My results? 129 WPM, 7 Word Errors, Net Speed 122 WPM, Accuracy 94%.

And on that crappy Mac keyboard, too

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I was 13, and a partner and I had made it, deep into the LEST Spelling tournament. LEST stands for Lutheran Elementary Schools Tournament – I’m attempting to come up with some sort of sordid or distasteful acronym that would also be suitable, but am drawing a blank. Anyway, there were only two other two-person teams left, and us: Team Trinity Lutheran, comprised of me, a gregarious fat kid with a talent for spelling, and a friend, who was one of those simultaneously cool, simultaneously nerdy kids who wouldn’t really recognize that as an asset until later.

While this obviously isn’t the national spelling bee, in which bedraggled children completely devoid of social skills commit to memory thousands of words foreign even to those who study for the GRE, we’d weathered some difficult words. Imagine our surprise and delight when the next word was called: “Please spell ‘misspell’”

We looked at each other, relief probably palpable, but then shadows of doubt began to creep across our prepubescant visages: misspell? Who spells misspell? Miss-pell? Mi-spell ? Mis-spell? Well, the answer is the last word in the list, and it seems terribly obvious to me now, but it was either nerves or a combination of spelling words for hours on end, but we blurted out “mispell.”

We lost.

My father hit the bottle that night. My friend killed himself. Ok, he didn’t really, and my father didn’t drink due to our mistake, either. But it still stunk to have to tell people you knew that, yes, we had been tossed out of a spelling competition because we misspelled mispell. Er, wait. We mispelled misspell. Aw, fuck it.

Screw you, misspell.

My favorite? Probably #4, which is table-less forms, by the always impeccable Peter-Paul Koch.

Will this article get me to finally write down my own list of the CSS tips and tricks I’ve learned, after being exclusive to CSS and (nearly) exclusive to table-free design since 2002? We’ll see.

I actually noticed it intermittently last night, but Slashdot has finally made the move. Kudos to them.

While I really want to make a “Thanks for joining 1999! LOL!” remark here, I can’t bring myself to do so. Perhaps that’s because I don’t want to think about what a terrible process it must have been to convert all those old, statically generated stories from HTML to CSS. It’s hard to even imagine.

Oh, and to all of you people complaining about Slashdot not moving to XHTML Strict – why would they do so? Well-formed CSS has obvious advantages. But XHTML? What’s the point? (And that’s from someone whose site does validate as XHTML strict.)

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On the home page of this website, you’ll notice a number of projects mentioned in the sidebar. Allow me to formally introduce them to you.

• Audition Audition is simple website software – like Wordpress, or Drupal – that makes it possible to run a website for a band. I created this out of necessity for Oliverband.com, and it’s come in handy. Check it out.
• iPod bartender / iPod bartender shuffle My first web app to really make a splash with the Mac community, the iPod bartender is a compendium, in iPod notes format, of drink recipes that you can take on the go. There are 230 recipes – sure, not as much as some others, but the iPod bartender is free. Plus, the iPod bartender shuffle lets you specify drink categories, and load a random set of drinks onto your iPod. What other webapps can do that?
• LinkFinder A web app of which I’m really proud, LinkFinder is basically a web-enabled, iTunes for bookmarks. Using remote scripting (before it was fashionable, changed its name to Ajax, and stopped returning my phone calls) , LinkFinder lets you manage, drag-and-drop and search bookmarks and RSS feeds from the comfort of your web browser. It requires PHP 5, and there’s no demo yet, but you can feel free to download the source, and see where it’s at. Development will be starting up again soon.
• Sexycal The calendar that ships with Wordpress is ugly. The sexycal plugin aims to change that. Sure, there are other calendar plugins out there – even some that use Ajax, like this one does. But are any as pretty? Will any love you as much, as unconditionally, as Sexycal? Coming soon. Give me some features for Sexycal, while I’m cleaning up the code and making it reusable.

  So, whatcha think?