.)

So where do you fit?

Use the shift key to switch between revolver and shotgun. Sometimes that’s critical. And best of luck.

De-Animator