In a startling turn of events, I believe I may have stumbled across the answer to the question of why the news page here reloads a second time for some readers. I was noodling around with the settings in Internet Explorer 5, and I noticed a setting under the view menu called "encoding." When I changed this from Western-yada to auto-select, the news page seemed to reload, so if you are experiencing difficulties, this may help (though it may not, because a similar test by loony didn't seem to duplicate those results). If this fixes the problem for you, I'd appreciate a quick note to that effect if you have the time (or if it didn't help you for that matter). I also received a couple of note from lynx readers pointing out the news page was generating an error... turns out there was a bad link in the no-frames version of the site (which shows these were users of an older version of lynx), it's fixed now (sorry about that).

With all the new stuff going on here, the Messageboards, and all, it slipped my mind that loony is heading off on Saturday to party down with the Quake III Tour Bus crew, so I'm going to try to relax a bit today before I'm abandoned (all these changes and new features are so exciting I've been working non-stop lately, so I should pace myself better). By the way, in light of the stories that were mentioned here recently regarding ethics and journalism, we have made my long-standing policy of disclosing when accepting travel or accommodations from outside companies an official thing, so when we travel somewhere (like QuakeCon, for instance), unless it's stated otherwise, you can assume that expenses came out of the meager Blue's News travel budget. In the case of loony's trip, id Software is not paying for loony to fly down to Texas to join the bus tour, though he apparently will be able to share a hotel room with one of the folks from Activision, and Anna has promised to feed him if he's good. id invited us to join the tour for a bit, and it seemed like it would be fun enough to be worth flying down for (I just can't figure out how I lost the coin toss, when loony told me it came up heads I dropped the telephone in shock).

Link of the Day: New Jolt Flavors (thanks Alex Bischoff). Great decision, since Jolt is a great idea, but that taste is a crime against cola (before you Jolt fans flame me, remember you aren't drinking it for the taste).