The Club of Queer Trades + a small dev update

I just finished the book last night - it's a G.K. Chesterton and somewhat reminiscent of his Father Brown stuff. It's a detective novel, but not a very conventional one. The detective in question is one Basil Grant, a retired judge and unsocial but not antisocial type, who is followed about by his brother Rupert, an ever suspicious amateur detective himself, and the narrator of the book, Swinburne.

As described on the back, there are six chapters, but not a crime in any of them, unless of course, you could consider some of the actions involved in investigation criminal. That is, of course, where the Club of Queer Trades comes in, that mysterious bureau of entirely new occupations. And they really are queer, in that old British sense of the word. I confess that some of them had me until the very end (and they certainly have Rupert and Swinburne to the end every time).

Basil seems insane to his friends, but I found myself rather trusting him even if his ideas seemed absurd. So, to wrap this bit of the post up, it's not too long of a read (my edition is 126 pages) and is worth a read for each chapter, and especially for reading through and discovering the ending (if you don't guess it before, that is).

Dev Update

Now then, the report on the new a broken mold. I'm happy to say that the development, which consists of bending WordPress and CSS to my will, seems to me to be almost over. While I'm here, let me give Firebug a plug; it's a web development add-on for Firefox, and boy is it ever cool. It has JavaScript and DOM tools, which I don't use, but the HTML and CSS tools are handy. The killer feature: you can edit code and see the results in real time (I'm not sure how that works with JavaScript). If you've ever done CSS work, you can probably imagine how handy that is.

I'm also happy to say that I contacted NearlyFreeSpeech.NET last night and was elated to learn that I could pay through the parents' plastic (with me giving them equal cash, of course) since I don't have a checking account yet.

So I'm hoping to get it up within the next half a month, and I suppose a month at the latest.

Time for homework now -- catch you later.