FIGURE A

Get a taste of the night life at Kbars.com. Click picture for a larger image.

The site has a number of fun features, such as a downloadable psychedelic screen saver and e-postcards you can send to your friends in order to make them think you hang out in trendy British clubs. There's also Kbar merchandise for sale and an events section to let you know what's happening at a Kbar near you.

Another interesting feature is the site's ability to remember who you are. Once you fill out a brief membership form, the site will welcome you back by name each time you return to it. Is this useful? Not really, but it holds similar comedic possibilities as the ET: The Extra-Terrestrial ride at Universal Studios. There, kids are invited to fill out an electronic card with their names so that at the end of the ride, they experience the magic of hearing an animatronic ET puppet greet them personally. Of course, the challenge for older kids is to sneak in cleverly disguised pseudonyms for the rib-splitting hilarity of hearing ET earnestly welcome "Ben Dover," "Mike Rotch," or "Ima Weiner."

The foolery demonstrated in Figure B falls under the category of life's simple pleasures.

FIGURE B

Witness the unfortunate abuse of a responsive Domino form. Click picture for a larger image.

Beyond the personal greeting, however, there does exist a practical application to the membership form, as it extends to an SMS messaging service. SMS (Short Message Service) is a particular message service offered by the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) digital cellular telephone system. Based on the information in your Kbar membership profile, Kbars can contact you using SMS, as a short alphanumeric message is sent to your mobile phone to let you know when a Kbar event that might interest you is taking place. For serious Kbar attendees, this is extremely useful and strikes me as a unique meshing of technologies, taking information gleaned from a Domino form and utilizing it in a cellular phone messaging service.

Finally, one last aspect of the Kbar Web site I enjoy is that it's been designed to demonstrate the style and design within each bar. This is accomplished both through photographs and, more interestingly, 3-D virtual tours, made possible by iPIX technology. You can control the zoom and direction of the tour by moving your cursor over the image. To really get into the spirit of things, place the cursor at the extreme edge of the image, hold down the left mouse button, and get the virtual tour spinning as fast as it will go. Then throw on a Republica CD and start mixing drinks!