Greetings from "I took a week off and you didn't"-ville. Life and cats are good. We're considering the names Sydney and Amber for the kittens, though April might be in the mix too. I'll talk more about them in another update, since this one is reserved for the new look of the URI! Zone.

After experimenting with several dramatic layout redesigns, I finally decided on a moderate graphic revision while maintaining most of what worked from the old site. The URI! Zone has been around for nine years now, which makes it younger than the shirts I bought in high school and still wear regularly, but older than most cats or dogs you currently own (Chompy included). I think I finally did the navigation well around Year Eight, so I'm sticking to my guns in that regard. The Links page has been trimmed down and the posting bug on the Forum has been fixed, but you won't find much new functionality at this point.

Here are the short-term upgrades that I have planned:

• A navigation calendar on each month's news updates, so you can quickly locate a particular day.
• Clean up of dead news links from July 2003 - February 2005 (earlier posts are all cleaned up now)
• New avatars for frequent posters in the Comments section
• New text on the About page about this past year's site
• A picture on every news updates
• Minutely more interesting news updates
• More funny quotes
• The backlog of photos from the past two months

Here are the long-term upgrades that I have planned:

• A new navigation scheme for Photos (possibly many pictures per page)
• Weekly or daily polls
• A local search engine
• Gaming-related pages

I have no grandiose plans for the site, other than to keep it regularly updated and interesting. I'd like to see the Forum get a little more use, though it's generally hard for the various visitors from school, work, games, and links to find things worth talking about. In general, I've stayed away from the deep and the somber in news updates, and I'll continue this for now. There are plenty of more interesting blogs discussing the meaning of life, angstful teenage poetry, or right-wing conspiracies, so the URI! Zone will continue to be a light site about weird news, stupid people, my personal life, and the occasional critique of a passing fad when my feelings on the subject exceed the Too-Apathetic-To-Write meter.

One of the things I always wanted to do is to create a comprehensive resource about something, be it Alias episodes, a band's music, or gaming tips. I've avoided this for two reasons:

1. There are very few interesting, non-self-serving subjects which I'd consider myself an expert in
2. There is already a comprehensive resource for anything you can think of on the Internet.

If you can convince me otherwise, or have a topic I could write about, feel free to let me know. What do you think about the new look? Fire away!

"I'd like to buy an owl." - Contestant on Wheel of Fortune