Over the past week or so I have grown a beard. I’m going to chop it off today, but it’s not bad as beards go: short, thick, dark, and slightly curly, with flecks of grey in it. It’s grown while I’ve been locked indoors doing Web design on my Sepial site. The design isn’t even my own; I’ve merely modified a template written by someone else and installed and customised various bits of software written by other people. But it still felt like pushing a dried pea the length of high street with my nose—and that would have taken less time.

Thank you to those who have helped me with suggestions and bug reports to date. There are still glitches, but I am now past caring. You are welcome to tell me about them and I’ll fix them when I give have recovered enough to give a toss. Jackie will be pleased to note that my professional home on the Web is now a blog, cunningly disguised as a static site.

I detest doing Web design. I detest doing it even more when I have to worry about layout rather than the clear communication of information. Mostly I detest doing Web design because most Web browsers are broken. Instead of the programmers who wrote, say, Internet Explorer 6 being given a modest number of (wo)man hours by their managers to fix the bugs in their own code once, everyone else in the World spends countless thousands of man hours navigating around those bugs again and again in a miserable and unnecessary distribution of labour.

Now I have froth in my whiskers.