Maybe I'll get back into web design.

I'm thinking of getting back into web design. It's been a few years, and the kids probably know a few more tricks than I do, but I have one thing they don't: I could not possibly care less about web design.

That's right. You want your logo to spin in a circle and twist itself inside-out for twenty seconds before people can get to your splash page? How about this instead: bgcolor=#CCCCCC. That is "portable across platforms."

You think it would be great to have a Flash movie play in the center of your splash page, and "maybe have a guy do kind of a 'Matrix'-thing?" This is the sound of me stapling a picture of Keanu Reeves to my invoice. I made you a table where border=5.

Actually, I copied the code from somebody else.

You want the navigation buttons to change color when the mouse rolls over them? And maybe make a little "plink" sound? That's called Javascript. I have no idea how it works. I made your buttons out of blue underlined text. The "Contact" one is actually a "mailto" command. On the house, compadre.

Look, I didn't go to college for this. You couldn't, when I was in college. We would spend hours, hunched over our NeXT boxes, trying to figure out why BRs would behave as Ps in certain TDs. We learned nothing and were paid nothing. Excite was still called Architext. I know this because I used to get stoned with one of the founders. I said hi to him at the mall last week and he looked at me like I was crazy.

Hm, a "chat room." Yes, I think that everybody who comes to your model railroad website will want to sit around alone in your chat room. One thing I could also do, though, is design a link to "Yahoo Chat: Small Trains." For the link, I can create little right-arrows using two "greater-than" signs. Or maybe I will use the guillemot right ASCII character. That's a premium character, and rather volatile cross-platform, but breathtaking when executed correctly.

What? You want your website to automatically play a 2kb MIDI of "Oh My Darling Clementine" when it loads, and for the background to be a tiled animated GIF of an American flag? And for the header to be H1 size? Okay, I think I have that template. I may have to "back it up" off of an old hard drive. I charge $150/hr, and I don't have a phone number.