Columns

Well, a month on and Eric's large-screen Asus Eee PC with XP still hasn't arrived. Every time I phone the people who run www.asuslaptop.co.uk I get to talk to someone who adopts the Manuel in Fawlty Towers approach; ie, "I know nothing".

In the meantime, I've been to Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Dallas, Texas. I flew with Continental, which offers an online check-in service. Happy to try anything that might cut down on tedious queuing, I gave it a whirl. It was easy and painless; all I had to do was type in my booking number and give my passport and destination address. I was impressed when, a few minutes later, Continental emailed me boarding passes for both legs of the journey (from Manchester to Newark, then to Baton Rouge).

I arrived at Manchester in plenty of time, and found a huge line of grumpy-looking people waiting to check in. There was nowhere for me, already checked in, to go, so I showed the nice lady waiting to greet the posh folks with expensive tickets at the first-class desk my weird A4-sized boarding tickets. She ushered me through to the first-class desk to dump my case and gave me the wonderful news that the plane, coming in from New Jersey, would be five hours late. I smiled sweetly and pondered what a waste of time the online check-in had been. She gave me a £9 voucher to buy lunch. (Why didn't they just round it up to a tenner?)

Design of the times

I passed the time by reading the third edition

Using the CRAP principle - that's Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity - Williams takes you through a series of exercises that illustrate how to create great-looking pages. Anyone who has any responsibility for producing or buying any kind of artwork, from simple letterheads to complex brochures, will find this money well spent. If you use desktop publishing software and haven't got any formal training, this book's a must.

An interesting feature is the text Williams uses to fill sample paragraphs. Most books of this kind use a Latin piece that starts "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" as a standard dummy text (see www.lipsum.com for details of its usage). Williams, however, uses an amusing concoction of English words used out of context in a form known as 'Anguish Languish'. When read aloud the words make sense, as typified by the story 'Guilty Looks Enter Tree Beers' by Howard Chace, which starts: "Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe hat search putty yowler coils debt pimple colder Guilty Looks."

Upgrade workshop

I was halfway through the section on repetition when the nice check-in lady appeared. She'd been looking for me. She said everybody else was really horrible when they found out about the delay and I wasn't. She had a spare place in first class; would I mind if she upgraded me? How long does it take to work out the answer?

At Newark I just made the last flight to Baton Rouge. Arriving at the client's supposedly empty house, which I'm privileged to borrow on these visits, I found myself asking the same question as the 'Tree Boars', but in the present tense: who's sleeping in my bed? Turned out it was Big Derek, the painter (of walls), who last appeared in this column in issue 198.