Boojum

Merda. Michelle! I forgot Michelle. [sound of hand clapping forehead.] I seem to get more absent-minded every ... er ... every .... What were we talking about again?

Not sure if she's "feamle" or not, but TCH-Lisa does appear to qualify as at least one of that word's anagrams. Naughty Not only that, but she is "creatively devious"; a fine bit of guerrilla marketing, that phrase. Thumbs Up (Granted: She may well have joined the staff after Glenn's post.)

Hmm. "Bill is NOT a robot," you say? What? You've never heard of androids? Everyone knows Bill is the Webhosting Terminator, a cyborg sent from the future to wipe out all other web-hosting companies by the subversive expedient of providing superior service at flexible and affordable prices, making it possible for impecunious folks with a lot to say to say it online. Good grief: With examples like this, American corporate ethics could eventually become less of an oxymoron.

Cookies. (My daughter has a stomach virus, and has been doing just that.)

Yesterday, after purchasing a new domain name (solidarityalliance.com), I went on to order a second TCH account. The order was completed in what appeared to be sufficiently good order, and I received the order confirmation e-mail at 5:26 a.m., May 31, 2004. This included the following: Now, I am of course aware that it hasn't been much over 24 hours. But I also remember that when I set up my first account here, it took only a few hours to process. My purpose, therefore, in writing this is not to criticize but to express concern and to request any available information on the status of my account.

That's okay, Thomas. You can always abbr. it.

Oh. Van Halen. For a moment, I thought you were talking about Sergei Prokofiev. (Listen to "Romance" sometime; now, that's music.) As for music made in recent decades, I think even there Van Halen might have a bit of competition. Sting comes immediately to mind, as the most literate lyricist of the modern age, both solo and with the Police. Certain claims could also be advanced for, among many others, the Fixx, Peter Gabriel, Enya, Men at Work, the Cars, Madonna, Genesis and Joe Jackson. And that's without even leaving the eighties.

Jikrantz, I have joined the Webring. Now, a question: I note that my site ID number is 10. Does this actually mean the ring contains only 10 members to date?

Hardly on here. Of course. You must be one hell of a fast writer, then, to have completed those 2048 entries on this forum. What, you took the new Evelyn Wood Speed-Writing course?

Funny: I remember it as, "Now, that's a knife!"

Woman. (As in "Scent of a Woman.")

Abnihilate.

Teach.

Word. (I've occasionally been called a wordsmith.)

Jim, Thanks for taking the time to review my site. Interestingly, I just finished incorporating my Javascript menu into a .php file; I hope this will help the spiders process it as well as the external-file idea you referred to. As for the CSS: Now that I'm finished "php-ifying" the site, my next structural objective is to introduce actual stylesheets. The keyphrase issue is one I will have to spend some time reviewing; it is the trickiest and most subjective part of the task, to me at least.

I'm wondering who's in charge of this part of the forums. It used to be Scott, then it was Mitch. Now it's ... well, that's the problem. After doing a lot of hard work on the new version of my site, I finally uploaded it, with a link to TotalChoice not only on the home page, but on all 44 pages of the site. And I thought, "Finally, I can join the TCH Family!" Now here I am. My site still links 44 times to TCH, and the Family? Apparently dysfunctional. I'm not trying to be unduly demanding, but my site could certainly benefit from the Family's inbound link. This does not seem to me to be unreasonable; it's a simple matter of reciprocity. So, who's in charge? And if no one is, could that please be remedied soon?

andypeat: That's odd. I thought page rank zero only occurred in cases of penalization for spamming and the like. Y'ain't one o' them goldurn spammers, are ya?

As a practical matter, Rob's solution appears to work, and I haven't heard back from Raul yet, so I'm implementing it. I just can't afford to get bogged down in yet another technical issue. Perhaps I'll revisit this should I ever include variables in my include files.

Arrgh! I just tried this code, ><?php include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/inc/menu-sa.php"; ?> in which the menu is an include file under public_html/inc/menu-sa.php, on my Santa Cruz subdomain index page. Result: So, now what? Do I try modifying Rob's suggestion, inasmuch as the file includes no variables, or is there some better procedure?

Let's see if I've got this. The original code snippet ><?php include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/inc/menu-ho.php"; ?> actually resolves to my homepage URL, and by substituting "/menu-sa.php", "/menu-na.php", etc., to conform to the various subdomain menu filenames, I can refer to the correct files even from the respective subdomain pages. The suggestion from Rob, meanwhile, ><?php include("http://www.squort.com/inc/menu-ho.php"); ?> will do the same, as long as there are no variables to parse within the included file. And of course, as you've said, ><?php include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."http://www.squort.com/inc/menu-ho.php"; ?> will not work because the absolute URL is effectively redundant. So, as a general rule, I am therefore best advised to use the first code snippet, with the respective include file names substituted for "menu-ho.php" as needed. Does this sound correct?

Apropos of that last: My mother once informed me that she had "the mind of a steel trap." As for the knowing everything but only being able to remember one percent of it, that's a more common idea than you might think—and it's arguable that this is the consequence of our imperfect access to C.G. Jung's Collective Unconscious. On the other hand, H.P. Lovecraft expressed a countervailing understanding of this issue when (in "The Call of Cthulhu") he opined that, "The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of the black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far...."

Now that's funny! You gotta know where Boojum is coming from to appreciate the humor but it's great! I'm not sure Rush could stand to be in the same room with her and can pretty much guess that it's mutual, eh, Boojum? Jim, I'm a bit confused. Who's the "her" to whom you refer? Annie? If you think I'm a "her," you're not quite as knowledgeable as I thought you were. (See my May 19 entry under "Birthdays and Anniversaries.")

As the old song has it, "Ya Gotta Shop Around." It is generally true that generic equivalents are functionally identical to name brands, and in those cases it is uninformed consumers who are naively paying more than they need to for the spurious reassurance of the big, familiar company name. This is mostly a matter of good old American economic laziness: people not taking the trouble to inform themselves of their choices and the potential consequences thereof. But: There are exceptions to this, and TCH-Robert unwittingly picked one of them as an example of the advantages of generic buying. As it happens, I have a close family member who suffers from clinical depression and takes Prozac. Not long ago, her health-care provider tried to switch her to the generic equivalent. She fell apart. Now, I might be inclined to dismiss this as a case of placebo effect, except that I did some research and found that, not only do many patients find the generic equivalent ineffective, but pharmacists admit that, for whatever reason, the biological availability of fluoxetine in the generic product does not match that of the name brand. So: Ya gotta shop around.

It does appear to work. Thanks, Rob.

I am assuming that code is to replace the second line, and am trying it now. Please stand by for update ....