Happy Halloween 

Well, the little ghosts, goblins, super heros, angels, princesses, and high school kids (high school kids?) are roaming the neighborhoods looking for free sugar rushes. What a racket. Go door to door asking for candy just because you're cute (or ugly, or creative, or not creative). Anyway... the month of October has been pretty good to The World According to Nick. I've had my best month traffic wise, with over 2,300 unique site visits and over 4,000 page views. Sure that's small potatoes for some blogs, but for me this was huge.

I've been steadily working down my book stack lately. I just finished another Koontz book (my all time favorite author). It's called The Face and is pretty good. It's not his best, but it's definitely worth reading. If you're into suspense, with a sometimes sci-fi twist, then Koontz needs to be on your list. I just started reading Virginia Postrel's latest called The Substance of Style. I'll report on it when I'm through. The topic is of particular interest to me. A lot of technical people tend to look past the cover of the book, and concentrate on how it's made (metaphorically speaking of course). But when you need to sell to consumers, especially when you make a commodity item, how it looks is what distinguishes you. Engineering I was once told is the art of taking scientific advance and making something useful with it, combining both form and function. Too often we forget the form.

Take web pages (and blogs) for instance. How many times have you gone to a web page that was all black with white text? I know when I click away from it, my eyes are killing me. I have a hard time reading the entire page. Many times I switch away because I just can't stand it. That person could have the best content around... but if it's hard to read, nobody will ever know.