Sounds like a good idea for a Friday in the off-season: message board poster HokieZ has put together a Virginia Tech sports crossword puzzle to while away the time.

The crossword puzzle and the key are both thumbnailed below. You can download them and print them one of two ways:

• Simply click on them. This will open up the images in a new browser window, and you can print from the browser.
• Right-click on the image and select "Save Link As" (in Netscape) or "Save Target As" (in Internet Explorer). This will save the puzzle and the key to your hard drive, and you can access them later without having to log on again.

Each image is a two-color (black and white) GIF image that is roughly 726x940 pixels. They are pretty small in terms of file size and will load quickly.

I tested printing them in Netscape Communicator 4.75 and Internet Explorer 5.00, and to get them to print on one page, I had to set my print margins to 0.25 inches for top, bottom, right and left. Enjoy!

The TechSideline.com/HokieCentral.com Archives Page has been extensively revamped. Previously, the Archives Page was very cumbersome and crammed full of dead links to old articles (many of the links were to the HokieCentral.com Members Only archives, which are no longer accessible).

In the past, all archives prior to fall of 1999 were arranged in an unwieldy format that combined News and Notes and opinion pieces into the same files. Long ago, I took the time to break the News and Notes archives out into separate files and archive them into the News and Notes Archives page, but until now, I had never done that with the old opinion pieces and columns (named "My Opinion" and "Special Features" back in the early HokieCentral.com days).

Now it has been accomplished. Old "My Opinion" and "Special Feature" columns have been integrated into new TSL Columnists Archives pages and Voice of the Fan Archives pages for the time period of 1996 through early/mid 1999.

I recommend that you visit the new Archives page, get familiar with its format, and click some of the links to see how the archives are arranged. In the future, you can reach the Archives Page from the link on the home page, in the "News and Features" section in the left-hand border.

In the future, I plan on pulling out the old "Members Only" archives and integrating them into the TSL Columnists and Voice of the Fan archives. I'll let you know when I do that. (For those who don't know what "Members Only" means, HokieCentral.com had pay material from January 1998 to November of 1999 that was accessible in a password-protected Members Only section of HokieCentral.)

TSL News and Notes Archives