GUI Bytes, A star is born

Go forth and bring the faithful CSI members, professional and industry alike, that they may commune with one another and with the Institute in electronic harmony

One night last year, while gazing blank-eyed at a map of the Midwest states, a voice said unto me, "Go ye and serve the multitudes in the NorthStar region." This was quite unsettling, as the usual message at that time of day was more like, "Are you going to stay up all night?"

I quickly checked the house and found everyone to be fast asleep, except for our cat Darth. (The older of our two felines, her name was changed from Puddin' last winter when she came down with a terrible, and apparently permanent, respiratory ailment. In the winter months her approach is foreshadowed by her loud breathing, eerily reminiscent of the evil villain from Star Wars.)

I don't follow sports too closely, but I was fairly certain that we didn't have a professional hockey team anymore. So what was this "NorthStar" region? Returning my attention to the map, I was suddenly overcome with a need to find those cities that have CSI chapters. Too much pizza, perhaps, or maybe too long at the computer.

In a moment of revelation, I saw that there are islands of construction activity separated by more rural areas. One of these is defined roughly by the locations of four CSI chapters in and near Minnesota. From the Red River in the northwest to the Twin Ports in the northeast, down to the Twin Cities, and finally to La Crosse in the southeast, building conditions and services are much the same.

Furthermore, distributors and product representatives that serve any one of these four chapters almost always serves the others. Contractors within the area frequently serve the same cities, as do the architects and engineers. Leaving our shores you have to go all the way to Denver, Milwaukee, Chicago, or St. Louis to find the centers of similar large islands of activity.

And thus it came to pass that the NorthStar region was named. But how was I to serve the multitudes?

"Build a website of strong and good HTML. Make it not too many pixels wide, so that even those with low resolution monitors can view its wonders without overmuch use of their scroll bars. Go forth and bring unto it the faithful CSI members, professional and industry alike, that they may commune with one another and with the Institute in electronic harmony. When it is finished, get thee a new domain name - something without that members.aol.garbage. Test the links to be sure they are strong, and post it in a place where all the peoples of the earth can see it, and make its wonders known to the masses."

The new site, at http://www.NorthStarCSI.com (not case sensitive), highlights information useful to the entire region, with special sections for each of the CSI chapters and a growing library of articles about construction products, the practice of writing specifications, and computer issues. Stop in often; the information changes frequently, and some useful new features will appear in the next few weeks.

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