My first thought on hearing that Patricia Dunn had offered to resign as HP Chairwoman was that it was time for her to go. There was no doubt in my mind that she was sitting where the buck had to stop.

My second thought was that I’ve made a mistake or two in my professional life. I owned up to my mistakes and I was forgiven by my bosses. In the big scheme of things, was Dunn’s mistake unforgivable?

My third thought was that people at the top are given more leeway than those at the bottom. I have no doubt that a middle manager who set in motion the collection of his peer’s private telephone records would be tossed out in a heartbeat.

My fourth thought was that a Chairwoman must delegate. A middle manager should keep an eye on things. But the HP Chairwoman needs to make decisions, delegate their execution and move on.

My fifth and final thought was that big business should face a vote of confidence every now and then. Imperial boards have convinced themselves that can justify anything in the name of shareholder value. I’m not sure that the shareholders actually agree with them.

Strange things happen at work. After a particularly strange day, I’ll go home and tell my partner “you won’t believe what happened today…”. When two strange days collide, then each of us will try to top the other’s story.

But now, HP has gone and raised the bar. We may never experience something that tops this story of Directorial shenanigans. Following the story is like watching an accident in slow motion - I want to turn away, but I can’t resist its pull.

The worst aspect of the entire affair is its demonstration of my inability to be shocked by big business. I was surprised that it was HP, but I wasn’t shocked. And there are a lot of companies for which I wouldn’t have even been surprised.

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy first appeared as “Star Trek’s” Capt. James T. Kirk and his first officer, Mr. Spock, on September 8, 1966 - 40 years ago Friday.

It’s a bit unfortunate that the anniversary comes with Star Trek out of production. But it was time to recharge the creative juices of the Star Trek franchise. Star Trek hit its peak during Deep Space Nine. Voyager never really caught my fancy. And prequels (Enterprise) are just a bad idea.

Hopefully, a little time off will bring new life to the franchise when it returns.

As I revisited my past, it became apparent that Moneyball resuscitated my interest in baseball. I was a casual fan, only watching the all star game and the post season. I fell in with some rabid fans in the late 80’s, went to a lot of A’s games, and became a real fan.

Then there was the strike. A bunch of rich guys fighting over how they were going to get richer. Major League Baseball had turned its back on me and I turned my back on it.

Moneyball came out in 2003 - a new take on an old game. And just the thing to rekindle the interest of the mathematically inclined fan. And MLB had me back again. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s in progress.

aka “I’ve got categories.”

Textpattern has both sections and categories. The difference is a bit subtle; but the upshot was that Take the First Step was only using sections for Technology and Sports out of the chute.

That’s changed. Categories are up and I tweaked the templates to include a category list. Since that is presentation rather than content, any curious subscribers should make a real visit to check it out.

And then I burnt the better part of two hours adding categories to old posts in the Sports section. I really need to get a life.

In an ideal world I could do a standards based CSS design, test it in a single browser, and declare victory. In the real world I do a standards based CSS design, cross my fingers, test in as many browsers as I have installed, and repeat until I’ve reached a reasonable compromise. Which is why a service like BrowserCam is so great - screen captures of the major browser variants on the major OS flavors.

The only problem is that the BrowserCam Service Plans are targeted at commercial users. About a year and a half ago, I asked for an account for the casual user. What I got was just as good - a group purchase via Fundable. Which has been institutionalized as the Fundable BrowserCam Special. Plans designed for the small professional/dilettante with friends.

Which is a roundabout way of me saying that we need just a few more members for Zach’s BrowserCam Group Membership - take 2.

Gene’s post on MyBlogLog reminded me that I’ve been without a good analytics package since TextDrive broke up with Urchin. So I signed up for Google Analytics to see what I’ve been missing.

Wow. Google Analytics is dramatically better than the Urchin 5 that used to be available from TextDrive. The data presentation is improved and there is more data collected to boot. I wish that I had a goal page with a funnel just so I can see how it works.

I don’t think that I needed to know that 49% of my page reads are from IE, that 89% of my page reads are from MS Windows, or that that 75% of my page reads are broadband.

But it is interesting to know that only 4% of my page reads are seen on a 800x600 screen or smaller. My style sheet is set up for a width of 780. I don’t think that I want to stretch out the width of my main body, but it seems that I have the real estate to add another column on the right.

Update: I should also mention that I purchased 12 month’s of MyBlogLog Pro. Google Analytics crunches its data once a night, while MyBlogLog Pro satisfies my thirst for real-time statistics.

I really need to pay more attention to my log files. I have been monitoring for 404 “file not found” response codes to detect any fallout from my .htaccess frenzy from a few weeks ago.

But I haven’t been looking for anything else. Until tonight - when I realized that I haven’t checked my feed subscription levels in quite a while. And I was even more surprised when I realized that I had neglected to redirect all of my old Radio Userland feeds to their new Textpattern equivalents.

So I added some more htaccess redirects, I claimed some more feeds in Bloglines and I think that all my old feeds are back in business.

There is a certain appeal to a simple white web page with text. But it was time to liven the joint up. Not finding a suitable image of my own, I started searching at iStockphoto.

A bit of rotating and cropping and Take the First Step has a new header graphic.