Welcome to the a Risque Business Membership Tour

[This is another section lifted entirely from the Members' Area. We thought it might be useful out here to serve as a bit of technical information about some of your choices for viewing the site. Also, it can serve as yet another warning about our bizarre sense humor. When your lives are as odd as ours are, you really don't have to make things up. The truth will be entertaining enough.]

We really didn't make any effort to "republish" the entire Members' Area like the vast majority of web companies would do. First of all, it would take a really, really long time to go back and manually redo tens of thousands of pages, and actually we'd rather spend our time hanging out with beautiful naked women. Secondly, we've never made any claims on being any sort of "Official Web Company" with a dozen (or even dozens) of employees, and so we don't see how some "uniform" look makes any difference in our situation. Lastly, although most of us that have been here a long time now look back and laugh (or more likely groan) at the way we used to present the site, we're not really embarrassed about it. Just as the people have changed over the years, so has our representation. Quite honestly, almost all of the truly Geeky additions have come from talented technical people that just lent us their expertise for the duration of a project or so and then sent us on our merry way. In other words, it's true: We have always relied on the kindness of strangers.

Then, rather than wait until "it was all done" we decided just to put this renovation up in phases. Even though it looks different now about 95% of the changes here were in the (invisible) code areas. We're hoping to make the site a lot more accessible for a wider variety of mediums, and we're hoping to make it work a lot faster and more efficiently, even from your traditional computer at your desk. We've also decided to go ahead and use some more modern technology in the way that we present the "data" – such as the way this "folder" group works, and the way the Menu Bar opens and closes. Again, this doesn't change what you're looking at precisely, but it does make it easier to jump around without having to make a bunch of clicks or open/reload a bunch of pages. At least that's the theory here, and if you can't have the practice, you should at least have a theory we've always thought.

That "phase" theory in mind, we promised to point out that the ... um ... design that you see on many of the pages, including this one really exists only as a place-holder for Phase II of the plan. We didn't want to have to redo all the pages to different specified widths later. It's hard enough doing it the first time, and no matter what anyone tells you, this is NOT "Crown Molding on Acid" .... Actually we got comments in-house from "pretty" to "busy" or even "garish" – and you can probably guess which of those people got a raise for the new year. This has taken a long series of very busy weeks to get even this far along, and we have found that after awhile you don't even notice the graphic anymore. So there's hope for at least some semblance of sanity at least somewhere down the road ....

Oh the joys of modern Computerdom.

When you "publish" a web site, it obviously makes sense to consider how people are going to be looking at whatever you are showing off for the day. Without getting too technical, let's lay out a few things you should know:

1. Despite what anyone says, even the most conservative of estimates consistently put Microsoft's Internet Explorer still at somewhere around a 60% usage rate, as far as browsers utilized in English-speaking countries goes.
2. Everyone still hates Microsoft.
3. Experts from various fields, including those that have competing web browsers, have long been telling us that "IE" (Internet Explorer) has seen its glory years pass, and any day now we'll all realize that [insert competing product here] will soon show itself to the masses to be a vastly superior option, thus enabling us all to catapult it to market dominance. Very recently it has begun to look like Firefox (and its technically superior code rendering) will soon surpass IE in percentage usage, and those of us in the web business feel very happy about that.
4. It still hasn't happened, even though any Geek with much web development experience will laud either Firefox or Safari (depending on which OS they use, basically), and all will band together to think evil thoughts about IE, particularly before version 7 came out. Still, some 20% of the people out there seem to use IE6, curiously relying on technology that is YEARS out of date, probably just because they don't know any better. Therefore …
5. In the Web World, you just can't please everyone. But we do our best.

So here's the deal: The very early stuff on this site was built by a group that thought Internet Explorer was the be all, end all, of browsers. Consequently, those of us that now champion standards compliant approach, are basically just really embarrassed by that — but not enough to go back and republish all those pages or anything. Also ... since the New Geek in Town Herself hates IE, we have worked quite diligently to make sure that it at least "functions" in other browsers too. It may not "look" exactly like it should but all of these will indeed work:

	Safari
	Mozilla/Firefox
	Netscape

Now, as of this writing AOL (which owns Netscape now) says the browser will die a quiet death, starting February 1, 2008. That's OK, because it really is/was the worst of the browsers. Sadly, Firefox has been a superior one, even if it doesn't show "IE Optimized" pages all that well, but will now be "adopted" by AOL, thus probably meaning that it will suck really soon too. And Safari works great on the Mac, but the PC version ... well ... we wouldn't be "PC" if we told you how Safari works on the PC. As an interesting aside, we had a very good friend that was part of the development team for AOL. Internally, the Geeks called it "Rainman" .... Enough said (which almost never happens for us).

So what to do? If you want our advice for something besides naked women worth noticing and even talking to, then we'll give you one more little insight. Like Every Geek Everywhere, none of us like IE either, and if you want to know what we use, we'll tell you: Opera. We're relatively new converts to the program, and if bugs come up later in our specific usage, we'll let you know, but if you absolutely don't want to use IE, we'd suggest this one. Now it's still better to use IE if you want this all to function "exactly" like the designers' intended it, but Opera comes pretty darned close, and it's a lot faster than IE ... and it doesn't have Microsoft's name attached to it – at least we think it doesn't. If somebody knows any differently, please don't tell us. It has taken us forever to find a suitable replacement for IE, and if that turns out to be a false sense of security (literally) ... well, then we're going to have to go find Jimmy Stewart so he can remind us again of all the good reasons we have to keep living. We can also ask him to help us pray that AOL doesn't buy Opera.

Oh, and naturally this is free, although that wasn't always the case with Opera. Hey, if opera is going to compete with Country & Western, it had better be free ....

REVISION — Until Further Notice — Opera has begun following the technical "lead" of Safari recently which occasionally makes odd things happen in the browser. Now we're big fans of "Standards Compliance" — but how the various companies define that remains a matter of heated debate among the relevant Geeks. To the end user, sadly, it just means confusion. Consequently, we can no longer recommend it as the "best" browser, despite its many wonderful attributes. Until they figure things out, we're going back to our old FIREFOX standard, which has gotten much better in the intervening months, by the way. If you want to see the most advanced web styles, seamlessly working as they are designed, we suggest you go back to Firefox. If you want to launch Windows Media Files automatically (still the "best" option out there we think), you're back to Internet Explorer.

In D.Minion's famous words: "We just wish everybody could get along." Sigh.

OK. Now we don't mean to offend anyone here, because we're fairly certain that all of you can pretty much figure out what a Menu Bar is, and what the difference looks like between "open" and "closed" when you see it. Because it starts "closed" we added the Flash file at the top that mentions you can open and close it as you see fit in order to maneuver yourselves around the site.

End of story. We're done. ... er, NOPE.

Her Geek Mistress said that we should be more clear. Now some of us could certainly have pulled rank and pointed out that we're perfectly fine with just the Flash directions, but the only person with sufficient rank to do so also happens to know that in addition to her technical prowess, Bijou just happens to be the best damned baker we've met in our entire lives. And we're pretty damned old, even without using dog years. Also, we love the homemade "extra" stuff she always brings to the office after a weekend of frenetic baking. ... Consequently, we would be happy to explain.

This is a moment in time when the Menu Bar is closed.

This represents a different moment in time, with the Menu Bar open.

If you click on one of the yellow tabs in the closed Menu Bar, it will open up. Then, you can click on various items shown when the menu bar is open and you can jump to different areas of the site. Whenever you feel like it, you can click on the darker blue heading areas to close the Menu Bar again and get it out of your way. It's a beautiful thing.

So we clear?

And you know why else we went to all this trouble just for Bijou? If you've been around awhile, you can probably tell that we have a bit of the old South in us, and so in that grand tradition, we'll drag out a colloquialism that fits right nice here, as they say: When Momma ain' t happy, ain' t nobody happy.

Many of you are probably full of Ideas or Inspirations. We like to hear them.

Just as soon as we get the databases set up so you can submit comments without opening your email program and thus telling us who you are and where you come from (if you don't want to), we'll post said form in this location. This could be in Phase II ... or it could be in Phase III.

We could be in trouble because we can count to a very high number, even in Roman Numerals.